Klöster und Orden im Mittelalter

Klöster und Orden im Mittelalter, by Gudrun Gleba (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2002; pp. 148. Pb.n.p.). As befits a work published in a series entitled Geschichte Kompakt Mittelalter, this book does what it says on the spine: in just under one hundred and fifty pages Gleba covers the whole history of medieval monasticism in Latin Europe from its origins in the fourth-century Egyptian desert to the monastic visitations of reforming German bishops in the fifteenth century. The result is a rather breathless account which follows the traditional narrative, and one which is more than a little unbalanced in favour of the later period: those chapters devoted to the Cistercians, the military orders, the mendicants, and the beguines and mystics include a lengthier, and more detailed, narrative of the history of each movement, than that on Cluny and the Cluniacs, which stretches over three centuries beginning with the Carolingians' promotion of

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