HUMANISM AND REFORM IN PRE-REFORMATION ENGLISH MONASTERIES

ABSTRACT It is commonly understood the old monastic order in England confronted the King's Reformation unreformed: the houses of the Benedictines, Cistercians and Cluniacs were seemingly untouched by the spirit of renewal that charged continental congregations in the conciliar era, and their conventional patterns of observant life persisted in the face of a fast-changing world beyond the precinct walls. This paper reexamines this view. There was no formal process of congregational reform in England and the effectiveness of the order's governing bodies faltered over the course of the fifteenth century. Yet the responsiveness of the monks to contemporary trends in learning and teaching and in patterns of personal and corporate devotion may be traced in many of their manuscript records. This is indicative, certainly, of the lively engagement of individual brethren but in a number of instances it can be read as part of a collective impulse for reform that animated the house as a whole, and perhaps even networks of houses. It was an impulse that owed much to a generation of (generally, graduate) monks that rose to prominence against the background of the great church councils; their influence allowed it to flourish, albeit briefly, in the triennial sessions of the Benedictine chapters. Their interest in humanism passed to the next generation of superiors, some of whom appear to have transformed their conventual curricula. Their pioneering work perhaps also stimulated a refined conception of the monastic profession which blossomed in the half-century before the suppressions, one suffused with a sharp, one might say, antiquarian sense of the heritage of early English monasticism, and the scholarly calibre and spiritual purity of its celebrated fathers. The energy that emanated from a number of these houses in the reigns of Henry VII and his son attracted like-minded seculars into collaborations that were not necessarily claustral in focus but certainly reformist in tone. Of course, such extra-mural interest and interaction did little to defend the monastic redoubt from the assault of the Cromwellian commissioners.