From Canonry to Monastery: Changing Observances and the Agency of the Foundation’s Community at Eleventh-Century Hasungen

Abstract

Abstract Interreligious endowments in the strict sense were beyond the imagination of medieval founders and churchmen alike. Among similar phenomena, however, Latin Christendom did experience changes of monastic observances, which were often shaped as refoundations. In the late eleventh century, when monastic reform movements became increasingly important, a number of canonries (communities of secular clerics) were reorganized as monasteries. Hasungen in Hesse is an interesting case, founded and refounded by the same bishop for spiritual, political and personal reasons. This paper looks at the reaction of the former canons. By analysing charters and narrative evidence, it asks about their agency in adapting to the change of observance. Although monastic “reform” had the potential to marginalize the former canons, they not only accepted the refoundation: during the eventful first decades of the new monastery, they managed to keep alive the memory of, and connections to, the social environment which their pre-monastic community had been rooted in.