Regular Canons

The regular canons—clerics living in common and following a monastic rule—are not easy to categorize. In theory, the vocation of the regular canon was more outward-looking than that of the monk, but historians have often found it difficult to discern clear differences in practice between monasteries of canons and monks. There was also a great deal of diversity among houses of regular canons, for example in their origins, locations, buildings, and observances, and relatively weak connections between monasteries (in sharp contrast to centralized orders like the Cistercians). However, it was this very versatility that made the regular canons attractive to lay and clerical founders. Part of the high medieval movement to rediscover the “apostolic life,” monasteries of regular canons were established in large numbers in the later 11th and 12th centuries. They soon outnumbered houses for monks in many parts of Europe: there were more monasteries of Augustinian canons in medieval England than of any other single order. Although most houses of regular canons were autonomous, a number of orders and congregations also grew up, including the Premonstratensians, Gilbertines, Victorines, Arrouaisians and (in the later Middle Ages) the Windesheim congregation, with varying degrees of centralized organization. Once heavily overshadowed by the monks in the historiography of the religious orders, the study of the regular canons has quickened in recent years—for example with the publication of several volumes of collected essays and the appearance of new series, such as the Bibliotheca Victorina and Victorine Texts in Translation series from Brepols. The sheer variety of the canonical order is reflected in this scholarship (and also this bibliography), and few have to date attempted the difficult challenge of writing synthetic histories of the regular canons. The works listed in this article refer only to regular canons and not the canonesses, who are covered in a separate article.