Comparative history of religious orders, history of institutions

该项目的目的是回答中世纪宗教秩序的组织机制如何运作的问题。秩序需要持续的治理行动，以确保最大限度地利用他们的精神和物质资源，并防止或应对骚乱、异常或其他缺点。作为这项任务的一部分，该命令的中央机构（一般章节，访问），永久性地有义务在个别情况下做出决定，这些决定是基于相应规范的参数，记录和存档所产生的材料。在这个项目中，这些系列文本将首次进行系统分析。尽管它们的版本很容易获得，但到目前为止，它们只被用作调查特定问题的采石场。这些传统的方法完全忽视了它们作为具有高度创造性理性的重要来源的重要性，这种理性允许在12世纪和13世纪已经严格采用正式过程。由于他们的做法，定期文件和他们的能力，正式的过程集中在决策，本研究试图从文化史和制度史的角度来证明这一假设，尽管对宗教组织实际控制的制度前提和规范结构的研究状况可能被视为目前为止还不够充分--实际上是为预期的项目建立一个平台--对有关订单实际政府的材料信息的分析工作程度很低，需要选择来源。出于这个原因，该项目将集中在熙笃会，克吕尼亚克和多米尼加，因为这些订单提供了一个很好的基础上比较的各种传统，他们的宪法和指导思想。事实上，他们是中世纪的订单与最好的生存率的必要来源增加了他们的适用性。第二个限制是调查所涵盖的时间。鉴于组织结构的连续性，它将足以限制在12和13世纪的几十年的广泛的系列来源的研究。对于来源的分析方法的微观历史将被应用。由于以减少复杂性为目标的程序性进程已经正式化，将有广泛而多样的例行活动，可以通过对其构成要素进行编目来加以组织。将个案纳入分析模式，将有助于评估控制机制的效率。系统地研究众多案件中超出日常活动的复杂性，将表明程序的潜力和局限性。随后将对控制机制的范围和协调它们的程序进行类型学调查，包括治理研究的方法。最终的目标是重建秩序的政府和控制的应用机制，由于其合理的设计和复杂的程序，这些机制远远领先于他们的时代。

The project’s aim is to answer the question of how the organisational mechanisms of medieval religious orders functioned. Orders required continuous acts of governance to ensure that the use of their spiritual and material resources was maximised and to prevent or respond to disturbances, deviances or other shortcomings. As a part of this task the order’s central institutions (general chapters, visitations), were permanently obliged to make decisions in individual cases, these decisions being based on the parameters of the respective norms, documenting and archiving the resulting material.In this project these serial texts will be subjected to a systematic analysis for the first time. Even though their editions are easily accessible, they have only been used as quarries for the investigation of specific questions up to now. These traditional approaches completely neglect their importance as remarkable sources with a high degree of creative rationality which allowed the stringently adopted use of formal processes already in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Because of their practice of regular documentation and their ability to formalise processes focused on decision making, the religious orders are seen as institutions with model character by the project and it is intended to prove this assumption from the perspective of cultural as well as institutional history.Even though the state of research on the institutional preconditions and the normative structures for the orders’ actual control may be regarded as adequate by now – in fact establishing a platform for the intended project – the low degree of analytical work on the material’s information concerning the orders’ actual government requires a selection of sources. For this reason the project will focus on the Cistercians, the Cluniacs and the Dominicans, because these orders offer an excellent basis for comparison based on the variety of their traditions, their constitution and their guiding ideas. The fact that they are the medieval orders with the best survival rate of the necessary sources increases their suitability. The second restriction will be the period covered by the investigation. Given the continuity of the organisational structures, it will be sufficient to limit the study of the extensive serial sources on a number of decades in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.For the analysis of the sources methods of microhistory will be applied. Since procedural processes targeted at the reduction of complexities were formalised, there will be an extensive and varied range of routine events which can be structured by cataloguing their constitutive elements. The integration of individual cases into an analytical pattern will allow an assessment of the efficiency of control mechanisms. The systematic study of the complexities in the numerous cases beyond the routine activities will indicate the potential and limits of procedures. This will be followed by a typological survey of the spectrum of control mechanisms and the procedures to coordinate them – including the approaches of Governance-Research. The ultimate aim will be to reconstruct the orders’ applied mechanisms of government and control which – because of their rational design and their sophisticated procedures – were far ahead of their times.