«Archiabbatem numquam invenimus annotatum». Una svolta del monachesimo sotto i pontificati di Urbano II e Pasquale II

During the papacies of Urban II and Paschal II substantial changes took place in the relations between bishops and abbots and between abbots and their subordinate abbots. Until then the structure of the vast majority of the monastic networks, from Montecassino to Cluny, from Marmoutier to Chaise Dieu to Hirsau were of a oligarchic type. In fact they were constituted by a central abbey with a conspicuous number of dependent structures, mostly priorates, often quite far from the main house. Among the subject communities even abbeys, often of considerable size and great traditions, were not lacking. The summit of the monastic network became in this case also a sort of abbot of abbots, abbas abbatum, indicated in the contemporary sources even as archiabbas or archimandrita, with the function of correcting the subordinate abbots. In the early decades of the 12th century the Cistercians, on the contrary, created a sort of horizontal “confederation”, composed substantially almost entirely of abbeys which maintained strong ties with the episcopate and were materially rather independent of each other. This turning point was not only the product of an “innovative act of greatest creative rationality” of the Cistercian fathers. One can observe these changes in action. In particular in this article the relationship between Marmoutier abbey in the diocese of Tours and the abbeys of St. Florentin of Bonneval and St Remì of Reims in the last decades of the 11th century will be considered.