The Trauma of Monastic Reform

Alison I. Beach is Associate Professor of History at the Ohio State University, Columbus. She is the author of Women as Scribes: Book Production and Monastic Reform in Twelfth-Century Bavaria (Cambridge, 2004) and is also editor, with Isabelle Cochelin, of the forthcoming two-volume Cambridge History of Medieval Monasticism in the Latin West for the Cambridge New History Series.

• Prologue: Felix Mater Constantia; 1. Raw cloth unto old garments: monastic reform as cultural trauma; 2. Because they destroyed the beauty of my house: trauma in the core community; 3. Rootstock of the living vines: the arrival of The Bearded Brothers; 4. Women among the Apostles? The complexities of the double monastery; 5. Cockle among the wheat: Petershausen as agent of reform; 6. A whole kingdom laid waste: Petershausen and its patrons in a violent landscape; Epilogue; Postscript; Appendix 1: a manuscript in a reformed landscape; Appendix 2: timeline of events.

'Her excellent study is eminently grounded in the sources and her prose is exceptionally readable as she weaves an accessible narrative out of complicated and disparate evidence. Even when her technical paleographical and codicological methodology appears in the book, it never distracts from, and only enhances, the story she tells. This is an accomplishment, to be sure. The Trauma of Monastic Reform will be useful not only for monastic historians and medievalists, but also for those interested in the dynamics of reform in general.' Jacob Doss, Reading Religion