Monks and Nuns, Saints and Outcasts

A new generation of historians today is borrowing from cultural anthropology, post-modern critical theory, and gender studies to understand the social meanings of medieval religious movements, practices, figures, and cults. In this volume Sharon Farmer and Barbara H. Rosenwein bring together essays—all hitherto unpublished—that combine some of the best of these new approaches with rigorous research and traditional scholarship.

Some of these essays re-envision the professionals of religion: the monks and nuns who carried out crucial social functions as mediators between living and dead, repositories for social memory, and loci of vicarious piety. In their religious life these people embodied an image of the society that produced them. Other contributions focus on social categories, usually expressed as dichotomies: male/female, insider/outsider, saint/outcast. Monks and Nuns, Saints and Outcasts is the first book to show the interaction of seemingly antithetical groups of medieval people and the ways in which they were defined by, as well as against, each other. All of the essays, taken together, form a tribute to Lester K. Little, pioneer in the study of religion in medieval society.

Sharon Farmer is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of Communities of Saint Martin: Legend and Ritual in Medieval Tours, also from Cornell. Barbara H. Rosenwein is Professor of History, Loyola University, Chicago, and editor of the Cornell series "Conjunctions of Religion and Power in the Medieval Past." Notable among her other books are To Be the Neighbor of Saint Peter: The Social Meaning of Cluny's Property, 909-1049 and Negotiating Space: Power, Restraint, and Privileges of Immunity in Early Medieval Europe, both from Cornell. She is also the editor of the Cornell University Press book Anger's Past: The Social Uses of an Emotion in the Middle Ages.

The volume's essays are important, original contributions.

Its introduction and ten essays are well written and engage with wide-ranging and serious issues.... Their authors succeed in asking innovative questions and suggesting new approaches with a clear sense of the demands and limitations posed by the documentary remains that sustain their inquiries.

A common feature of these studies is the full and helpful citation of primary sources combined with an extensive acquaintance with relevant scholarly work. They merit the careful attention of those interested in their subjects, and they inspire confidence in the judicious use of the approach that they adopt.