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是如何运作的问题。秩序需要持续的治理行为，以确保最大限度地利用其精神和物质资源，并防止或应对骚乱、偏差或其他缺点。作为这项任务的一部分，骑士团的中央机构（总会、视察）有义务对个别案件作出决定，这些决定是根据各自规范的参数作出的，并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受到系统的分析。尽管它们的版本很容易获得，但到目前为止，它们只被用作研究特定问题的采石场。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显著来源的重要性，这种理性允许严格采用已经在12世纪和13世纪的正式过程。由于他们定期记录文件的做法以及他们将专注于决策的过程正式化的能力，该项目将宗教团体视为具有典范特征的机构，该项目旨在从文化和机构历史的角度证明这一假设。尽管目前对订单实际控制的制度前提和规范结构的研究状况可能被认为是足够的-实际上为预期的项目建立了一个平台-但对订单实际管理的材料信息的分析工作程度较低，需要选择来源。出于这个原因，该项目将重点关注西多会修士、克鲁尼亚修士和多米尼加修士，因为这些修会提供了一个很好的基础，可以根据他们不同的传统、结构和指导思想进行比较。事实上，他们是中世纪的秩序与最佳存活率的必要资源增加了他们的适用性。第二个限制是调查所涵盖的期限。考虑到组织结构的连续性，将广泛的系列来源的研究限制在12世纪和13世纪的几十年里是足够的。对于来源的分析，将采用微历史的方法。由于旨在降低复杂性的程序过程已形式化，因此将有广泛和各种各样的常规事件，可以通过对其构成要素进行分类来组织。将个别案件纳入分析模式将有助于评估控制机制的效率。系统地研究常规活动之外的众多案件的复杂性，将表明程序的潜力和局限性。随后将对各种控制机制和协调这些机制的程序进行类型学调查- -包括治理研究的方法。最终的目标将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.