Giles Constable (1929–2021)

This is one of those foundational texts that I'm ashamed I'm reading in full for the first time now and not as an undergrad—but then again, if I'd read it as an undergrad there's no way I would have appreciated the depth of erudition and the breadth of primary source reading that underpins The Reformation of the Twelfth Century. It is about a quarter of a century old now, so some of what Giles Constable has to say here has of course been superseded or nuanced by later work. But for a show more sweeping overview of how ideas of what it meant to a Christian, and what monastic reform meant, in western Europe of the twelfth century, this is still hard to top. show less