Innovations or Preservation? Reforms of the Regula Benedicti in the Educational Care of the Young in the Early Middle Ages

With this contribution, we intend to ask the research question whether the Rule of Benedict and its reforms, in the early Middle Ages, contained real attention to the educational care of childhood and youth or simply placed a functional discipline to maintain a specific lifestyle. The research work intends not only to analyze the Rule of Benedict by focusing on the space and attention devoted to childhood, but also to follow its evolution and the main reforms it underwent during the early Middle Ages in order to evaluate whether and how this attention developed. We will retrace the history of the Rule in the early Middle Ages to verify how the attention to childhood and youth changed in the main reforms it underwent from its birth until around the 11th century. Three main reforms will be analyzed: the Cluniac, the Cistercian and the Camaldolese. We will make use not only of the sources and constitutions of the rules themselves, but we will also try to support our considerations through epistolary or secondary sources such as hagiographic literature, taken with due consideration, analysing possible topoi. Was youth, with its impetuousness, its impulses, and developing sexuality, considered merely a period of life to be regimented and constrained? Or did the attention paid to that period of life in some way presage, even if in a germinal form, a sensitivity to childhood and youth not so much as an object, but as a subject of educational attention? Consequently, we will try to understand if the Rule, and its reforms, contained for this phase of life only instances of discipline and control, or can be considered heralds of attention and sensitivity to be rediscovered.