Steven Vanderputten

Steven Vanderputten (PhD 2000) is a professor of the History of the Early and High Middle Ages at Ghent University (Belgium). For the past two decades, he has done extensive research on the development of monastic life as a religious, cultural, and social phenomenon, based on the realization that study monastic communities of the medieval period as anthropological and sociological ‘laboratories’ allows us to observe over extremely long periods of time and with an unparalleled degree of detail the workings of past organizations. This ‘laboratories’ approach also enabled him to see how such organizations shaped collective memories and promoted various forms of collective forgetting, how they awarded the individual a meaningful place in the group, and how gendered identities were established. As such, his research also questions former narratives of the medieval past, and attempts to understand the medieval and modern roots of these narratives.