Research Seminar: A Donkey's Dilemma: The New Religious Orders of the High Medieval Centuries in Debate Satire

The satirical epic poem Mirror of Fools (Speculum stultorum), written in Canterbury around 1200, criticizes various aspects of medieval society by observing the hapless and luckless schemes of the ass Burnellus, who vainly attempts to gain wisdom, higher social standing, or at least a tail long enough to match his ears. The talk will focus on a rarely studied aspect of this text: its discussion of the diversification of religious life within the Latin church. When Burnellus finally decides to enter the religious life, he is stymied by the multiplicity of new religious orders confronting him, and the text proceeds to criticize this new development of Christian religiosity on a surprisingly fundamental level. As the talk argues, this discussion and critique of the “new” social problem of legitimate religious diversity offers unique insights into dynamics of relativization sparked by the inner religious pluralization of Christianity. It has the power to add important differentiations to our typical perspective on the high medieval church and the monastic reform movements characterizing it.

Sita Steckel has been Professor of Medieval History at the Goethe University in Frankfurt-am-Main in Germany since 2023. She studied all her degrees at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. She previously worked in Munich, Oslo and Műnster. Sita’s research focuses on religious diversity and polemical debates in high and late medieval Latin Christianity, the history of knowledge and scholarship in the Latin Middle Ages, manuscript studies and digital editions, and historical and sociological models of social transformation.