Monks, Aristocrats, and Justice: Twelfth-Century Monastic Advocacy in a European Perspective

With a focus on the decades around 1100, West pays particular attention to the judicial dimension of monastic advocacy, more clearly defined than the generic protection or political patronage universally sought by monastic communities everywhere in the Latin West. He concentrates on old, wealthy, and well-established Benedictine communities, leaving to one side other forms of advocacy, notably those relating to bishops and to the emerging Cistercian group of monasteries. Above all, instead of concentrating on what aristocratic families did with their monastic advocacies, he looks at what monastic communities in the Reich did with their advocates, and how comparable communities elsewhere managed without them. Examined in this way, it becomes clear that monastic advocacy was a product not simply of aristocratic power, as has usually been supposed, tacitly or otherwise, but also of the perceived needs of certain monastic communities.