For a long time, historians have tried to explain the lack of order structures among Benedictinehouses by referring to these communities’ conservative attitude. This paper proposesa new hypothesis, which states that twelfth- and thirteenth-century Benedictinesreally were receptive to new trends in monastic government; be it without imitating theorder model. As will be argued below, they attempted to install supra-monastic (i.e.involving two or more monastic communities) structures by developing decentralisedassociations between their houses. Even though, at first sight, these Benedictine initiativesappear very different from the emerging religious orders, it will be shown that bothexperiments were essentially rooted in a single type of institution: the confraternity agreement.
