ABSTRACT
When I started researching this project, I did not expect to write a success story. In fact, the degree to which convents such as Klingental and Notre-Dame flourished in the late Middle Ages came as a surprise. I had long known, of course, that the old historiographical narrative of monastic decline in the late Middle Ages was faulty. A growing number of studies, including my own work on Fontevraud, have shown that there was no universal monastic decline in late medieval Europe – and many convents, such as Fontevraud, experienced a renewed rise to influence during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Innumerable convents of early and high medieval origin existed for many centuries, some even for more than a millennium. In those regions where the Reformation did not take root, it was the French Revolution and European Secularization which brought about the end of many medieval monasteries. To put it somewhat polemically, for any institution to exist for such long stretches of time as many female monasteries did, its administrators had to have a profound understanding of how to run their institutions. At the same time, considering the long period of their existence until the sixteenth (Reformation) or early nineteenth century (Secularization), any historian studying them in their longue durée will naturally come across periods of crises. That such periods of crisis are more easily discerned for the late than for the high Middle Ages does not come as a surprise either. It is only for this later period that account books provide detailed insights. Moreover, the period’s observant reformers were prolific writers who justified their intrusive reforms by portraying unreformed convent life in drastic, albeit frequently exaggerated terms, which have influenced also later perceptions of late medieval monasticism.
