Finding precedents in the medieval past : the construction of ‘reform’ narratives in Richard de Wassebourg’s 'Antiquitez de le Gaule Belgicque'

According to traditional historiography of medieval Europe, a decline in clerical and monastic observance during the tenth century prompted centrally-organised, large-scale programmes of reform, supposedly culminating in reform ‘movements’. Recent scholarship working to nuance this narrative often locates its origins in the work of seventeenth-century historians like Jean Mabillon. However, the present study asserts that such ‘narratives of reform’ are detectible more than a century earlier, in the Antiquitez de la Gaule Belgicque, by lesser-known cleric of the Church of Verdun, Richard de Wassebourg (d. 1556). Wassebourg’s obfuscation of highly localised experiences was a projection of his own sixteenth-century context, where more organised forms of religion dominated, and ‘reform’ was applied society-wide. It helped establish an antecedent to contemporary efforts – part of the so-called ‘Counter Reformation’ movement – to effect ecclesiastical change.