This is the first English translation of Dom Jean Mabillon's treatise that defends the propriety of study and research as an occupation for monks, and lays out a course of studies for young Benedictines training to be scholars. In the 1680s the strict Trappist reformer, Armand-Jean de Rance, published books condemning scholarship as a suitable occupation for monks. Mabillon belonged to the Maurists, a group of French Benedictines who were already launched on a 150-year odyssey of collecting, editing, and publishing critical editions of the church Fathers, the classics of early French literature and history, the annals of the Benedictine order from its beginnings, and critically vetted lives of Benedictine saints. Mabillon refuted Rance's claims, but transformed the debate by writing a masterful survey of authors and works with which monastic scholars should be familiar: pagan classics, the writings of early Christianity, and important publications of the 16th and 17th centuries on topics ranging from biblical scholarship to belles lettres to civil and canon law to books about books. Mabillon includes a "list of difficulties met with in reading the councils, the Fathers, and church history" that presents problems in a non-dogmatic, open-ended way. This edition includes a translator's introduction, suggestions for further reading on the monastic studies controversy, all Mabillon's marginal notes, a bibliography of all published works mentioned in the text, and an index."

The Diary of Soeur Marguerite of the Sisters of Lamotte Suffering and Sacrifice in the First World War. The campaign in Flanders, with its successive battles, would be the longest of the Great War and the costliest in terms of human life. At the centre of the fearful and prolonged barrages of shelling by the military of both sides lay the town of Ypres, known for its Cloth Hall and cathedral, its butter and its lace -- now to be blasted to infamy as an indelible symbol of suffering and sacrifice and wanton destruction. The underground passageways of the towns ancient fortifications provided shelter for the trapped townspeople. In desperate circumstances courageous and selfless individuals administered medical attention, distributed food and clothing, provided milk for babies and set up orphanages and schools for children. Some of these volunteers, such as the Friends Ambulance Unit (FAU), came from afar, whilst others already formed an essential part of the moral and social fibre of the beleaguered town: these included the local priest, Camille Delaere, and the nuns who lent him their support. The cures indefatigable assistant was the young nun Soeur Marguerite of the Sisters of Lamotte, and it is her daily journal that became The Diary of an Ypres Nun. Originally published in French in 1917, this harrowing yet sometimes surprisingly humorous account of events in the besieged and battered town of Ypres was written between October 1914 and May 1915, as she worked alongside the FAU and Father Delaere, to bring comfort and succour to the suffering civilian population.

This book looks at Eastern and Western monasticism's continuous and intensive interactions with society in Eastern Europe, Russia and the Former Soviet Republics. It discusses the role monastics played in fostering national identities, as well as the potentiality of monasteries and religious orders to be vehicles of ecumenism and inter-religious dialogue within and beyond national boundaries. Using a country-specific analysis, the book highlights the monastic tradition and monastic establishments. It addresses gaps in the academic study of religion in Eastern European and Russian historiography and looks at the role of monasticism as a cultural and national identity forming determinant in the region.

Collected Studies CS1064 This collection of Giles Constable's key articles on medieval monastic and ecclesiastical history provides nothing less than a comprehensive overview of research in the field. The book provides an insight into monastic life in the Middle Ages - from Germany to Normandy and from England to Sicily.

Francis of Assisi is one of the most beloved of all saints. Both traditional and entirely revolutionary, he was a paradox. He was at once down to earth and reaching toward heaven, grounded in the rich history of the Church while moving toward a new understanding of the world beyond. Richard Rohr, himself a Franciscan friar, draws on Scripture, insights from psychology, and literary and artistic references, to weave together an understanding of the tradition as first practiced by St Francis. Rohr shows how his own innovative theology is firmly grounded in the life and teaching of this great saint and provides a perspective on how his alternative path to the divine can deepen and enrich our spiritual lives.

This book presents an invaluable selection of sermons and theological treatises of the twelfth century author, Isaac of Stella. The English born abbot of the French Cistercian monastery of Stella on the Isle of Re is one of the most inspiring, yet equally elusive, representatives of the great twelfth-century Cistercian Renaissance more widely associated with the person of Bernard of Clairvaux. The astonishing spiritual and intellectual depth of Isaac's surviving writings makes him a valuable read for anyone aiming to receive a complete picture of the intellectual heritage of the Middle Ages. Of the twenty-five sermons by Isaac presented in this volume, ten are made available here in an English translation for the first time. These are accompanied with two new studies examining Isaac of Stella's work from an historical, literary as well as theological perspective.

In Desiring Life, Norvene Vest brings the insights of Benedict s Rule to the wisdom tradition. Desiring Life is the third book in her series on Benedictine spirituality for people living in the world today. Vest asks questions of pressing concern today, such as: What is the good life we seek? How can we learn to live with integrity and compassion, despite the growing gap between public ethics and narrow self-interest? How can we live fully and well? What sort of people should we as Christians try to be? In sections on wisdom, virtue, and ethics Vest describes these contemporary questions and addresses them through passages from Benedict s Rule. Through the recovery of insights from the past, Vest believes, we can draw closer to the heart of our desire for life in all its fullness union with God.

Examining the recent radical re-invention of monastic tradition in the everyday life of New Monastic Communities, Exploring New Monastic Communities considers how, growing up in the wake of Vatican II, new Catholic communities are renewing monastic life by emphasizing the most innovative and disruptive theological aspects which they identify in the Council. Despite freely adopting and adapting their Rule of Life, the new communities do not belong to pre-existing orders or congregations: they are gender-mixed with monks and nuns living under the same roof; they accept lay members whether single, married or as families; they reject enclosure; they often limit collective prayer time in order to increase time for labour, evangelization and voluntary social work; and are actively involved in oecumenical and interreligious dialogue, harbouring thinly-veiled sympathy with oriental religions, from which they sometimes adopt beliefs and practices. Offering unique sociological insights into New Monastic Communities, and shedding light on questions surrounding New Religious Movements more generally, the book asks what 'monastic' means today and whether these communities can still be described as 'monastic'.

How did Thomas Merton become Thomas Merton? Starting out from any one of his earlier major life moments - wealthy orphan boy, big man on campus, fervent Roman Catholic convert, new and obedient monk - we find ourselves asking how by his life's end he had grown from who he was then into a transcultural and transreligious spiritual teacher read by millions. This book takes another such starting point: his attempt in the mid-1950s to move from his abbey of Gethsemani, in Kentucky - a place that had become, in his view, noisy beyond bearing - to an Italian monastery, Camaldoli, which he idealized as a place of monastic peace. The ultimate irony: Camaldoli at that time, bucolic and peaceful outwardly, was inwardly riven by a pre-Vatican II culture war; whereas Gethsemani, which he tried so hard to leave, became, when he was given his hermitage there in 1965, his place to recover Eden. In walking with Merton on this journey, and reading the letters he wrote and received at the time, we find ourselves asking, as he did, with so much energy and honesty, the deep questions that we may well need to answer in our own lives.

This book examines the influence of the monastic tradition beyond the Reformation. Where the built monastic environment had been dissolved, desire for the spiritual benefits of monastic living still echoed within theological and spiritual writing of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a virtual exegetical template. The volume considers how the writings of monastic authors were appropriated in post-Reformation movements by those seeking a more fervent spiritual life, and how the concept of an internal cloister of monastic/ascetic spirituality influenced several Anglican writers during the Restoration. There is a careful examination of the monastic influence upon the Wesleys and the foundation and rise of Methodism. Drawing on a range of primary sources, the book will be of particular interest to scholars of monastic and Methodist history, and to those engaged in researching ecclesiology and in ecumenical dialogues.

The book provides an account of many Jesuits, from the time of St. Ignatius to the 1990's, who have been incarcerated around the world for their faith. It is divided into chapters that deal with specific themes related to their imprisonment. The principal themes are: prayer as a key element in survival, arrest and trial procedures, the experience of suffering, Mass, the daily order of prison life, forced labor, ministry to other prisoners, guards, prisoners who became Jesuits while imprisoned, community in prison, and voluntary incarceration.This is the first book to examine the experience of incarcerated Jesuits around the world and down through the centuries from the standpoint of these various themes. Much of the material is by the Jesuits themselves, in letters, autobiographical fragments and other sources-including obscure publications long out of print. The result is a gathering together of these pieces and fragments into a coordinated whole, with commentary on their significance in the context of the political and cultural situations of their time-situations that were generally the immediate cause of the Jesuits imprisonment, whether in Elizabethan England or in Communist China and Russia. A chart of imprisoned Jesuits by country of incarceration at the beginning, and a glossary of names at the back (as well as an index), will help the reader to keep track of the names of the many Jesuits who figure in the book.

An alternative view of the Conquest and settlement from north-east England, charting relations between the monastic community and the invading Normans. North-east England experienced the Norman Conquest rather differently from the south of the country. This account of events in Northumbria gives an important alternative view of the Conquest and settlement, distinct from the moreusual southern and court-centred evidence. A key factor in events was the monastic community of St Cuthbert in Durham, which had survived the political upheavals following the collapse of the Northumbrian kingdom under Scandinavian pressure in the ninth century. Its position thus strengthened, it occupied an influential place in the factors ranged against the Normans, who recognised in the community a powerful force for resistance. The history of the community during the Anglo-Norman period is closely examined, particularly the relationship between the new Norman bishops and the monastic cathedral chapter and their respective rights and privileges. From this detailed study, Dr Airdargues that conquest, in the north-east at least, took a different, less traumatic form from that generally assumed from the early twelfth-century description of the reformation of the church in 1083. Throughout this account of events in Durham in the years following the conquest, Dr Aird is careful also to give due emphasis to relations with the Scots kings of the later eleventh and twelfth centuries, and to the distinctive nature of medieval Northumbriaand the Haliwerfolc in particular, that region subject to the bishops of the Church. Dr WILLIAM M. AIRD is Lecturer in History, School of History, Classics and Archaeology, University of Edinburgh.

The Society of Jesus was founded by Ignatius Loyola on a principal of strict obedience to papal and superiors' authorities, yet the nature of the Jesuits's work and the turbulent political circumstances in which they operated, inevitably brought them into conflict with the Catholic hierarchy. In order to better understand and contextualise the debates concerning obedience, this book examines the Jesuits of south-western Europe during the generalate of Claudio Acquaviva. Acquaviva's thirty year generalate (1581-1615) marked a challenging time for the Jesuits, during which their very system of government was called into doubt. The need for obedience and the limits of that obedience posed a question of fundamental importance both to debates taking place within the Society, and to the definition of a collective Jesuit identity. At the same time, struggles for jurisdiction between political states and the papacy, as well as the difficulties raised by the Protestant Reformation, all called for matters to be rethought. Divided into four chapters, the book begins with an analysis of the texts and contexts in which Jesuits reflected on obedience at the turn of the seventeenth century. The three following chapters then explore the various Ignatian sources that discussed obedience, placing them within their specific contexts. In so doing the book provides fascinating insights into how the Jesuits under Acquaviva approached the concept of obedience from theological and practical standpoints.

This book takes a new look at the impacts of Christianity in the late-nineteenth-century China. Using American Baptist and English Presbyterian examples in Guangdong province, it examines the scale of Chinese conversions, the creation of Christian villages, and the power relations between Christians and non-Christians, and between different Christian denominations. This book is based on a very comprehensive foundation of data. By supplementing the Protestant missionary and Chinese archival materials with fieldwork data that were collected in several Christian villages, this study not only highlights the inner dynamics of Chinese Christianity but also explores a variety of crisis management strategies employed by missionaries, Christian converts, foreign diplomats and Chinese officials in local politics.

A full and comprehensive survey of the development of the Cistercian Order which emerged from the tumultuous intellectual and religious fervour of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The Cistercians (White Monks) were the most successful monastic experiment to emerge from the tumultuous intellectual and religious fervour of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. By around 1150 they had established houses the length and breadth of Western Christendom and were internationally renowned. They sought to return to a simple form of monastic life, as set down in the Rule of St Benedict, and preferred rural locations "far from the haunts of men".But, as recent research has shown, they were by no means isolated from society but influenced, and were influenced by, the world around them; they moved with the times. This book explores the phenomenon that was the Cistercian Order, drawing on recent research from various disciplines to consider what it was that made the Cistercians distinctive and how they responded to developments. The book addresses current debates regarding the origins and evolution of the Order; discusses the key primary sources for knowledge; and covers architecture, administration, daily life, spirituality, the economy and the monks' ties with the world. Professor Janet Burton teaches at theSchool of Archaeology, History and Anthropology, University of Wales Trinity Saint David; Dr Julie Kerr is Honorary Research Fellow in the School of History, University of St Andrews.

The Cistercian Order in Medieval Europe offers an accessible and engaging history of the Order from its beginnings in the twelfth century through to the early sixteenth century. Unlike most other existing volumes on this subject it gives a nuanced analysis of the late medieval Cistercian experience as well as the early years of the Order. Jamroziak argues that the story of the Cistercian Order in the Middle Ages was not one of a 'Golden Age' followed by decline, nor was the true 'Cistercian spirit' exclusively embedded in the early texts to remain unchanged for centuries. Instead she shows how the Order functioned and changed over time as an international organisation, held together by a novel 'management system'; from Estonia in the east to Portugal in the west, and from Norway to Italy. The ability to adapt and respond to these very different social and economic conditions is what made the Cistercians so successful. This book draws upon a wide range of primary sources, as well as scholarly literature in several languages, to explore the following key areas: the degree of centralisation versus local specificity how much the contact between monastic communities and lay people changed over time how the concept of reform was central to the Medieval history of the Cistercian Order This book will appeal to anyone interested in Medieval history and the Medieval Church more generally as well as those with a particular interest in monasticism.

The third volume of Thomas Merton's journals chronicles Merton's attempts to reconcile his desire for solitude and contemplation with the demands of his new-found celebrity status within the strictures of conventional monastic life.

Offering a comprehensive analysis of newly-uncovered manuscripts from two English convents near Antwerp, this study gives unprecedented insight into the role of the senses in enclosed religious communities during the period 1600-1800. It draws on a range of previously unpublished writings-chronicles, confessions, letters, poetry, personal testimony of various kinds-to explore and challenge assumptions about sensory origins. Author Nicky Hallett undertakes an interdisciplinary investigation of a range of documents compiled by English nuns in exile in northern Europe. She analyzes vivid accounts they left of the spaces they inhabited and of their sensory architecture: the smells of corridors, of diseased and dying bodies, the sights and sounds of civic and community life, its textures and tastes; their understanding of it in the light of devotional discipline. This is material culture in the raw, providing access to a well-defined locale and the conditions that shaped sensory experience and understanding. Hallett examines the relationships between somatic and religious enclosure, and the role of the senses in devotional discipline and practice, considering the ways in which the women adapted to the austerities of convent life after childhoods in domestic households. She considers the enduring effects of habitus, in Bourdieu's terms the residue of socialised subjectivity which was (or was not) transferred to a contemplative career. To this discussion, she injects literary and cultural comparisons, considering inter alia how writers of fiction, and of domestic and devotional conduct books, represent the senses, and how the nuns' own reading shaped their personal knowledge. The Senses in Religious Communities, 1600-1800 opens fresh comparative perspectives on the Catholic domestic household as well as the convent, and on relationships between English and European philosophy, rhetorical, medical and devotional discourse.

The book recognizes the achievements by a nineteenth-century community of women religious, the Grey Nuns of Lewiston, Maine. The founding of their hospital was significant in its time as the first hospital in that factory city; and is significant today if one desires a more accurate and inclusive history of women and healthcare in America. The fact that this community lived in a hostile, Protestant-dominated, industrial environment while submerged in a French-Canadian Catholic world of ethnicity, tradition and paternalism makes their accomplishments more compelling.

Scholarly interest and popular interest in the military orders show no sign of abating. This volume records the proceedings of the fifth conference in 2009, and, like the earlier volumes in the series, is essential reading for everyone interested in the progress of research into these powerful institutions.

Originally published in Russian in 1910, this volume is made up of 382 letters of spiritual counsel by the late nineteenth century Optina Elder Hieroschemamonk Anatoly (Zertsalov) to nuns. All who seek the knowledge and love of God can benefit from reading these letters. Written in a tone that is both firm and tender, they are the words of a caring father for his spiritual children. The book also includes a short life of St. Anatoly, a glossary, an index of topics, and a table of letters.

This book explores Cassian's use of scripture in the Conferences, especially its biblical models to convey his understanding of the desert ideal to the monastic communities of Gaul. Cassian intended the scriptures and, implicitly, the Conferences to be the voices of authority and orthodoxy in the Gallic environment. He interprets familiar biblical characters in unfamiliar ways that exemplify his ideal. By imitating their actions the monk enters a seamless lineage of authority stretching back to Abraham. This book demonstrates how the scriptures functioned as a dynamic force in the lives of Christian monks in the fourth and fifth centuries, emphasizes the importance of Cassian in the development of the western monastic tradition, and offers an alternative to the sometimes problematic descriptions of patristic exegesis as "allegory" or "typology". Cassian has been described as little more than a provider of information about Egyptian monasticism, but a careful reading of his work reveals a sophisticated agenda to define and institutionalize orthodox monasticism in the Latin West.

An analysis and study of Caroline script from 200 years of ecclesiastical and secular records reveals important historical detail relating to late Anglo-Saxon England. Caroline minuscule script was adopted in England in the mid-tenth century in imitation of Continental usage. A badge of ecclesiastical reform, it was practised in Benedictine scriptoria but was also taken up by members of the royal writing office; the chancery occupied an important place in the pioneering of calligraphic fashions. During its approximately two-century history in England, Caroline script developed a number of forms, in part reflecting different tendencies within the Reform-cause. The Rule of St Benedict was focal for this movement. In the aftermath of the final Scandinavian conquest of England [AD1016] a Canterbury master-scribe created the form ofCaroline writing which was to become a mark of Englishness and outlive the Norman Conquest. In the closing chapter its inventor's career is discussed and his achievement assessed. This volume offers analysis of manuscript evidenceas a basis for the cultural and ecclesiastical history of late Anglo-Saxon England. David N. Dumville is professor of History and Palaeography at the University of Aberdeen

Focusing on the Dominican Order's activities in southeastern Poland from the canonisation of the Polish Dominican St Hyacinth (1594) to the outbreak of Bogdan Chmielnicki's Cossack revolt (1648-54) this book reveals the renovation and popularity of the pre-existing Mendicant culture of piety in the period following the Council of Trent (1545-64). In so doing, it questions both western and Polish scholarship regarding the role of the Society of Jesus, and the changes within Catholicism associated with it across Europe in the early modern period. By grounding the rivalry between Dominicans and Jesuits in patronage, politics, preaching, and the practices of piety, the study provides a holistic explanation of the reasons for Dominican expansion, the ways in which Catholicisation proceeded in a consensual political system, and suggests a corrective to the long-standing Jesuit-centred model of religious renewal. Whilst engaging with existing research regarding the post-Reformation formation of religious denominations, the book significantly expands the debate by stressing the friars' continuity with the medieval past, and demonstrating their importance in the articulation of Catholic-noble identity. Consequently, the monograph opens up new vistas on the history of the Counter-Reformation, Polish-Lithuanian noble identity, and the nature of religious renewal in a multi-ethnic and multi-denominational state.

Blending history and architecture with literary analysis, this ground-breaking study explores the convent's place in the early modern imagination. The author brackets her account between two pivotal events: the Council of Trent imposing strict enclosure on cloistered nuns, and the French Revolution expelling them from their cloisters two centuries later. In the intervening time, women within convent walls were both captives and refugees from an outside world dominated by patriarchal power and discourses. Yet despite locks and bars, the cloister remained "porous" to privileged visitors. Others could catch a glimpse of veiled nuns through the elaborate grills separating cloistered space from the church, provoking imaginative accounts of convent life. Not surprisingly, the figure of the confined religious woman represents an intensified object of desire in male-authored narrative. The convent also spurred "feminutopian" discourses composed by women: convents become safe houses for those fleeing bad marriages or trying to construct an ideal, pastoral life, as a counter model to the male-dominated court or household. Recent criticism has identified certain privileged spaces that early modern women made their own: the ruelle, the salon, the hearth of fairy tale-telling. Woshinsky's book definitively adds the convent to this list.