Reform, and Ever Reforming: From "Movements" to Conflicts, from Persons to Institutions, from the Twelfth Century to the Fifteenth

From the time of Konrad Burdach and Gerhart Ladner in the earlier twentieth century, medieval historians have made “reform” or “reformation” a central narrative line alongside the even earlier theme of “renaissance” and the later one of “repression” or “persecution.” These notions serve at least three historical purposes: they lift out key historical sources, moments, or conflicts; they inject dynamism into the broad thousand-year medieval story; and they create implicit narrative lines within that story. So effectively have they done so that historians invoke the notions all too readily, often without much in the way of reflection or definition or specification, thus allowing the notion itself to do too much of their narrative or interpretive work. This paper will consider, too briefly, two interrelated but distinct matters. It will examine prominent notions of “reform” as they have come to haunt the historical literature, and to suggest distinctions and refinements. More concretely and historically, it will look at selected cases in the twelfth and the fifteenth centuries, trying, among other things, to balance political or institutional instances with the more oft treated religious forms, and to isolate real elements of difference and change across those centuries.