From Martyr to Monument: The Abbey of Cluny as Cultural Patrimony

Abstract

The abbey of Cluny looms large over the religious landscape of the central middle ages. During the tenure of Abbot Hugh the Great (1049–1109), the community tripled in size to more than 300 monks, and work had begun on the building complex known to historians of church architecture as Cluny III, the largest basilica in western Europe at the time. Moreover, before the advent of the new monastic orders of the twelfth century, most notably the Cistercians, the brethren of Cluny enjoyed unparalleled prestige as the masters of intercessory prayer for the souls of the sinful dead; and their long-lived abbots wielded influence in the highest venues of secular and ecclesiastical power, from the Ottonian court in Pavia to the papal curia in Rome. Unfortunately, many studies have depicted Cluny's rich history as a story of decline and fall, positing a ‘golden age’ from the abbey's foundation in 910 to its height under Hugh the Great; an early onset dotage during the tenure of Abbot Peter the Venerable (1122–56), who faced the withering critiques of Abbot Bernard of Clairvaux; and an embarrassing senility from the thirteenth century until the destruction of the abbey five centuries later in the aftermath of the French Revolution. In the past two decades, this picture has begun to change for the better, however, as more and more scholars, almost exclusively Europeans, have taken on the task of rehabilitating the abbey's late medieval history. Beginning with Gert Melville's provocative article, ‘Cluny après “Cluny”: Le treizième siècle, un champ de recherche’, in Francia (1990) and fully realised in Denyse Riche's magisterial L’ordre de Cluny à la fin du Moyen Âge: Le vieux pays clunisien, XIIe-XVe siècles (2000), historians can now delineate with new clarity the arc and aggregate of Cluny's medieval past. In this book, Janet Marquardt carries this trend of inquiry even further by considering the modern after-life of Cluny, specifically the municipal, memorial and scholarly responses to the ruins of the abbey in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.