Comparative history of religious orders, history of institutions

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Gert Melville
• Subject Area: Medieval History
• Term: from 2014 to 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 253101728

The project’s aim is to answer the question of how the organisational mechanisms of medieval religious orders functioned. Orders required continuous acts of governance to ensure that the use of their spiritual and material resources was maximised and to prevent or respond to disturbances, deviances or other shortcomings. As a part of this task the order’s central institutions (general chapters, visitations), were permanently obliged to make decisions in individual cases, these decisions being based on the parameters of the respective norms, documenting and archiving the resulting material.In this project these serial texts will be subjected to a systematic analysis for the first time. Even though their editions are easily accessible, they have only been used as quarries for the investigation of specific questions up to now. These traditional approaches completely neglect their importance as remarkable sources with a high degree of creative rationality which allowed the stringently adopted use of formal processes already in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Because of their practice of regular documentation and their ability to formalise processes focused on decision making, the religious orders are seen as institutions with model character by the project and it is intended to prove this assumption from the perspective of cultural as well as institutional history.Even though the state of research on the institutional preconditions and the normative structures for the orders’ actual control may be regarded as adequate by now – in fact establishing a platform for the intended project – the low degree of analytical work on the material’s information concerning the orders’ actual government requires a selection of sources. For this reason the project will focus on the Cistercians, the Cluniacs and the Dominicans, because these orders offer an excellent basis for comparison based on the variety of their traditions, their constitution and their guiding ideas. The fact that they are the medieval orders with the best survival rate of the necessary sources increases their suitability. The second restriction will be the period covered by the investigation. Given the continuity of the organisational structures, it will be sufficient to limit the study of the extensive serial sources on a number of decades in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.For the analysis of the sources methods of microhistory will be applied. Since procedural processes targeted at the reduction of complexities were formalised, there will be an extensive and varied range of routine events which can be structured by cataloguing their constitutive elements. The integration of individual cases into an analytical pattern will allow an assessment of the efficiency of control mechanisms. The systematic study of the complexities in the numerous cases beyond the routine activities will indicate the potential and limits of procedures. This will be followed by a typological survey of the spectrum of control mechanisms and the procedures to coordinate them – including the approaches of Governance-Research. The ultimate aim will be to reconstruct the orders’ applied mechanisms of government and control which – because of their rational design and their sophisticated procedures – were far ahead of their times.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants