The History of the Carthusian Order at the Fonds zur Förderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung (Austria)

Project number		Stand-alone Projects P18219
Title		A History of the Carthusian Order
Principal investigator		James HOGG
Approval date		02.05.2005
University / Research institution		Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Paris-London-Universität Salzburg
Scientific field(s)
Keywords		Carthusians; Grande Chartreuse; Hermits; St. Bruno; Monasticism
Homepage		http://monsite.wanadoo.fr/AnalectaCartusiana/

Most of the major religious Orders of the Roman Catholic Church have received adequate historical treatment in the twentieth century. Thus, for example, Philibert Schmitz offered a magisterial survey of Benedictine history in his Histoire de l'Ordre de Saint Benoît, 2nd edition, Abbaye de Maredsous 1948 ff., Louis J. Lekai outlined Cistercian history in his The Cistercians: Ideals and Reality, Kent State University Press 1977, and the Anglican Bishop John Moorman outlined the early centuries of the Franciscans in his A History of the Franciscan Order from its Origins to the Year 1517 , Oxford 1968, whilst even such an extinct Order as Grandmont was investigated in depth by the Benedictine savant Jean Becquet in numerous publications. The Carthusians, with over 270 foundations, virtually alone lack an adequate general history, though some of the ground-work was accomplished on a popular level as early as 1881 by the Carthusian Dom Cyprian Boutrais in his La Grande Chartreuse par un Chartreux, which has been continually revised and corrected over the decades, the seventeenth edition being published as recently as 1998. The work itself is wider in scope than its title suggests, but it makes no pretension of offering a scientific history of the Order. Isolated publications, such as E. Margaret Thompson's The Carthusian Order in England, London 1930, and Marijan Zadnikar's Die Kartäuser: Orden der schweigenden Mönche, Cologne 1983, despite more detailed research, remained limited in scope, so that the sixteenth and seventeenth century Carthusian chroniclers Dom Clement Bohic, Dom Nicolas Molin, Dom Charles Le Couteulx, and Dom Leo Le Vasseur remain the principles sources for the earlier centuries of Carthusian history, despite the limitations imposed on them by their solitary vocation, which prevented them from leaving their monasteries to work in external libraries.
From 1960-1971 Dom Maurice Laporte, a Carthusian residing at the Grande Chartreuse, produced a study of the origins of the Carthusian Order in eight substantial volumes, which unfortunately have remained unpublished. In spite of the fact that he was not by training an historian, he cast new light on early Carthusian history, - a process which was continued by James Hogg, who, not having been received to the solemn profession in 1968, founded the Analecta Cartusiana in 1970, which has published significant source material in virtually three hundred volumes up to the year 2004. Working on the basis of the assembled material, James Hogg feels that the time is ripe for the composition of a collaborative general scientific history of the Order in three volumes, dealing with the medieval period, the period from the Reformation to the French Revolution, and from the French Revolution to the Present Day, which will meet the standards of modern historiography.

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