Imagining Religious Leadership in the Middle Ages is a fresh and necessary reexamination of Richard of Saint-Vanne. Steven Vanderputten's portrait of Richard unfolds in an analytical, narrative, and most entertaining fashion. Each chapter reveals further insights about Richard from different sources and keeps the reader anticipating what will come next. Vanderputten argues in clear, straightforward prose that seems to arrive ... Read moreeffortlessly at answers that in fact draw on his wide range of knowledge.
Marc Saurette, Carleton University Vanderputten places Richard within the wider context of ecclesiastical leadership at the turn of the first millennium.... Using multiple ecclesiastical chronicles, the eleventh-century Life of Richard, and some of Richard's own writings, Vanderputten paints a picture of Richard as a dynamic figure, part of the aristocratic elite of tenth-century Lotharingue who developed an ideal of following the suffering Christ, nudus Christum nudum sequere.
The Historian
Steven Vanderputten is a productive scholar, publishing a spate of books and articles over the past decade, most of which deal with questions of monastic history in medieval Flanders and the surrounding areas in the tenth and eleventh centuries. With Imagining Religious Leadership in the Middle Ages Vanderputten turns his attention to a monastic figure, who he argues has been oft misinterpreted: Richard of Saint-Vanne. Vanderputten gives us the most thorough investigation of the life and actions of Richard to date, and does so in an impressive manner.
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