DenMon

The development of monastic communities between the 7th and 11th c. was a crucial turning point in European history with the deepening of the Christianisation of the countryside and the creation of new forms of political and religious control of the population. It was during this time the first contours of a broad new civilization, especially in northern Gaul. For these reasons, the internal spatial articulation of monasteries was strongly influenced by the temporal and spiritual organization. During this period of monastic reform, we observe the appearance of models of monastic space arrangement in the Frankish kingdom. Our written and material sources suggest a frequency in distributing specific places and articulating spaces related to different activities. That this was a model is shown by the fact that the same type of organization is found at other sites whose foundations were supported by kings born as a pilgrimage sanctuary and then endowed with a royal monastery. The impression is, therefore, that starting from northern Gaul such models spread rapidly to other areas affected by Carolingian rule. In this sense, the Frankish monastic experience stands as a pilot case for understanding the dynamics of the transformation of monasteries throughout Europe. With this in mind, DenMon project aims to analyse the development and normalization of the space of royal monasteries and their spatial impacts by crossreferencing material and textual data to understand the choices and models of these privileged foundations. The aim is to provide an innovative methodological approach that will be able to describe the monastic complexes in their functional coherence, focusing on the royal monasteries founded within the limits of Northern Gaul.