46 - Nobility and Monastic Patronage: The View from Outside the Monastery

Summary

Secular noblemen and noblewomen’s relationships with monastic communities during the high Middle Ages follow many of the patterns already established in the preceding centuries. Across Latin Christendom, nobles continued to make donations to religious houses for the sake of their own souls and those of their ancestors and other relatives. Similarly, those who had sufficient resources to found new monasteries continued to do so, establishing and endowing religious communities dedicated in perpetuity to their spiritual well-being and the preservation of their memories. As in earlier centuries, nobles’ motives for patronizing monastic houses were not confined solely to the religious sphere. Anthropological models of “gift-giving” (as discussed by Isabelle Rosé in her article in volume 1) can be applied to the property agreements between nobles and monasteries of the high Middle Ages as well. Conflicts over lands and rights also continued to unsettle local societies, because the shifting nature of patronage and kinship networks over time repeatedly opened new questions about which nobles had claims to a piece of property even after it had been donated to a religious community.