This work, first published in 1863, relates the biography of a complex, visionary reformer from his birth in 1091 to his death in 1153, capturing in the process the major currents of twelfth-century politics, culture and faith. From the foundation of the Cistercian Abbey of Clairvaux to its rise as a centre of monastic austerity and devotion, the book traces Saint Bernard's participation in the seismic events of his day, including the creation of the Knights Templar, the rise of scholasticism and the preaching of the Second Crusade. Told in a lucid, anecdotal style by the Victorian essayist, biographer and political reformer James Cotter Morison (1832 88), whose friends included Matthew Arnold and Thomas Carlyle, this is an important work of Victorian medievalist criticism, capturing the spirit of its own age even as it evokes the spirit of another.

First published as part of the Cambridge Miscellany series in 1932, this book provides accounts of the lives and influence of St Bernard and St Francis. The volume also contains a variety of illustrative figures and a comprehensive index.

The twin sisters Agnes Lewis (1843 1926) and Margaret Gibson (1843 1920) were pioneering biblical scholars who became experts in a number of ancient languages. Travelling widely in the Middle East, they made several significant discoveries, including one of the earliest manuscripts of the Four Gospels in Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic, the language probably spoken by Jesus himself. Their chief discoveries were made in the Monastery of St Catherine on Mount Sinai. This fascicule is the translation of a Syriac manuscript from the monastic library of St Catherine. Translated by Lewis and first published in 1900, the manuscript recounts the tales of a number of saintly women, including Pelagia, a rich courtesan who converted to Christianity and Eugenia, a holy woman who lived as a man and became the abbot of a monastery. An interesting collection of stories with relevance for scholars of Middle Eastern Christianity.

The sisters Agnes Lewis (1843 1926) and Margaret Gibson (1843 1920) were pioneering biblical scholars who became experts in a number of ancient languages. Travelling widely in the Middle East, they made several significant discoveries, including one of the earliest manuscripts of the Four Gospels in Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic, the language probably spoken by Jesus himself. Their chief discoveries were made in the Monastery of St Catherine on Mount Sinai. This fascicule, a useful resource for scholars of Syriac, and originally published as part of the Studia Sinaitica series, is the text of a Syriac manuscript from the monastic library at St Catherine's. Transcribed by Lewis and first published in 1900, the manuscript recounts the tales of a number of saintly women including Pelagia, a rich courtesan who converted to Christianity, and Eugenia, a holy woman who lived as a man and became the abbot of a monastery.

Originally published during the early part of the twentieth century, the Cambridge Manuals of Science and Literature were designed to provide concise introductions to a broad range of topics. They were written by experts for the general reader and combined a comprehensive approach to knowledge with an emphasis on accessibility. English Monasteries by A. H. Thompson was first published in 1913 and reissued as this second edition in 1923. The book presents a study of medieval monasteries in England, paying special attention to describing the uses of principal monastic buildings.

Originally published in 1909, this book contains an English translation of The History of the Foundations, the sequel to Saint Theresa's Life. While the Life focuses more strongly on purely spiritual matters, the Foundations is highly informative in terms of secular history and the practical aspects of Theresa's existence. Illustrations are provided throughout, including a map showing the sites where Theresa founded Carmelite institutions. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in the life of Saint Theresa, Spanish history, and the development of the Catholic Church.

Theodore (759-826), abbot of the influential Constantinopolitan monastery of Stoudios, is celebrated as a saint by the Orthodox Church for his stalwart defense of icon veneration. Three important texts promoting the monastery and the memory of its founder are collected in The Life and Death of Theodore of Stoudios. In the Life of Theodore, Michael the Monk describes a golden age at Stoudios, as well as Theodore's often antagonistic encounters with imperial rulers. The Encyclical Letter of Naukratios, written in 826 by his successor, informed the scattered monks of their leader's death. Translation and Burial contains brief biographies of Theodore and his brother, along with an eyewitness account of their reburial at Stoudios. These works, translated into English for the first time, appear here alongside new editions of the Byzantine Greek texts.

The Iona Community was founded in Glasgow in 1938 by George MacLeod, minister, visionary and prophetic witness for peace, in the context of the poverty and despair of the Depression. Its original task of rebuilding the monastic ruins of Iona Abbey became a sign of hopeful rebuilding of community in Scotland and beyond. Since that time, the Community's Rule has been the common thread running through the life of its members, weaving them together. As the church becomes polarised in many places, many people are seeking a committed life which is radical, but also open, ecumenical and inclusive. Such resources as are found in the Community's Rule give an anchor which works against the grain of suspicion, and states that there are alternatives, that a Christian life can be lived fully in ways which do not have, by definition, to be either right-wing or reactionary. Kathy Galloway offers a series of reflections on living by the Rule of the Iona Community, exploring its history, inner life and public witness. They arise from her conviction that 'the Rule is, for us, a source of freedom and, in its outworking, contains something of our prophetic edge. It is not so much that I keep the Rule, as that the Rule keeps me.'

The Sisters of Our Lady of Christian Doctrine community was founded in 1910 by marion gurney, who adopted the religious name Mother Marianne of Jesus. A graduate of Wellesley College and a convert to Catholicism, Gurney had served as head resident at St. Rose's Settlement, the first Catholic settlement house in New York City. She founded the Sisters of Christian Doctrine when other communities of women religious appeared uninterested in a ministry of settlement work combined with religious education programs for children attending public schools. The community established two settlement houses in New York City-Madonna House on the Lower East Side in 1910, followed by Ave Maria House in the Bronx in 1930. Alongside their classes in religious education and preparing children and adults to receive the sacraments, the Sisters distributed food and clothing, operated a bread line, and helped their neighbors in emergencies. In 1940 Mother Marianne and the Sisters began their first major mission outside New York when they adapted the model of the urban Catholic social settlement to rural South Carolina. They also served at a number of parishes, including several in South Carolina and Florida, where they ministered to both black and white Catholics. In Neighbors and Missionaries, Margaret M. McGuinness, who was given full access to the archives of the Sisters of Christian Doctrine, traces in fascinating detail the history of the congregation, from the inspiring story of its founder and the community's mission to provide material and spiritual support to their Catholic neighbors, to the changes and challenges of the latter half of the twentieth century. By 1960, settlement houses had been replaced by other forms of social welfare, and the lives and work of American women religious were undergoing a dramatic change. McGuinness explores how the Sisters of Christian Doctrine were affected and how they adapted their own lives and work to reflect the transformations taking place in the Church and society. Neighbors and Missionaries examines a distinctive community of women religious whose primary focus was neither teaching nor nursing/hospital administration. The choice of the Sisters of Christian Doctrine to live among the poor and to serve where other communities were either unwilling or unable demonstrates that women religious in the United States served in many different capacities as they contributed to the life and work of the American Catholic Church.

First published in 1933 as part of the Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought series, Coulton's Scottish Abbeys and Social Life was an expanded version of his Rhind Lectures given to the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland in 1931. Although a rigorous academic, who stressed the importance of using primary sources, Coulton was skilled at making medieval history accessible to a wider audience. He played an important role in encouraging interest in the study of social and economic, rather than political and military, history of the Middle Ages among younger scholars. In the present work, he used his wide reading of the evidence to examine how monasticism developed in Scotland, from the early Celtic period to the Reformation. Much of the material reveals a complex relationship between the monks of the various orders and the world in which they lived, and teaches the reader about the Church and Scottish society.

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.

For this 1916 work, Archdeacon E. H. Pearce searched through the extensive muniments of Westminster Abbey to provide a list of all the known members of the monastic community until the Dissolution. Over 700 individuals are included, with all the information about them available to the author. While the list is not complete, and the use of other sources would add additional names for the early period, Pearce completed a remarkable achievement. Westminster was a substantial foundation, with an average community of 47 for the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. About half of these, who held some office or function, are naturally better documented than ordinary monks. Scholarship was evidently valued by the abbey, although the majority of the writings evidenced were on the history of the community rather than theological or literary works. Some monks were supported at Oxford, but little is known of the education offered to the remainder.

In the past, the question of the formal and functional context of sculpture and nunneries around the year 1300 has been predominantly confined to the Alemannic nunneries. This text focuses on Nordic sculpture. The medieval grounds of the Luneberg nunnery and their fittings represent an unusual legacy, deriving from the heyday of women's mysticism and the expansion of the system of territorial sovereignty.

The first edition of Living Faithfully in a Fragmented World became one of the founding and guiding texts for new monastic communities. In this revised edition, Jonathan Wilson focuses more directly on lessons for these communities from Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue. In the midst of the unsettling cultural shifts from modernity to postmodernity, a new monastic movement is arising that strives to be a faithful witness to the gospel. These new monastic communities seek to participate in Christ's life in the world and bear witness by learning to live intentionally as the church in Western culture. This movement is about finding the church's center in Christ in the midst of a fragmented world, overcoming the failure of the Enlightenment project and our complicity with it, resisting the temptation to Nietzschean power, and building communities of disciples. This new edition is greatly enlarged from the original volume. It includes responses to critics of the new monasticism such as D. A. Carson, an entirely new chapter on the Nietzschean temptation, an afterword on properly understanding the new monastic movement, the dangers it faces, and the work yet to be done, as well as an appendix on the supposed post-modern agenda of Jonathan Wilson and Brian McLaren. For those striving to understand the path the church should take in this fragmented world, this book is essential reading.

Silence and Sign Language in Medieval Monasticism explores the rationales for religious silence in early medieval abbeys and the use of nonverbal forms of communication among monks when rules of silence forbade them from speaking. After examining the spiritual benefits of personal silence as a form of protection against the perils of sinful discourse in early monastic thought, this work shows how the monks of the Abbey of Cluny (founded in 910 in Burgundy) were the first to employ a silent language of meaning-specific hand signs that allowed them to convey precise information without recourse to spoken words. Scott Bruce discusses the linguistic character of the Cluniac sign language, its central role in the training of novices, the precautions taken to prevent its abuse, and the widespread adoption of this custom in other abbeys throughout Europe, which resulted in the creation of regionally specific idioms of this silent language.

A provocative, interdisciplinary study of nuns on the big screen, from The Bells of St. Mary's (1945) to Doubt (2008), that shines fresh light on the cinematic nun as a woman and a religious in the twentieth century.
Ingrid Bergman's engaging screen performance as Sister Mary Benedict in The Bells of St. Mary's made the film nun a star and her character a shining standard of comparison. She represented the religious life as the happy and rewarding choice of a modern woman who had a "complete understanding" of both erotic and spiritual desire. How did this vibrant and mature nun figure come to be viewed as girlish and naive? Why have she and her cinematic sisters in postwar popular film so often been stereotyped or selectively analyzed, so seldom been seen as women and religious?
In Veiled Desires--a unique full-length, in-depth study of nuns in film--Maureen Sabine explores these questions in a groundbreaking interdisciplinary study covering more than sixty years of cinema. She looks at an impressive breadth of films in which the nun features as an ardent lead character, including The Bells of St. Mary's (1945), Black Narcissus (1947), Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (1957), Sea Wife (1957), The Nun's Story (1959), The Sound of Music (1965), Change of Habit (1969), In This House of Brede (1975), Agnes of God (1985), Dead Man Walking (1995), and Doubt (2008).
Veiled Desires considers how the beautiful and charismatic stars who play chaste nuns, from Ingrid Bergman and Audrey Hepburn to Susan Sarandon and Meryl Streep, call attention to desires that the veil concealed and the habit was thought to stifle. In a theologically and psychoanalytically informed argument, Sabine responds to the critics who have pigeonholed the film nun as the obedient daughter and religious handmaiden of a patriarchal church, and the respectful audience who revered her as an icon of spiritual perfection. She provides a framework for a more complex and holistic picture ofnuns on screen by showing how the films dramatize these women's Christian call to serve, sacrifice, and dedicate themselves to God, and their erotic desire for intimacy, agency, achievement, and fulfillment.

Ingrid Bergman's engaging screen performance as Sister Mary Benedict in The Bells of St. Mary's made the film nun a star and her character a shining standard of comparison. She represented the religious life as the happy and rewarding choice of a modern woman who had a "complete understanding" of both erotic and spiritual desire. How did this vibrant and mature nun figure come to be viewed as girlish and naive? Why have she and her cinematic sisters in postwar popular film so often been stereotyped or selectively analyzed, so seldom been seen as women and religious? In Veiled Desires-a unique full-length, in-depth look at nuns in film-Maureen Sabine explores these questions in a groundbreaking interdisciplinary study covering more than sixty years of cinema. She looks at an impressive breadth of films in which the nun features as an ardent lead character, including The Bells of St. Mary's (1945), Black Narcissus (1947), Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (1957), Sea Wife (1957), The Nun's Story (1959), The Sound of Music (1965), Change of Habit (1969), In This House of Brede (1975), Agnes of God (1985), Dead Man Walking (1995), and Doubt (2008). Veiled Desires considers how the beautiful and charismatic stars who play chaste nuns, from Ingrid Bergman and Audrey Hepburn to Susan Sarandon and Meryl Streep, call attention to desires that the veil concealed and the habit was thought to stifle. In a theologically and psychoanalytically informed argument, Sabine responds to the critics who have pigeonholed the film nun as the obedient daughter and religious handmaiden of a patriarchal church, and the respectful audience who revered her as an icon of spiritual perfection. Sabine provides a framework for a more complex and holistic picture of nuns onscreen by showing how the films dramatize these women's Christian call to serve, sacrifice, and dedicate themselves to God, and their erotic desire for intimacy, agency, achievement, and fulfillment.

"Negotiating the Landscape" explores the question of how medieval religious identities were shaped and modified by interaction with the natural environment. Focusing on the Benedictine monastic community of Stavelot-Malmedy in the Ardennes, Ellen F. Arnold draws upon a rich archive of charters, property and tax records, correspondence, miracle collections, and saints' lives from the seventh to the mid-twelfth century to explore the contexts in which the monks' intense engagement with the natural world was generated and refined.Arnold argues for a broad cultural approach to medieval environmental history and a consideration of a medieval environmental imagination through which people perceived the nonhuman world and their own relation to it. Concerned to reassert medieval Christianity's vitality and variety, Arnold also seeks to oppose the historically influential view that the natural world was regarded in the premodern period as provided by God solely for human use and exploitation. The book argues that, rather than possessing a single unifying vision of nature, the monks drew on their ideas and experience to create and then manipulate a complex understanding of their environment. Viewing nature as both wild and domestic, they simultaneously acted out several roles, as stewards of the land and as economic agents exploiting natural resources. They saw the natural world of the Ardennes as a type of wilderness, a pastoral haven, and a source of human salvation, and actively incorporated these differing views of nature into their own attempts to build their community, understand and establish their religious identity, and relate to others who shared their landscape.

Monastic experience in twelfth-century Germany provides a rare window on to monastery life in the tumultuous world of twelfth-century Swabia. From its founding in 992 through the great fire that ravaged it in 1159 and beyond, Petershausen weathered countless external attacks and internal divisions. Supra-regional clashes between emperors and popes played out at the most local level. Monks struggled against overreaching bishops. Reformers introduced new and unfamiliar customs. Tensions erupted into violence within the community. Through it all the anonymous chronicler struggled to find meaning amid conflict and forge connections to a shared past, enlivening his narrative with colorful anecdotes - sometimes amusing, sometimes disturbing. Translated into English for the first time, this fascinating text is an essential source for the lived experience of medieval monasticism. -- .

'Honest and down to earth, but neither evasive nor sentimental, this book will appeal to Christians of differing backgrounds . . . there is a gentleness about Ramon's writing that inspires trust and cooperation.' Life and Work. What is special about the spirituality of St Francis? Can it be possible for ordinary men and women today, with families, jobs and other responsibilities, to follow in the way of a thirteenth-century friar? Brother Ramon, an Anglican Franciscan friar, shows us that Franciscan spirituality is as compelling and relevant today as ever. It is marked by spontaneity and emotional freedom, by openness to every human being and love for nature. It treasures both the evangelical and the catholic nature of the gospel. It is rooted in a biblical faith and in reverence for the whole of creation. Franciscan Spirituality introduces us to the world of Francis and his first followers and shows how their excitement and wonder at Jesus alive in their midst can still be recaptured. The book is illustrated throughout by Molly Dowell.

Silence and Sign Language in Medieval Monasticism explores the rationales for religious silence in early medieval abbeys and the use of nonverbal forms of communication among monks when rules of silence forbade them from speaking. After examining the spiritual benefits of personal silence as a form of protection against the perils of sinful discourse in early monastic thought, this work shows how the monks of the Abbey of Cluny (founded in 910 in Burgundy) were the first to employ a silent language of meaning-specific hand signs that allowed them to convey precise information without recourse to spoken words. Scott Bruce discusses the linguistic character of the Cluniac sign language, its central role in the training of novices, the precautions taken to prevent its abuse, and the widespread adoption of this custom in other abbeys throughout Europe, which resulted in the creation of regionally-specific idioms of this silent language.

Confraternities were the most common form of organized religious life in medieval and early modern Europe. They were at once the lay face of the church, the spiritual heart of civic government, and the social kin who claimed the allegiance of peers and the obedience of subordinates. In this 1999 collection, fifteen scholars examine the development of confraternities in Italy, where they emerged first and had the greatest impact. Individual essays explore a common set of themes across Italy from the twelfth to the eighteenth centuries: the ubiquity of confraternities, social construction, and devotional ethos; their ritual culture and civic religion; their antagonistic and collaborative relations with both civic and ecclesiastical authorities; and their role in social welfare and social control of marginal groups. The authors demonstrate how the ritual kinship expressed in confraternities emerged in the Middle Ages and became a powerful force in 'civilizing' early modern Italian society.

The English Benedictine Cathedral Priories offers a detailed study of nine monastic communities. Joan Greatrex follows the lives of the young men, only some of whom are known by name, from the day of their arrival at the monastery to the moment of their death or departure. The individual chapters provide the details that fill in many of the gaps in the monastic biographies to be found in her earlier work. The result is the first comparative study of the implementation of the Benedictine Rule, and the daily routine, observances, and customs practised by the nine priories, as well as of the monks' progress through the successive stages of their monastic life. The author exploits to the full the archiepiscopal and episcopal registers, which record their official acts, in addition to the monastic accounts of the monk office holders who were responsible for the various departments within the monastery.

Traces the part of the rooting system which derives from the founding of the Iona Community in Scotland in the 1930's as an aid to understanding in terms of historical roots, distinctive features and experiences of struggle the significance of these communities.

This 1999 book explores the dramatic growth of the monastic order in Yorkshire from the foundation of the first post-Conquest abbey at Selby in 1069 to 1215. The first half examines the dynamics of monastic expansion, discussing the influences on both its chronological development and its geographical pattern. It demonstrates that the monastic expansion owed much to the particular political and tenurial conditions which existed in the century after 1069: the establishment of Norman political ascendancy, the extension of central government under Henry I, and the civil war of the reign of King Stephen. The second part of the book explores recruitment, patronage, economy and cultural life. Particular attention is paid to the role of women in the religious life. Nunneries, so often regarded as second-class or failed monasteries, are here shown to have had a distinctive function in society, in terms both of recruitment and of interaction with the local community.