Acknowledgements
This book is the result of a research project entitled “Learning as Shared Practice. Towards a New Understanding of Education in Monastic Communities of the High Middle Ages”, which was funded by a postdoctoral fellowship from the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO) from 2014 to 2018 at Ghent University: I am very grateful to both institutions. Crucially, I wish to thank Steven Vanderputten, who acted as my supervisor for this project. He has been the first to apply the notion of “communities of practice” to medieval monasteries, and the research project on shared learning was developed in close dialogue with him; during my time at Ghent University, he was always a source for inspiration and advice. He was also the first person to read a draft of this book, offering many insightful comments that greatly helped me to improve it. Within the research group “Religion and Society in the Early and Central Middle Ages”, I also learned a lot from my exchanges with Tjamke Snijders and Johan Belaen.
The conference “Horizontal Learning within High Medieval Religious Communities” (organized by Tjamke Snijders, Steven Vanderputten and me and funded by the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts in Brussels, Ghent University’s Henri Pirenne Institute for Medieval Studies, Department of History, and Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, and the Leuven Centre for the Study of the Transmission of Texts and Ideas in Antiquity) offered an opportunity to put to the test the notion of peer-to-peer knowledge transfers in high medieval religious communities. It also allowed me to establish or renew enriching intellectual contacts with Cédric Giraud, Jay Diehl, Marc Saurette, Karl Patrick Kinsella, Stephen Jaeger, Babette Hellemans, Nicolangelo D’Acunto, Neslihan Şenocak and Sita Steckel. I am particularly grateful to Stephen Jaeger for entertaining a lively e-mail exchange with me through the years and for kindly commenting on many of my drafts. While Mia Münster-Swendsen ultimately could not contribute to the “Horizontal Learning” conference or the book which resulted from it, and which was published by Amsterdam University Press in 2019, she has helped this book project take shape by sharing her expertise on multiple occasions and ways.
At the Department of History of Ghent University, and also thanks to the presence of the Henri Pirenne Institute for Medieval Studies, I enjoyed a warm and intellectually stimulating environment: special thanks go to Marianna Mazzola, Lorenzo Focanti, Brianne Dolce, Tineke Van Gassen, Rayek Vereeken, Linde Nuyts, Claudia Wittig, Pieter Bytterbier, Barbara Vinck, Stefan Meysman, Jeroen de Gussem, Jeroen Wijnendale, Erika Graham-Goering, Frederick Buylaert, Jan Dumolyn, Jeroen Deploige and Els De Paermentier.
I also benefitted from short stays at the Centre for Medieval Literature in Odense and the Academia Belgica of Rome in 2016: in both places I found friendly people, exciting ideas and excellent libraries. I am particularly grateful for the feedback that I received in Odense following a presentation of my research on shared learning and during insightful conversations with Aglae Pizzone, Lars Boje Mortensen, Elizabeth M. Tyler, Shazia Jagot, Réka Forrai, Steffen Hope, Christian Høgel, Dale Kedwards and Kristin Bourassa.
The people with whom I came in contact at conferences and from whose presentations I learned are too numerous to be listed here, but I would like to mention that it was for me both pleasant and profitable to attend the conferences organized in the contexts of the research projects “Marginal Scholarship: The Practice of Learning in the Early Middle Ages (c. 800–1000)”, “Monks around the Mediterranean. Contacts, Exchanges and Influences in East and West from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages (4th–15th c.)” and “MISSIVA. Lettres de femmes dans l’Europe médiévale (Espagne, France, Italie, Portugal, VIIIe–XVe s.)”.
I also wish to thank the Board of the “Education and Society in the Middle Ages” series and the editorial team at Brill for their faith in this publication, and the anonymous reviewers for their thorough readings and many useful comments, which allowed me to improve the text. Of course, responsibility for all errors remains my own.
Last but not least, I am very grateful to my husband Tommaso, who has always supported my career and my work, for making the relocation to Belgium not only possible but also joyful, and for helping me maintain a healthy work/life balance. Little Alessandro arrived too late to have a significant impact on this book, although my plan to send off the manuscript days before giving birth was thwarted by his early arrival, so I ended up doing some of the final polishing with a newborn asleep on my lap. Watching our eldest, Marianna, grow and learn, and learning from her and with her as much as she learned from us, has been – and still is – a source for inspiration. To her this book is – quite appropriately – dedicated.