medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
also perhaps of some interest here.
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Received: Thu, 31 May 2012 04:18:58 PM EDT
From: The Medieval Review <[log in to unmask]>
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Subject: TMR 12.05.22 Jamroziak, Survival and Success on Medieval
Borders(Grélois)
Jamroziak, Emilia. <i>Survival and Success on Medieval Borders:
Cistercian Houses in Medieval Scotland and Pomerania from the Twelfth
to the Late Fourteenth Century</i>. Series: Medieval Texts and
Cultures of Northern Europe. Turnhout: Brepols, 2011. Pp. xvi, 215.
EUR 95,00. ISBN: 978-2-503-53307-0.
Reviewed by Alexis Grélois
Université de Rouen (France)
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After a book on the social context of the famous abbey of Rievaulx,
Emilia Jamroziak now presents us with a comparative study of
Cistercian houses located on both sides of the English-Scottish border
and in Pomerania and Neumark, mainly Melrose and Kolbacz. These were
the most important Cistercian houses in their respective areas from
the late twelfth century to the Reformation and left many historical
sources, including chronicles. The basic idea was to compare how
white or gray monks succeeded--or at least succeeded to survive--in
two frontier or border regions, two concepts Jamroziak retraces the
history of in a solid introduction.
This work is also explicitly inspired by "new local history" (33-4)
which intends to rewrite the story of Europe at a local scale,
especially in long disputed areas, far from the nationalistic and even
racist conceptions that predominated during the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. It is now well known that the construction of
the Scottish identity was a long and complex process with major
consequences for the religious map of Great Britain; Jamroziak
provides a focus on the role of some monastic houses in this
evolution, notably in Galloway. The "local" point of view affords a
more innovative perspective on Central and Eastern Europe, for
instance on the southern shores of the Baltic Sea which modern
nationalist historiography has reduced to a battlefield between
Germany and Poland. The Western reader will thank Jamroziak for
providing access to the latest trends in Polish historiography (it
could have been useful to offer an English translation of the Polish
titles since Slavic languages are usually not familiar to Western
scholars), which stress the importance of local powers (including the
military religious orders) in a region that was not a border but an
ever disputed frontier. She rightly criticizes the idea that founding
a monks' or a nuns' house was a way for these powers to ensure their
territorial dominations and stresses in the contrary the role of the
religious as intercessors able to change of patrons when necessary.
Another key-concept of this study is the "Europeanization" (30): both
areas were affected during the early and late Middle Ages by
transformations that attached them to the core of the Latin Europe,
since Pomerania and its Cistercian estates were at the border of pagan
Prussia and since the installation of the Cistercians in Scotland was
part of a reconfiguration of the local Church according to a Gregorian
framework. Thus this book connects two distant regions of Northern
Europe and various academic worlds, linking the English-speaking and
the Polish spheres through the numerous references to recent German
historiography (Ordensgeschichte, "Dresden School"). Specialists of
the Cistercian order will be interested by Jamroziak's attention to
questions that have been neglected for too long, such as hospitality
(62-7) and the fate of the gray monks in the late Middle Ages: thus it
is fascinating to discover that Kolbacz was still building granges in
the second half of the fourteenth century (106) and to read how
filiation networks continued to exist despite the emergence of
political boundaries, which proves once more that the common but
nobody-knows-why 1300 break makes historians blind or at least short-
sighted. It is also very interesting to read how Kolbacz helped her
daughter-houses in time of war (193-4).
All these qualities contribute to commend Jamroziak's book. However,
some quibbles should be mentioned. The book is illustrated with very
useful maps, but the demonstration of the architectural filiation
between various houses would have been far more convincing with photos
(54, 64-5). A general bibliography would have been much appreciated,
and some references are missing such as Jorg Oberste's studies on
visitation. If Jamroziak has deeply focused on relationships with
patrons, the way the Cistercian dealt with their tenants in border
areas where they possessed villages could probably have been studied
in more depth. The first two pages of the book are disappointing
because they are based on two contradictory and insufficient works:
Janauschek's classical chronology of the order's development (whose
errors for Spain and Portugal were demonstrated in the 1960s by
Cocheril) and Berman's revisionist <i>Cistercian Evolution</i>, which
shouldn't be used without taking into account the many objections
raised in reviews. Most of all, the small number of houses considered
(Kolbacz, Marienwalde, Himmelstädt, Melrose, Dundrennan and Holm
Cultram) prevents this book for being much more than a case study.
The scope should be enlarged (for instance, to other Baltic areas) in
order to offer a large spectrum of religious houses located in
disputed regions and the bibliography on Spain should not have been
limited to a single article on Poblet. However, Jamroziak's book can
be considered as a first step towards progress in several important
research fields, such as Cistercians and frontiers, but also white
monks and nuns around the Baltic, the Northern and the Irish Seas, or
abbots in the Anglo-Norman world.
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