Monastic Prisons and Torture Chambers: Crime and Punishment in Central European Monasteries, 1600–1800. By Ulrich L. Lehner. Eugene, Ore.: Cascade Books, 2013. xii + 105 pp. $15.00 paper.

Abstract

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Monastic Prisons and Torture Chambers: Crime and Punishment in Central European Monasteries, 1600-1800 . By Ulrich L. Lehner . Eugene, Ore. : Cascade Books , 2013. xii + 105 pp. $15.00 paper.Book Reviews and NotesIn the wake of the 1848 revolutions, archives across Europe became available scholars, who discovered documentary evidence that changed the nature of historical inquiry in the latter nineteenth century. Research in these archives dramatically altered the outlook of historians like Ignaz von Dollinger and his aristocratic disciple, John Dalberg Acton. In 1864, Acton and Dollinger visited numerous libraries and archives in Vienna and Venice. Acton described the impact of their discovers on his mentor in this way:Conventional history faded away; studies of lifetime suddenly underwent transformation; and his view of the last six centuries was made up from secret information gathered in thirty European libraries and archives. As many things remote from current thought grew be certainties, he became more confident, more independent, more isolated. (Dollinger's Historical Work, The English Historical Review 5 [1890], 734)Much later in life, Acton summed up what he and his mentor came believe: To renounce the pains and penalties of exhaustive research is remain victim ill informed and designing writers, and authorities that have worked for ages build up the vast tradition of conventional mendacity (Damian McElrath, Lord Acton: The Decisive Decade, 1864-1874, Essays and Documents [New York: Humanities Press, 1970], 139-140).These reflections came mind while reading Ulrich Lehner's slim but provocative introduction field of research that, until his study, had been virtually unexamined: early modern monastic prisons and torture chambers. While affirming the essential validity of the received historiography of post-Tridentine Catholicism--which emphasizes reform of the religious orders and reinvigoration of spiritual discipline among priests and religious orders--Lehner reveals evidence that tempers these received accounts of early modern religious life. A byproduct of his Enlightened Monks: The German Benedictines 1740-1803 (Oxford: Oxford Univesity Press, 2011), this book project was pursued with some reluctance, and described by the author as a personal challenge and an unpleasant experience. He credited colleagues in the Theology Department of Marquette University for encouraging him to pursue the quest for historical truth (x). We must be grateful for his perseverance.This book is intended as an opening venture into the study of criminal law in monastic settings, church and state conflicts over criminal cases, and an analysis of how sexual offenses were managed by religious superiors. Perhaps the greatest contribution of this volume is the extensive collection of footnotes with lengthy quotes from criminal regulations of religious orders and canon law, and the procedures established prosecute them. Archival evidence of individual cases, while reportedly sparse, opens window onto events that sometimes read like narratives found in Protestant and anticlerical polemics of the early modern and modern period. Lehner acknowledges that this may be one of the reasons why monastic prisons and torture chambers have gone largely unexamined. …