This book is the first publication of a very early set of Christian monastic rules from Roman Egypt, accompanied by four preliminary chapters discussing their historical and social context and their character as rules. These rules were found quoted in the writings of the great Egyptian monastic leader Shenoute. Designed for a federation of monks and nuns who banded together about 360 CE-forming the so-called "White Monastery Federation"-the rules date back to the fourth and fifth centuries. New historical evidence is presented for the founding of the Federation. Providing almost the earliest evidence for Christian communal (cenobitic) monasticism, the rules depict many intimate aspects of ascetic practice. Details of monastic daily life are mentioned in passing in the rules, and the author uses these details to describe their picture of monastic life under five general topics: the monastery as a physical plant, the human makeup of the community, ascetic observances, the hierarchy of authority, and the daily liturgy. The book includes a clear English translation of the rules accompanied by the original Coptic text, amounting to five hundred and ninety-five entries.

This book presents a broad sociological perspective on the contemporary issues facing Christian monasticism. Since the founding work of Max Weber, the sociology of monasticism has received little attention. However, the field is now being revitalized by some new research. Focusing on Christian monks and nuns, the contributors explore continuity and discontinuity with the past in what superficially might appear a monolithic tradition. Contributors speak not only about monasticism in Europe and the United States but also in Africa and Latin America, a different landscape where the question of recruitment does not figure among issues considered as problematic.

When journalist Liao Yiwu first stumbled upon a vibrant Christian community in the officially secular China, he knew little about Christianity. In fact, he'd been taught that religion was evil, and that those who believed in it were deluded, cultists, or imperialist spies. But as a writer whose work has been banned in China and has even landed him in jail, Liao felt a kinship with Chinese Christians in their unwavering commitment to the freedom of expression and to finding meaning in a tumultuous society.

Unwilling to let his nation lose memory of its past or deny its present, Liao set out to document the untold stories of brave believers whose totalitarian government could not break their faith in God, including:

The over-100-year-old nun who persevered in spite of beatings, famine, and decades of physical labor, and still fights for the rightful return of church land seized by the government

The surgeon who gave up a lucrative Communist hospital administrator position to treat villagers for free in the remote, mountainous regions of southwestern China

The Protestant minister, now memorialized in London's Westminster Abbey, who was executed during the Cultural Revolution as "an incorrigible counterrevolutionary"

This ultimately triumphant tale of a vibrant church thriving against all odds serves as both a powerful conversation about politics and spirituality and a moving tribute to China's valiant shepherds of faith, who prove that a totalitarian government cannot control what is in people's hearts.

This volume contains Latin texts, facing translations, and full commentary on four texts which are key to an understanding of the development of monasticism in early medieval Northumbria: Bede's History of the Abbots of Wearmouth and Jarrow, his Homily on Benedict Biscop, and his Letter to Ecgbert, Archbishop of York, together with the anonymous Life of Ceolfrith. The texts are based on a fresh collation of all available manuscripts, and a complete apparatus criticus is included. The translation is as close to the original as possible while communicating its sense clearly. A series of essays in the introduction examines the importance of the texts, the picture they paint both of Bede and his monastic milieu, and the Latinity of the texts included in the volume. As the major texts on the monasteries of Wearmouth and Jarrow, these works are vital for our understanding both of the context in which Bede was writing and also of the nature of monasticism in Northumbria in the pre-Viking period.

"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.

An apostolic lifestyle characterized by total material renunciation, homelessness, and begging was practiced by monks throughout the Roman Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries. Such monks often served as spiritual advisors to urban aristocrats whose patronage gave them considerable authority and independence from episcopal control. This book is the first comprehensive study of this type of Christian poverty and the challenge it posed for episcopal authority and the promotion of monasticism in late antiquity. Focusing on devotional practices, Daniel Caner draws together diverse testimony from Egypt, Syria, Asia Minor, and elsewhere-including the Pseudo-Clementine Letters to Virgins, Augustine's On the Work of Monks, John Chrysostom's homilies, legal codes-to reveal gospel-inspired patterns of ascetic dependency and teaching from the third to the fifth centuries. Throughout, his point of departure is social and cultural history, especially the urban social history of the late Roman empire. He also introduces many charismatic individuals whose struggle to persist against church suppression of their chosen way of imitating Christ was fought with defiant conviction, and the book includes the first annotated English translation of the biography of Alexander Akoimetos (Alexander the Sleepless). Wandering, Begging Monks allows us to understand these fascinating figures of early Christianity in the full context of late Roman society.

Ancrene Wisse introduced through a variety of cultural and critical approaches which establish the originality and interest of the treatise. The thirteenth-century Ancrene Wisse is a guide for female recluses. Addressed to three young sisters of gentle birth, it teaches what truly good anchoresses should and should not do, offering in its examples a glimpse of the real life women had in England in the middle ages. It is also important for its evidence for the continuation of the Anglo-Saxon tradition of prose writing, being produced in the West Midlands where Old English writing conventions continued to develop even after the Norman conquest. The Companion addresses the cultural and historical background, the affiliations of the versions, genre, authorship and language; the various approaches also includea feminist reading of the text. Contributors: ROGER DAHOOD, RICHARD DANCE, A.S.G. EDWARDS, CATHERINE INNES-PARKER, BELLA MILLETT, CHRISTINA VON NOLCKEN, ELIZABETH ROBERTSON, ANNE SAVAGE, D.A. TROTTER, YOKO WADA, NICHOLAS WATSON.

The Cistercian Evolution The Invention of a Religious Order in Twelfth-Century Europe Constance Hoffman Berman "An extremely important book, one that will redefine the ways we conceive of medieval religiosity and politics."--"Virginia Quarterly Review" "A significant contribution to the study of the history of monasticism in the twelfth century."--"EHR" "Stimulating, controversial, and compelling, Constance Berman's major revisions of early Cistercian history, "The Cistercian Evolution," should be read by historians of monasticism and will greatly interest scholars in the institutional and religious history of the twelfth century as well as those who study the experience of women in that period."--"The Medieval Review" "An important and provocative book: important because it challenges scholars to rethink a central medieval theme, the creation and expansion of the Cistercian order in twelfth-century Europe; provocative because it brazenly upends received narratives, two generations of accumulated monastic scholarship."--"Speculum" "This important work builds on and continues Berman's solid, indeed splendid, scholarship on the institutional history of the Cistercians in southern France. She explores and rejects much traditional thinking in fields as diverse as the supposed uniformity of Cistercian architecture and the propagation of the order through colonization or 'apostolic foundation, ' pointing out that much Cistercian expansion was by incorporation of existing communities."--"Church History" " Berman's] book changes our understanding of the early Cistercians. It will shape our research for some time to come. Berman's questioning of Cistercian documents, her new picture of Cistercian growth, her warnings about reading thirteenth-century administrative structures and ideas back on to the twelfth, and especially, her insistence that we consider houses of both men and women, make this book an important contribution to the history of religious institutions in the central Middle Ages."--"The Catholic Historical Review" For centuries the growth of the Cistercian order has been presented as a spontaneous spirituality that swept western Europe through the power of the first house at Citeaux. Berman suggests instead that the creation of the religious order was a collaborative activity, less driven by centralized institutions; its formation was intended to solve practical problems about monastic administration. With the publication of "The Cistercian Evolution," for the first time the mechanisms are revealed by which the monks of Citeaux reshaped fact to build and administer one of the most powerful and influential religious orders of the Middle Ages. Constance Hoffman Berman is Professor of History at the University of Iowa and the 1999 May Brodbeck Fellow in the Humanities. The Middle Ages Series 2000 408 pages 6 x 9 ISBN 978-0-8122-2102-2 Paper $26.50s 17.50 World Rights History, Religion Short copy: Reveals the true story behind the growth of the Cistercian order.

An examination of the extraordinary texts produced by the community of St Cuthbert, showing how they were used to construct and define an identity. Historical texts of all kinds were written in the community of St Cuthbert c.700-1130, from short annals to extended narrative history, political tracts and works on the lives and miracles of saints.At the same time, scribes in the community worked to copy and procure notable classics of historiography, from Classical Antiquity down to the Norman Conquest of England. But what did these various forms of writing about past events mean to their original authors and readers? What were these texts for? This book offers a narrative of historiographical production within St Cuthbert's community from the time of its foundation on the island of Lindisfarne, through subsequent translations to Chester-le-Street and Durham, down to the vibrant intellectual revival of the Anglo-Norman period. Focusing on several watershed moments in the story of this community, it identifies political, religious, intellectual andcultural triggers for historical writing, and argues that knowledge of past events gave successive guardians of Cuthbert's cult their single most valuable tool in the continuous effort to define who they were, where they had comefrom, and what they hoped to continue to be.

Just five weeks after its publication in January 1836, Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery, billed as an escaped nun's shocking expose of convent life, had already sold more than 20,000 copies. The book detailed gothic-style horror stories of licentious priests and abusive mothers superior, tortured nuns and novices, and infanticide. By the time the book was revealed to be a fiction and the author, Maria Monk, an impostor, it had already become one of the nineteenth century's best-selling books. In antebellum America only one book, Uncle Tom's Cabin, outsold it. The success of Monk's book was no fluke, but rather a part of a larger phenomenon of anti-Catholic propaganda, riots, and nativist politics. The secrecy of convents stood as an oblique justification for suspicion of Catholics and the campaign against them, which was intimately connected with cultural concerns regarding reform, religion, immigration, and, in particular, the role of women in the Republic. At a time when the term "female virtue" pervaded popular rhetoric, the image of the veiled nun represented a threat to the established American ideal of womanhood. Unable to marry, she was instead a captive of a foreign foe, a fallen woman, a white slave, and a foolish virgin. In the first half of the nineteenth century, ministers, vigilantes, politicians, and writers-male and female-forged this image of the nun, locking arms against convents. The result was a far-reaching antebellum movement that would shape perceptions of nuns, and women more broadly, in America.

John Henderson examines the relationship between religion and society in late medieval Florence through the vehicle of the religious confraternity, one of the most ubiquitous and popular forms of lay association throughout Europe. This book provides a fascinating account of the development of confraternities in relation to other communal and ecclesiastical institutions in Florence. It is one of the most detailed analyses of charity in late medieval Europe.
"[A] long-awaited book. . . . [It is] the most complete survey of confraternities and charity, not only for Florence, but for any Italian city state to date. . . . This book recovers more vividly than other recent works what it meant to be a member of a confraternity in the late middle ages."--Samuel K. Cohn, Jr., "Economic History Review"
"Henderson offers new and fascinating information. . . . A stimulating and suggestive book that deserves a wide readership." --Gervase Rosser, "Times Higher Education Supplement"

If you liked Call the Midwife, you will love Kicking the Habit! What makes a fun-loving teenager turn her back on a life of parties, boys and fun, to become a nun in a French convent? And what later leads her to abandon the religious life, to return to the big wide world and later marry? At the age of 18, Eleanor Stewart goes to France to enter a convent. After four years of struggling with the religious life, she becomes a nun, and then trains as a midwife in a large inner-city hospital in Liverpool. While Beatlemania grips the nation, she attempts to coordinate the reclusive demands of the religious life with the drama, excitement and occasional tragedy of the hospital world. Written with honesty and affection, this is a wonderful and intimate portrait of convent and hospital life.

The Henry Bradshaw Society was established in 1890 in commemoration of Henry Bradshaw, University Librarian in Cambridge and a distinguished authority on early medieval manuscripts and liturgies, who died in 1886. The Society was founded for the editing of rare liturgical texts'; its principal focus is on the Western (Latin) Church and its rites, and on the medieval period in particular, from the sixth century to the sixteenth (in effect, from the earliest surviving Christian books until the Reformation). Liturgy was at the heart of Christian worship, and during the medieval period the Christian Church was at the heart of Western society. Study of medieval Christianity in its manifold aspects - historical, ecclesiastical, spiritual, sociological - inevitably involves study of its rites, and for that reason Henry Bradshaw Society publications have become standard source-books for an understanding of all aspects of the middle ages. Moreover, many of the Society's publications have been facsimile editions, and these facsimiles have become cornerstones of the science of palaeography. The society was founded for the editing of rare liturgical texts; its principal focus is on the Western (Latin) Church and its rites, and on the medieval period in particular, from the sixth century to the Reformation. Study of medieval Christianity - at the heart of Western society - inevitably involves study of its rites, and the society's publications are essential to an understanding of all aspects (historical, ecclesiastical, spiritual, sociological) of the middle ages.

This is the most useful survey of medieval Franciscan history available. ENGLISH HISTORICAL REVIEW St Francis of Assisi is one of the most admired figures of the Middle Ages - and one of the most important in the Christian church, modelling his life on the literal observance of the Gospel and recovering an emphasis on the poverty experienced by Jesus Christ. From 1217 Francis sent communities of friars throughout Christendom and launched missions to several countries, including India and China. The movement soon became established in most cities and several large towns, and, enjoying close relations with the popes, its followers were ideal instruments for the propagation of the reforms of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215. They quickly became part of the landscape of medieval life and made their influence felt throughout society. This book explores the first 250 years of the order's history and charts its rapid growth, development, pastoral ministry, educational organisation, missionary endeavour, internal tensions and divisions. Intended for both the general and more specialist reader, it offers a complete survey of the Franciscan Order. Dr MICHAEL ROBSON is a Fellow and Director of Studies in Theology at St Edmund's College, Cambridge.

Born in the dark days of the great crusades, the warrior monks of the Knights Templar vowed to defend pilgrims traveling to the Holy Land. Yet strangely, there are few historical records of the Templars ever fulfilling this task. Instead, their history is one of bloodshed and conquest, wealth and power, dark secrets and conspiracies. Today, the story of the Knights Templar is intimately linked with the story of the Holy Grail. But what exactly is this ancient artifact, and how has it been used to manipulate history for the last one thousand years? This book, based on the notes of the recently deceased historian, Dr. Emile Fouchet, attempts to unlock the secrets of the Knights Templar. It begins with an examination of their historical origins, their growth in the early middle-ages, and their supposed destruction under the charges of heresy. From there, it uses the clues left by the Templars themselves to reconstruct their secret journeys as they moved the Holy Grail from Europe to the New World and back. It also charts the secret, three-way war that is still being fought between the Templars, the Freemasons, and the Catholic Church. Finally, the book reveals the greatest of all Templar conspiracies, the attempt to found a new world order under the auspices of the European Union.

The writings of Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109) reveal how the monastic mind, oscillating between hope and despair, was absorbed in technical exercises rather than in religious emotions. Early on monasticism had developed procedures for " ruminating on" the Bible and the works of the Church Fathers. Applying the art of logic to this theme, Anselm offers a denser version of monastic meditation that constitutes a poetics of monastic literature.
Before engaging Anselm' s works, this book addresses texts-- by Gregory the Great, Bernard of Clairvaux, Rupert of Deutz, and Richard of St. Victor-- based on the same principles. In them, the potentially violent nature of an existence in which time has almost come to a halt manifests itself in a vision of the act of reading as a struggle with the text and as violent, amorous passion. The book then traces the decline of the monastic poetical principle in the writings of John of the Cross, Pierre de Be rulle, Calvin, and Ignatius of Loyola.
A concluding chapter on Ignatius and James Joyce shows how the poetics of monasticism both survives and is exiled in modernist literature.

Religious Women in Early Carolingian Francia, a groundbreaking study of the intellectual and monastic culture of the Main Valley during the eighth century, looks closely at a group of manuscripts associated with some of the best-known personalities of the European Middle Ages, including Boniface of Mainz and his "beloved,"abbess Leoba of Tauberbischofsheim. This is the first study of these "Anglo-Saxon missionaries to Germany" to delve into the details of their lives by studying the manuscripts that were produced in their scriptoria and used in their communities. The author explores how one group of religious women helped to shape the culture of medieval Europe through the texts they wrote and copied, as well as through their editorial interventions. Using compelling manuscript evidence, she argues that the content of the women's books was overwhelmingly gender-egalitarian and frequently feminist (i.e., resistant to patriarchal ideas). This intriguing book provides unprecedented glimpses into the "feminist consciousness" of the women's and mixed-sex communities that flourished in the early Middle Ages.

`Both authoritative and attractive, this is a most welcome study... a cornucopia of facts and insights....' CHOICE Professor Milis challenges the accepted view of monasticism as a powerful social influence on medieval life, supporting his case with detailed arguments. `A new assessment of the impact of monasticism on medieval society... a notable merit is that it obliges its readers to re-examine the assumptions which may have entered into their own consideration of the monastic role in society and led them to a different conclusion.' ENGLISH HISTORICAL REVIEW [Barbara F. Harvey]

Casey invites us to embrace the challenge of gospel living, with thoughtful reflections on the values of asceticism, silence, leisure, reading, chastity, and poverty.

Discovered in a secret Vatican archive, this is the true, never-before-told story of poison, murder, and lesbian initiation rites in a nineteenth century convent. In 1858, Katherina von Hohenzollern, a German princess recently inducted into the convent of Sant'Ambrogio in Rome, wrote a frantic letter to her cousin, a confidant of the Pope, claiming that she was being abused and feared for her life. The subsequent investigation by the Church's Inquisition uncovered the extraordinary secrets of Sant'Ambrogio and the illicit behavior of the convent's beautiful young mistress, Maria Luissa. What emerges through the fog of centuries is a sex scandal of ecclesiastical proportions, skillfully brought to light and vividly reconstructed in scholarly detail by one of the world's leading papal historians. Offering a broad historical background on female mystics and the cult of the Virgin Mary, and drawing upon written testimony and original documents, Hubert Wolf tells an incredible story of deception, heresy, seduction, and murder in the heart of the Catholic Church.

This is the first book-length study of children in one of the birthplaces of early Christian monasticism, Egypt. Although comprised of men and women who had renounced sex and family, the monasteries of late antiquity raised children, educated them, and expected them to carry on their monastic lineage and legacies into the future. Children within monasteries existed in a liminal space, simultaneously vulnerable to the whims and abuses of adults and also cherished as potential future monastic prodigies. Caroline T. Schroeder examines diverse sources - letters, rules, saints' lives, art, and documentary evidence - to probe these paradoxes. In doing so, she demonstrates how early Egyptian monasteries provided an intergenerational continuity of social, cultural, and economic capital while also contesting the traditional family's claims to these forms of social continuity.

A history of the role played by the Franciscans during the contentious Wars of Religion (1562-1594). In this paperback reissue of The Politics of Piety, author Megan Armstrong situates the Franciscan order at the heart of the religious and political conflicts of the late sixteenth century to show how a medieval charismatic religious tradition became an engine of political change. The friars used their redoubtable skills as preachers, intellectual training at the University of Paris, and personal and professional connections with other Catholic reformers and patrons to successfully galvanize popular opposition to the spread of Protestantism throughout the sixteenth century. By 1589, the friars used these same strategies on behalf of the Catholic League to try to prevent thesuccession of the Protestant heir presumptive, Henry of Navarre, to the French throne. This book contributes to our understanding of religion as a formative political impulse throughout the sixteenth century by linking the long-term political activism of the friars to the emergence of the French monarchy of the seventeenth century. Megan C. Armstrong is Associate Professor of History at McMaster University.

This book brings together the work of eleven leading international scholars to map the contribution of teaching Sisters, who provided schooling to hundreds of thousands of children, globally, from 1800 to 1950. The volume represents research that draws on several theoretical approaches and methodologies. It engages with feminist discourses, social history, oral history, visual culture, post-colonial studies and the concept of transnationalism, to provide new insights into the work of Sisters in education. Making a unique contribution to the field, chapters offer an interrogation of historical sources as well as fresh interpretations of findings, challenging assumptions. Compelling narratives from the USA, Canada, New Zealand, Africa, Australia, South East Asia, France, the UK, Italy and Ireland contribute to what is a most important exploration of the contribution of the women religious by mapping and contextualizing their work. Education, Identity and Women Religious, 1800-1950: Convents, classrooms and colleges will appeal to academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of social history, women's history, the history of education, Catholic education, gender studies and international education.

Investigation of lives of the saint, Lindisfarneand its scriptorium and Gospels, and the treasures of Cuthbert's coffin.Very fine collection of essays...a rich feast of scholarship with many discoveries and new interpretations of greatest value for Anglo-Saxon history. SPECULUM `Very fine collection of essays - a rich feast of scholarship with many discoveries and new interpretations of greatest value for Anglo-Saxon history.' SPECULUM St Cuthbert is known to many as the the saintly bishop of Holy Island inthe 7th century, but he was also a figure of great political and territorial power. The book is divided into four sections, each dealing with different aspects of Cuthbert and his milieu. Among the topics investigatedare the early Livesof the Saint, two by Bede himself, and his cult; Lindisfarne, its scriptorium and of course the famous Gospels; the sumptuous treasures gathered round the coffin, such as a portable altar and elaborately-worked silks, many of which are still preserved at Durham; and St Cuthbert's community at Chester-le-Street and Durham. Contributors: J. CAMPBELL, CLARE STANCLIFFE, MICHAEL HERITY, BENEDICTA WARD SLG, MICHAEL LAPIDGE, WALTER BERSCHIN, ALAN THACKER, DEIRDRE O'SULLIVAN, CHRISTOPHER D. VEREY, MICHELLE P. BROWN, JANET BACKHOUSE, R. BRUCE-MITFORD, DAIBHI D CRDINN, NANCY NETZER, ROSEMARY CRAMP, RICHARD N. BAILEY, J.M. CRONYN, C.V. HORIE, R.I. PAGE, JOHN HIGGITT, ELIZABETH COASTWORTH, HERO GRANGER-TAYLOR, CLARE HIGGINS, ANNA MUTHESIUS, ERIC CAMBRIDGE, GERALD BONNER, LUISELLA SIMPSON, DAVID ROLLASON, DAVID HALL, A.J. PIPER, VICTORIA TUDOR

The great city of Alexandria is undoubtedly the cradle of Egyptian Christianity, where the Catechetical School was established in the second century and became a leading center in the study of biblical exegesis and theology. According to tradition, St. Mark the Evangelist brought Christianity to Alexandria in the middle of the first century and was martyred in that city, which was to become the residence of Egypt's Coptic patriarchs for nearly eleven centuries. By the fourth century Egyptian monasticism had began to flourish in the Egyptian deserts and countryside. The contributors to this volume, international specialists in Coptology from around the world, examine the various aspects of Coptic civilization in Alexandria and its environs, and in the Egyptian deserts, over the past two millennia. The contributions explore Coptic art, archaeology, architecture, language, and literature. The impact of Alexandrian theology and its cultural heritage as well as the archaeology of its 'university' are highlighted. Christian epigraphy in the Kharga Oasis, the art and architecture of the Bagawat cemetery, and the archaeological site of Kellis (Ismant al-Kharab) with its Manichaean texts are also discussed.