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64 - A Crisis of Late Medieval Monasticism?

from Part IV - Forms of Monasticism in the Late Middle Ages

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2020

Alison I. Beach
Affiliation:
Ohio State University
Isabelle Cochelin
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
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Summary

The history of late medieval monasticism, covering roughly the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, used to be hampered by negative connotations. It shared in the overall negative interpretation of late medieval ecclesiastical history, which was bound up with the Avignon papacy, the papal schism, and the Conciliarism crisis. Scholars affirmed that traditional monasticism had long been losing out to the regular canons and especially the mendicant orders, which would have been much better suited for the new pastoral realities within an urbanizing world that was increasingly uncertain about doctrinal purity. The study of late medieval monasticism also suffered from a venerable historiographical legacy, initiated by medieval and early modern order historians, yet maintained by later scholars, namely that attention was nearly always focused on the origins and first age of dynamic expansion of a given order.

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