Bounded Wilderness: Land and Reform in the Congregation of Fonte Avellana, 1035-1394
FAIN: FEL-281584-22
Kathryn Lee Jasper
Illinois State University (Normal, IL 61790-0001)
Research and writing leading to a book on clerical reform and ecclesiastical property in medieval Italy (1035 to 1394).
Traditional approaches tend to regard reform in terms of ideas, but scholarly consensus has long been moving towards broadening this notion to define the practical results of lofty polemic during the “Age of Reform” (c. 1049–1122). My book focuses on one reform protagonist, Peter Damian, because he links ideas and practices of reform; he wrote treatises on ecclesiastical property and also implemented his ideas about land management at the hermitage of Fonte Avellana from 1043 until his death in 1072. In a word, this book is about land, and how religious reform profoundly shaped land and landscape in Italy. Reform was never solely confined to the rarefied intellectual realms but rather it circulated much more widely and demanded thinking about matters as seemingly mundane as property boundaries and rights to water, orchards, pastures, and mills. Studying economic practices, religious traditions, and the natural environment in tandem sheds light on another side of religious reform.