Christian leaders and scholars during the first millennium in the West were preoccupied with written norms and corrective practices. Law (lex) during this era needs to be understood in a broader normative context. This introductory chapter provides historical and historiographical background to the specialized chapters that follow, explores the notions of lex, ius, norma, regula, and canon, and proposes an overarching schema of four normative fields, as understood by authors of the period: laws, canons, penitential prescriptions, and monastic rules, with their corresponding normative practices and textual compilations. The legal status of conciliar canons and papal decretals during this era is problematic. Although scholars today usually construe these as constituting a body of law, Isidore of Seville did not, and authors of the era usually treated laws (leges) and canons as distinct but complementary categories. The final section of the chapter examines this problem, proposing several fields of inquiry that would shed light on it, and suggesting that canonical collections, as a genre, were practical but not attached to any particular application.

This chapter critically reviews and complicates three premises of the standard historiography of early-medieval monasticism: monastic life turned at an early stage into a “regular life,” lived according to a written rule; the practice of following a normative written rule was stable, not subject to much historical change; there was an organic evolution that culminated in the implementing of the Rule of Benedict as the unifying norm for monastic life in the context of Carolingian monastic reforms. The chapter complicates these notions on the basis of four case studies: the “angelic Rule” of Pachomius and its role in creating a monastic origin myth; the sancta regula of Caesarius as a way to achieve collective sanctity; the Regula Columbani as a program to unify a monastic movement; and the Regula Benedicti in its two manifestations: as a document revealing a late-antique attempt to organize an ascetic community; and as a Carolingian instrument of reform. Monastic rules are not only different in their content and in their disciplinary program, but each of them carries a different understanding of normativity and a distinctive idea of what the term “rule” (regula) really means.