IMC 2026: Sessions

Throughout the middle ages, abbesses and abbots had concerns that went well beyond the walls of their communities. Whether this concerned issues of legal jurisdiction, or more worldly matters such as economic or political questions, monastic leaders invariably found themselves torn between their responsibilities for their monks and their authority in the world outside. The three papers in this panel will explore various such themes and how they affected the (self-)image of abbots and abbesses. Eduardo Manarini will first explore how abbots in early medieval Italy dealt with the changes in material and political dynamics following in the wake of the Carolingian conquest. Johanna Jebe will then focus on the way abbots in the Frankish realms would combine their spiritual and economic interests in the regular practice of everyday life. Laura Gathagan, finally, will explore how abbesses’ judicial prerogatives outside the cloister affected their identity and authority in Normandy and Flanders. Rutger Kramer will offer an analysis of the ways in which the saintly bishop Nicholas of Myra is depicted as the protector of monastic interests, specifically in the Vita sancti Nicolai (BHL 6126) by the eleventh-century monk Otloh of Sankt-Emmeram.