Vanderputten analyzes various accounts of Richard’s life, contemporary sources that are revealing of his worldview and self-conception, and the evidence relating to his actions as a monastic reformer and as a promoter of conversion. Richard himself conceived of his life as an evolving commentary on a wide range of issues relating to individual spirituality, monastic discipline, and religious leadership. This commentary, which combined highly conservative and revolutionary elements, reached far beyond the walls of the monastery and concerned many of the issues that would divide the church and its subjects in the later eleventh century.
Steven Vanderputten is Professor of Medieval History at Ghent University. He is the author of Monastic Reform as Process: Realities and Representations in Medieval Flanders, 900–1100, also from Cornell, editor of Understanding Monastic Practices of Oral Communication (Western Europe, Tenth–Thirteenth Centuries), and coeditor of Ecclesia in medio nationis: Reflections on the Study of Monasticism in the Central Middle Ages.