Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction: using the past, interpreting the present, influencing the future
- 1 Memory, identity and power in Lombard Italy
- 2 Memory and narrative in the cult of early Anglo-Saxon saints
- 3 The uses of the Old Testament in early medieval canon law: the Collectio Vetus Gallica and the Collectio Hibernensis
- 4 The transmission of tradition: Gregorian influence and innovation in eighth-century Italian monasticism
- 5 The world and its past as Christian allegory in the early Middle Ages
- 6 The Franks as the New Israel? Education for an identity from Pippin to Charlemagne
- 7 Political ideology in Carolingian historiography
- 8 The Annals of Metz and the Merovingian past
- 9 The empire as ecclesia: Hrabanus Maurus and biblical historia for rulers
- 10 Teutons or Trojans? The Carolingians and the Germanic Past
- 11 A man for all seasons: Pacificus of Verona and the creation of a local Carolingian past
- APPENDIX: The Memorial to Pacificus of Verona
- Index
4 - The transmission of tradition: Gregorian influence and innovation in eighth-century Italian monasticism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 August 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction: using the past, interpreting the present, influencing the future
- 1 Memory, identity and power in Lombard Italy
- 2 Memory and narrative in the cult of early Anglo-Saxon saints
- 3 The uses of the Old Testament in early medieval canon law: the Collectio Vetus Gallica and the Collectio Hibernensis
- 4 The transmission of tradition: Gregorian influence and innovation in eighth-century Italian monasticism
- 5 The world and its past as Christian allegory in the early Middle Ages
- 6 The Franks as the New Israel? Education for an identity from Pippin to Charlemagne
- 7 Political ideology in Carolingian historiography
- 8 The Annals of Metz and the Merovingian past
- 9 The empire as ecclesia: Hrabanus Maurus and biblical historia for rulers
- 10 Teutons or Trojans? The Carolingians and the Germanic Past
- 11 A man for all seasons: Pacificus of Verona and the creation of a local Carolingian past
- APPENDIX: The Memorial to Pacificus of Verona
- Index
Summary
Among the most potent paradigms of Christian practice handed down from late antiquity to the early Middle Ages was that which combined the pursuit of the perfect life with the communal tenure of property, in the form of the monastery. Already by the sixth century, a broad, but none the less identifiable, western monastic tradition had grown up. Those who entered monasteries shared a common ideological inheritance which was transmitted both in written form – in a canon which included the works of such writers as Augustine and Cassian – and in less formal, perhaps predominantly oral, ways. While the former constituted those written norms which defined the parameters of monasticism as an institution, they were only a part of the collective memory – the social memory – of monks as a whole and of individual monastic communities. For the historian, a concentration on formal literary signposts is especially tempting in the case of the monastic tradition, since monks used writing to an extent unusual in this period. As with the study of other walks of early medieval life, however, there is the danger that viewing monasticism chiefly or solely in terms of a literary canon will produce a limited, even a distorted, image. We need look no further than Gregory the Great's Dialogues for a written witness to a more broadly transmitted monastic culture, and no further than some of the older studies of that work for examples of the danger of interpreting written sources too narrowly.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Uses of the Past in the Early Middle Ages , pp. 78 - 101Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000