Imagining Religious Leadership in the Middle Ages

Steven Vanderputten is Professor of Medieval History at Ghent University. He is the author of Monastic Reform as Process: Realities and Representations in Medieval Flanders, 900–1100, also from Cornell, editor of Understanding Monastic Practices of Oral Communication (Western Europe, Tenth–Thirteenth Centuries), and coeditor of Ecclesia in medio nationis: Reflections on the Study of Monasticism in the Central Middle Ages.

Steven Vanderputten is a productive scholar, publishing a spate of books and articles over the past decade, most of which deal with questions of monastic history in medieval Flanders and the surrounding areas in the tenth and eleventh centuries. With Imagining Religious Leadership in the Middle Ages Vanderputten turns his attention to a monastic figure, who he argues has been oft misinterpreted: Richard of Saint-Vanne. Vanderputten gives us the most thorough investigation of the life and actions of Richard to date, and does so in an impressive manner.(Comitatus 47) Vanderputten places Richard within the wider context of ecclesiastical leadership at the turn of the first millennium.... Using multiple ecclesiastical chronicles, the eleventh-century Life of Richard, and some of Richard's own writings, Vanderputten paints a picture of Richard as a dynamic figure, part of the aristocratic elite of tenth-century Lotharingue who developed an ideal of following the suffering Christ, nudus Christum nudum sequere.(The Historian)

• Introduction1. Imagining Richard in Medieval and Modern Historiography2. Ecclesiastical Office, Religious Virtuosity, and the Apostolic Imperative3. Imagining Saint-Vanne4. "Founder and Head of Many Monasteries"5. Converting the WorldConclusionAppendix A: Chronology of Major Events in Richard's LifeAppendix B: The Life of RodingAppendix C: Monastic Reading at Saint-VanneAppendix D: Overview of Richard's Abbacies Outside of Saint-VanneAppendix E: Overview of Richard's "Priors"Appendix F: Overview of Richard's SuccessorsBibliographyIndex