D. Bellenger: David Knowles and the Writing of History

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Keeping the Rule. David Knowles and the Writing of History


Herausgeber
Bellenger, Dominic; Johnson, Simon
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274 S.
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£ 25.00
Rezensiert für H-Soz-Kult von
Martin Heale, Department of History, University of Liverpool

The writings of David Knowles – and particularly his magisterial four-volume survey of the religious orders in England from Dunstan to the Dissolution (published between 1940 and 1959) – have exerted a remarkably enduring influence on English monastic history. His pioneering analysis of later medieval monasticism, in particular, shaped scholarly interpretations of the subject for many decades. When I began a PhD on the religious orders in the late 1990s, the obvious starting point was to read David Knowles’ major works from cover to cover; and (as this volume illustrates) the research agendas of many leading scholars in the field have been partly forged in dialogue with Knowles’ highly personal reading of monastic history.

This volume therefore serves as a useful primer for those interested in the historiography of medieval English monasticism. It has two principal aims: to offer a critical assessment of David Knowles’ scholarship; and to trace how monastic studies in England have developed under the influence of – and often in reaction against – his works. The seven essays published here are drawn from a lecture series held at Downside Abbey between 2009 and 2012, and survey different facets of Knowles’ oeuvre. Sarah Foot addresses early medieval monasticism, which Knowles treated only selectively. Nicholas Vincent offers a detailed and searching analysis of "The Monastic Order in England", supplemented by a fascinating appendix which reproduces the readers’ reports for the volume and Knowles’ own correspondence with Cambridge University Press. In essays which draw on their own research expertise, Janet Burton discusses how scholarship on the religious orders has advanced in recent decades, and Benjamin Thompson critiques Knowles’ views of the ‘alien priories’ (i.e. the daughter houses of French monasteries in England). James Clark focuses on volume two of "The Religious Orders in England" ("The End of the Middle Ages"), highlighting how recent studies have built on and moved beyond Knowles’ work. George Bernard’s chapter addresses the sixteenth century (the subject of volume three of "The Religious Orders"); but is in fact a re-printing of his interpretive essay on "The Dissolution of the Monasteries"1, with very little reference to Knowles. The collection concludes with Michael Bentley’s discussion of David Knowles’ place among the historians of his era, tracing both intellectual and personal influences on his scholarship.

These essays lucidly establish the salient characteristics of Knowles’ interpretation of English monasticism and his historical method. All the contributors pay tribute to the strengths of his work which have helped to make it so durable: Knowles’ skill as a synthesiser (he was no archival historian); his broad grasp of both British and European scholarship; his remarkable literary and narrative powers; his elegant and penetrating biographical sketches; and his intimate understanding of the religious life from within. But they also highlight the idiosyncrasies, blind-spots and prejudices inherent in all Knowles’ writing. His studies of English monasticism were essentially inward-looking and were relatively unconcerned with the role of the laity in establishing, upholding and shaping the religious life. He could be uncritical of his sources, and often took the writings of reformers at face value. Moreover, he always viewed his own Benedictine order as the pinnacle and the ‘main trunk’ of the monastic tradition. Other ‘branches’ of the religious orders were inferior offshoots, handled in his work with varying levels of sympathy. Thus Knowles viewed the regular canons as barely monastic, and he considered small or dependent houses to be stunted and rustic. The English friars, after their thirteenth-century heyday, were marginal and reactionary figures, while female monasticism and the military orders were largely excluded from Knowles’ canvas. This failure to engage with the diversity of English monastic life was undoubtedly a major shortcoming of his work, which subsequent generations have done much to rectify. Knowles’ focus on the Benedictines also led him to treat early British monasticism with caution, commencing "The Monastic Order" in the year 943 with the abbacy of Dunstan at Glastonbury. Sarah Foot endorses Knowles’ concern not to pre-date the emergence of self-conscious Benedictine identity in Anglo-Saxon England, but also critiques his lack of interest in Celtic monasticism and his exaggeration of Dunstan’s influence.

Other characteristics of Knowles’ writing are anatomised in the two most biographical (and entertaining) chapters of this collection, by Nicholas Vincent and Michael Bentley. These two lively and perceptive essays succeed in evoking Knowles’ intellectual environment and outlook, while tracing his formation as a historian and a stylist – inspired by, amongst others, Mabillon, Macaulay and Gibbon – and the various influences on his character and career. Both analyse his revealing use of language, including his ready recourse to metaphors of evolution and decay. This Darwinist and Whiggish outlook informed Knowles’ influential – but now widely challenged – conception of the monastic order as an organism which reached its apogee in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, before falling into irreversible decline in the later middle ages: an important precondition, he believed, for the sixteenth-century Dissolution. Vincent also addresses Knowles’ eagerness to make pronouncements on his subjects’ sanctity: perhaps his most disconcerting trait for twenty-first century readers. But, as Bentley makes clear, we cannot understand David Knowles the historian without appreciating the moral purpose behind his writing. Knowles studied the past not to explain it, but in order to discern the workings of God through time – and (as Maurice Cowling observed) was almost unique among twentieth-century British historians in finding a language through which he could integrate seamlessly his religious convictions into his academic writing.

Alongside its analysis of Knowles as a historian, this volume offers a helpful summation of the present state of research into the religious orders of medieval England. The essays by Sarah Foot, Janet Burton, Benjamin Thompson and James Clark knowledgeably survey recent literature in the field, highlighting recent advances and controversies. However, George Bernard’s essay on the Dissolution – although unquestionably an important contribution to the subject – sits rather uneasily in this volume, and feels like a missed opportunity. In some respects, the third and final volume of "The Religious Orders in England" ("The Tudor Age") remains Knowles’ most enduring work, since no comparably detailed treatment of this momentous era of English monastic history has yet been produced. While evincing many of the problematic characteristics prevalent in Knowles’ other works – including a relative lack of interest in the regular canons and nuns, and a lengthy treatment of the ‘martyrs’ of the Dissolution, replete with carefully calibrated judgements about their saintliness – this is an insightful, graceful and wide-ranging narrative of events. It would also have been valuable to have a chapter on Knowles’ treatment of the friars – a topic briefly surveyed here by James Clark – who featured heavily in volume one of "The Religious Orders". In all, this is a slightly uneven collection of essays, with some contributions rehearsing previously published work; and a couple of the chapters would have benefited from more careful copy editing. Nevertheless, it is undoubtedly a welcome volume, providing the first detailed critical evaluation of David Knowles as a historian, and tracing his deep-seated and long-lasting influence on English monastic studies.

Note:
1 George W. Bernard, The Dissolution of the Monasteries, in: History 96, 324 (2011), S. 390–409.

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