The transmission of tradition: Gregorian influence and innovation in eighth-century Italian monasticism

Abstract

Among the most potent paradigms of Christian practice handed down from late antiquity to the early Middle Ages was that which combined the pursuit of the perfect life with the communal tenure of property, in the form of the monastery. Already by the sixth century, a broad, but none the less identifiable, western monastic tradition had grown up. Those who entered monasteries shared a common ideological inheritance which was transmitted both in written form – in a canon which included the works of such writers as Augustine and Cassian – and in less formal, perhaps predominantly oral, ways. While the former constituted those written norms which defined the parameters of monasticism as an institution, they were only a part of the collective memory – the social memory – of monks as a whole and of individual monastic communities. For the historian, a concentration on formal literary signposts is especially tempting in the case of the monastic tradition, since monks used writing to an extent unusual in this period. As with the study of other walks of early medieval life, however, there is the danger that viewing monasticism chiefly or solely in terms of a literary canon will produce a limited, even a distorted, image. We need look no further than Gregory the Great's Dialogues for a written witness to a more broadly transmitted monastic culture, and no further than some of the older studies of that work for examples of the danger of interpreting written sources too narrowly.