Monasticism, in all of its variations, was a feature of almost every landscape in the medieval West. So ubiquitous were religious women and men throughout the Middle Ages that all medievalists encounter monasticism in their intellectual worlds. While there is enormous interest in medieval monasticism among Anglophone scholars, language is often a barrier to accessing some of the most important and groundbreaking research emerging from Europe. The Cambridge History of Medieval Monasticism in the Latin West offers a comprehensive treatment of medieval monasticism, from Late Antiquity to the end of the Middle Ages. The essays, specially commissioned for this volume and written by an international team of scholars, with contributors from Australia, Belgium, Canada, England, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, and the United States, cover a range of topics and themes and represent the most up-to-date discoveries on this topic.

This contribution proposes different notions of "monastic landscapes" (geographic, political, textual, economic, spiritual) and discusses whether applying them to the monastic movement allegedly initiated by Columbanus may help us to refine or deconstruct the concept of "Columbanian monasticism." Comparing evidence on monastic life in Gregory of Tours' hagiographic and historiographic works with the depiction of monastic life in Jonas of Bobbio's Vita Columbani shows that we can indeed identify a shift from a "landscape with monasteries" in sixth-century Merovingian Francia to a politically integrated "monastic landscape" in the seventh century. However, this does not mean that the fundamental shift was necessarily the result of the activities of the Irish monk Columbanus. An investigation of Jonas' depiction of the spiritual and physical landscape around Columbanus' main foundation Luxeuil shows the grade of continuity between monastic foundations in Gaul before Columbanus and the alleged center of a new "Columbanian" monastic movement.

The remains of the Benedictine abbey of St. Margaret are situated 500m south of the village Bijela, south-east of Daruvar (central Croatia), on a 120m long and 85m wide oval elevation. On the south-eastern side, the hill sharply descends into the creek Brzica. During the 14th and 15th centuries, the Benedictine Monastery of St. Margaret, on the western slopes of Papuk, was one of the Order's most important centers in medieval Slavonia. Although the exact date of the foundation and construction of the monastic complex is still unknown, Bijela Abbey has the best recorded history. The number of known documents mentioning the monastery, from only 10 in the 14th century increases significantly to a total of 70 in the 15th and 16th century, documenting the transformation of a priory into a flourishing abbey. In its beginnings the monastic community in Bijela was subordinated to the abbey of St. Margaret of Garab in Srijem. The old abbey had vast estate in Slavonia, on the border of the Zagreb and Pecs dioceses and organized the community in Bijela as a priory and grange to manage that estate. The abbey’s possession encompassed a large area on the western edges of Papuk Mountain. This paper will present the possibilities of studying topography, Franciscan cadastre, contemporary maps and written sources as a tool for mapping the structure of the abbeys estate, with a market town, villages, parish church, mills, fish ponds, quarries and distribution of arable land and woods.

This thesis studies a part of the monastic history of the kingdoms of Anglo- Saxon Northumbria and Merovingian Neustria. It is a comparative analysis of monasteries in the seventh century in these two kingdoms, focusing on four particularly famous houses, for which textual and archaeological sources are abundant. These four monasteries are those of Chelles and Jouarre in Neustria, and Whitby and Wearmouth/Jarrow in Northumbria. The aim is to detennine the different influences which affected them, by analysing every possible aspect of monasticism. The influence of Rome and Ireland is evident on these monasteries. The main difference lies in the fact that Irish influence came to Neustria through the missionary Columbanus in 590, 40 years before it reached Northumbria with Aidan in 635. A close study of the various aspects of monasticism for these four houses leads to the following conclusions. In several aspects, Neustrian and Northumbrian monasteries have the same characteristics, so...