Imagining Religious Leadership in the Middle Ages: Richard of Saint-Vanne and the Politics of Reform, by Steven Vanderputten

Abstract

This important book tackles a subject with great implications for our understanding not only of the period it treats (early eleventh century), but also subsequent, better-known developments such as the Papal Reform and the Investiture Conflict. In it, Steven Vanderputten does a double historiographical service: on the one hand, he examines carefully many of the accepted affirmations about Richard of Saint-Vanne and finds them wanting; on the other, he frames Richard’s career in terms of Max Weber’s notion of religious virtuosi, as a way to get at what Richard himself imagined he was doing: ‘a member of an elite group of ecclesiastical leaders whose mission in life it was to imitate Christ through suffering, individual perfection, and the total conversion of humanity’ (p. 42). The result is an extensive revision of past views of Richard and a new picture that could apply not only to the subject of the book, but other monastic reformers and religious leaders in this period where such ‘viri religiosi flourished’.