The Early Medieval Monastery as a Site of Commemoration and Place of Oblivion

Abstract

Early medieval monasteries were hierarchical institutions in which the practice of commemoration played a major role in establishing and maintaining a tradition of corporate identity. Commemoration functioned at various levels and took different forms: the veneration of saints and the cult of relics; liturgical memoria, the formal remembering of the names of members and friends of a community, both living and deceased; the glorification of certain outstanding alumni in order to establish a college of house worthies and so confirm the contemporary hierarchy; informal recording and display of the names of members of the community in both the public and the private sphere. Monastic commemoration could manifest itself materially in the form of brightly painted funerary oratories, prominent tombs, inscriptions of various kinds and painted portraits of prominent monks and lay benefactors. The phenomenon, in all its multifarious variety, is clearly exemplified in the surviving fabric of the early medieval monastery of San Vincenzo al Volturno. There the practice of commemoration co-existed with systematic forgetting. The lay familia which served the monks was largely excluded from memorial practices and the early material fabric of the monastery was held in little respect. Old sites, buildings and cemeteries were abandoned and wrecked without qualm, to be supplanted by new, more effective ones. Individuals were commemorated at all levels, but each generation was ready to consign the memorial structures and images associated with its revered and glorious predecessors to oblivion.