The early historians of the Franciscan order traced the causes of the troubles of the order in their time to Elias, a contemporary and friend of St Francis and an early Minister General. Elias was blamed for opening the way to all relaxations of discipline and disregard of the founder's teaching, and all conflicts and persecutions. Mrs Brooke shows that responsibility cannot be placed on one man, but on many of the early friars. She gives a more historical account of Elias, showing that he was never as dominant a figure as has been supposed. The early conflicts of the order are shown to have been more complex, more interesting and more probable than the fourteenth-century controversialists would allow. The second part of the book describes the achievements of Elias's successors as Minister General, and the important laws they passed. Mrs Brooke has been able to reconstruct the early constitutions, now lost, in greater detail than has previously been attempted.

The Monastic Order in England by Dom David Knowles was originally published in 1940 and was quickly recognised as a scholarly classic and masterpiece of historical literature. It covers the period from about 940, when St Dunstan inaugurated the monastic reform by becoming abbot of Glastonbury, to the early thirteenth century. Its core is a marvellous narrative and detailed analysis of monasticism in twelfth-century England, brilliantly set in the continental background of all the monastic movements of the day - with a vivid evocation of Anselm, Ailred, Henry of Blois and a host of other central figures. Dom David himself brought this second edition up to date in 1963.

Runaway religious were monks, canons and friars who had taken vows of religion and who, with benefit of neither permission nor dispensation and for myriad reasons, fled their monasteries and returned to a life in the world, usually replacing the religious habit with lay clothes. Not only the normal tugs of the world drew them away: other less obvious yet equally human motives, such as boredom, led to a return to the world. The church pursued them with her severest penalty, excommunication, in the express hope that penalties would lead to the return of the straying sheep. This book is the first to tell their story.

This book examines the selected writings of John of Wales, a thirteenth-century Franciscan scholar. Though overshadowed historically by men like Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure, John contributed significantly to the preaching explosion of the later Middle Ages, devoting his scholastic energies to the production of encyclopedic preaching aids for the growing number of the devout and learned emerging from the new universities. Through a detailed analysis of his world view, the author establishes John’s strong interest in politics and contemporary social issues and helps to explain why his writings appealed to young preachers and the popular imagination. John’s historic popularity and literary influence are also fully explored. His works seem to have been an important source of classical material for European literary texts of the period, and therefore, in addition to historians and theologians, this unprecedented book will appeal to those interested in the survival and transmission of Greek and Latin literature.

While the role of monastic education has been studied in great detail in regard to male practices, this book examines the differences between the monastic formation and education of men and of women in Western Europe from the eighth to the sixteenth century. Fourteen chapters, written by well-known scholars, consider monastic education and practices in the geographical areas of England, France, Germany and the Low Countries. Using attitudes toward education and actual educational theories, the authors explore issues such as the use of music and physical training in education to explore new realms of the discipline.

This book is the first major study in English of a group of late twelfth-century religious enthusiasts, the early Humiliati, who were condemned by the Church as heretics in 1184 but--in a remarkable transition--were reconciled seventeen years later and went on to establish a highly successful religious order in northern Italy. Using a wide range of sources, the nature of the early movement and its processes of institutional development are reconstructed. The book also includes a Bullarium Humiliatorum, a list of papal and episcopal letters and privileges.

Between the twelfth and the eighteenth centuries Italians frequently joined "confraternities" that made them symbolic brothers and sisters to one another. These kin groups launched extensive charitable programs, directed civic and religious rituals, and socialized members in class and gender roles. These essays examine how medieval religious and political values shaped early ritual kinship, how sixteenth-century social change and religious reform transformed confraternities, and how these altered groups became key agents in achieving the more rigid social order of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

This is a study of the life, monastic writings and spiritual theology of John Cassian (c.365-430). Cassian's writings were the bridge between eastern monasticism and the developing Latin monasticism of Southern Gaul, and exerted a major influence on the Rule of Benedict and the theology of Gregory the Great.

A new edition of the popular 'office' hymn book, Hymns for Prayer and Praise provides carefully-selected hymns for the daily monastic office, the Calendar of Saints and the seasons of the Christian year. First published in 1996, this new edition has been updated in light of Common Worship: Daily Prayer. A 'chant' and 'melody' form are provided for each hymn, allowing the material to be used in both community and congregational contexts. Available in both Full Music and Melody editions, Hymns for Prayer and Praise draws on ancient patterns of worship to meet present day needs.

This is the first study of the monastic movement in Palestine during the Byzantine period. The monasteries of the desert - in Jerusalem, Egypt, and Syria, played a key role in Byzantine society, and the `desert fathers' are well known even today as landmarks in the history of Christian spirituality. The book uses contemporary sources to discuss both how the monks actually lived, and their contribution to the doctrinal and spiritual debate.

This is an authoritative account of daily life in Westminster Abbey, one of medieval England's greatest monasteries. It is also a wide-ranging exploration of some major themes in the social history of the Middle Ages and early sixteenth century by a distinguished historian of that period. Barbara Harvey exploits the exceptionally rich archives of the Benedictine foundation at Westminster to the full, offering many vivid insights into the lives of the monks of Westminster, their dependents, and their benefactors. She examines the charitable practices of the monks, their food and drink, their illnesses and their deaths, the number and conditions of employment of their servants, and their controversial practice of granting corrodies (pensions made up in large measure of benefits in kind). All these topics Miss Harvey considers in the context both of religious institutions in general and of the secular world. Full of colour and interest, Living and Dying in England 1100-1540 is an original and highly readable contribution to medieval history and that of the early sixteenth century.

Burton-Christie shows how scripture was a primary source of influence on the founders of early Christian monasticism in fourth-century Egypt, and how it contributed to its original and influential spirituality.

This volume concludes the series of Peter Damian's Letters in English translation. Among Letters 151-180 readers will find some of Damian's most passionate exhortations on behalf of eremitic ideals. These include Letter 152, in which Damian defends as consistent with the spirit and the letter of Benedict's Rule his practice of receiving into the eremitic life monks who had abandoned their cenobitic communities. In Letter 153 Damian encourages monks at Pomposa to pass beyond the minimum standards established in the Rule of St. Benedict for the higher and more demanding eremitic vocation. In Letter 165, addressed to a hermit, Albizo, and a monk, Peter, Damian reveals as well the importance of monastic life to the world: because the integrity of the monastic profession has weakened, the world has fallen even deeper into an abyss of sin and corruption and is rushing headlong to destruction. Let monks and hermits take refuge within the walls of the monastery, he urges, while outside the advent of Antichrist seems imminent. Only from within their walls can they project proper examples of piety and sanctity that may transform the world as a whole. Damian was equally concerned to address the moral condition of the larger Church. Letter 162 represents the last of Damian's four tracts condemning clerical marriage (Nicolaitism). Damian's condemnation of Nicolaitism also informed his rejection of Cadalus, the antipope Honorius II (see Letters 154 and 156), who was said to support clerical marriage, and therefore cast him into the center of a storm of ecclesiastical (and imperial) politics from which Damian never completely extricated himself.

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.

After living the Rule and studying it for many years, the author introduces it to those who are encountering it for the first time. The relationship of Benedict's Rule to other early monastic legislation is treated thoroughly but the book is designed for those who are seeking a guide for christian living in this little rule for beginners'.

Impelling Spirit is a book about Jesuit spirituality as seen in its origins. As such it responds to the challenge of Vatican II that the appropriate renewal of religious life demands a return to the sources of Christian life and the spirit and aims of the founders of an institute. The instrument the author employs is a 1539 document Ignatius and his companions drafted for Pope Paul III as an apostolic letter addressed to themselves; this document - long neglected and largely unknown - clearly reveals how they understood themselves and their way of life. It demonstrates that the spirit and aims of the Society, though radical in 1539, were also deeply rooted in the Christian tradition.

This book shows how the kingdom of God has advanced through the progression of distinct covenants, collectively serving as the foundation for God's promise to bring redemption to his people.

The idea of the Native American living in perfect harmony with nature is one of the most cherished contemporary myths. But how truthful is this larger-than-life image? According to anthropologist Shepard Krech, the first humans in North America demonstrated all of the intelligence, self-interest, flexibility, and ability to make mistakes of human beings anywhere. As Nicholas Lemann put it in The New Yorker, "Krech is more than just a conventional-wisdom overturner; he has a serious larger point to make. . . . Concepts like ecology, waste, preservation, and even the natural (as distinct from human) world are entirely anachronistic when applied to Indians in the days before the European settlement of North America." "Offers a more complex portrait of Native American peoples, one that rejects mythologies, even those that both European and Native Americans might wish to embrace."-Washington Post "My story, the story of 'how I became a nun,' began very early in my life; I had just turned six. The beginning is marked by a vivid memory, which I can reconstruct down to the last detail. Before, there is nothing, and after, everything is an extension of the same vivid memory, continuous and unbroken, including the intervals of sleep, up to the point where I took the veil ." So starts Cesar Aira's astounding "autobiographical" novel. Intense and perfect, this invented narrative of childhood experience bristles with dramatic humor at each stage of growing up: a first ice cream, school, reading, games, friendship. The novel begins in Aira's hometown, Coronel Pringles. As self-awareness grows, the story rushes forward in a torrent of anecdotes which transform a world of uneventful happiness into something else: the anecdote becomes adventure, and adventure, fable, and then legend. Between memory and oblivion, reality and fiction, Cesar Aira's How I Became a Nun retains childhood's main treasures: the reality of fable and the delirium of invention. A few days after his fiftieth birthday, Aira noticed the thin rim of the moon, visible despite the rising sun. When his wife explained the phenomenon to him he was shocked that for fifty years he had known nothing about "something so obvious, so visible." This epiphany led him to write How I Became a Nun. With a subtle and melancholic sense of humor he reflects on his failures, on the meaning of life and the importance of literature.

This book offers a comprehensive panorama of modern Roman Catholic ecclesiology as it springs from the vision proclaimed by the Second Vatican Council in Lumen Gentium. The author's central thesis is an ecclesiology built around the notion of communio: all members of the Church should be able to carry out their respective responsibilities toward the Church at all levels (pastors, bishops, the entire Church). The Church needs the honest experiences of the faithful in the world in order to recognize and to meet the demands of the times by drawing on its ongoing tradition together with the work of the Holy Spirit. From this emerges the need to re re-think of the universal Church as a community of local churches. Questions concerning the scriptural basis for the Church are handled in an exegetical section. Next a systematic treatment deals with the nature of the Church, its structures (communities and offices; the structure of its offices), and the Church's duties (evangelization; the relations between Church and society). Dr. Garijo-Guembe emphasizes the systematic description of important moments in the history of dogma. From this foundation the author takes up questions directed by the Orthodox and the Churches of Reformation toward the Roman Catholic Church and attempts to answer them.. A rich bibliography-international in its authorship and ecumenical in their confessional backgrounds-rounds off each chapter.

These works by Sister Bartolomea Riccoboni offer an intimate portrait of the women who inhabited the Venetian convent of Corpus Domini, where they shared a religious life bounded physically by the convent wall and organized temporally by the rhythms of work and worship. At the same time, they show how this cloistered community vibrated with news of the great ecclesiastical events of the day, such as the Great Western Schism and the Council of Constance.
While the chronicle recounts the history of the nuns' collective life, the necrology provides highly individualized biographies of nearly fifty women who died in the convent between 1395 and 1436. We follow the fascinating stories that led these women, from adolescent girls to elderly widows, to join the convent; and we learn of their cultural backgrounds and intellectual accomplishments, their ascetic practices and mystical visions, their charity and devotion to each other and their fortitude in the face of illness and death.
The personal and social meaning of religious devotion comes alive in these texts, the first of their kind to be translated into English.

What expectations did the women and men living in early monastic communities carry into relationships of obedience and advice? What did they hope to achieve through confession and discipline? To explore these questions, this study shows how several early Christian writers applied the logic, knowledge, and practices of Galenic medicine to develop their own practices of spiritual direction. Evagrius reads dream images as diagnostic indicators of the soul's state. John Cassian crafts a nosology of the soul using lists of passions while diagnosing the causes of wet dreams. Basil of Caesarea pits the spiritual director against the physician in a competition over diagnostic expertise. John Climacus crafts pathologies of passions through demonic family trees, while equipping his spiritual director with a physician's toolkit and imagining the monastic space as a vast clinic. These different appropriations of medical logic and metaphors not only show us the thought-world of late antique monasticism, but they would also have decisive consequences for generations of Christian subjects who would learn to see themselves as sick or well, patients or healers, within monastic communities.

Most of the essays gathered in this volume evolved from papers that were delivered at a conference in the former charterhouse Our Lady of Bethlehem in Roermond (1376). This conference was held on the occasion of The Secret of Silence. The Hidden World of the Carthusians of Roermond (27 March - 21 June 2009), an international exhibition that explored the history and spirituality of the Carthusians, highlighting the Order's outstanding artworks now kept in public and private collections. The current volume explores the history of the Carthusians and their cultural and spiritual heritage in the Low Countries. It presents Carthusian monasticism as a multidimensional phenomenon requiring a multidisciplinary approach that explains the broader historical dimension of the Carthusian Order in relation to its local manifestations, cultural forms, and the centrality of its spirituality.

Artist, crafter, diarist, recovering alcoholic, Episcopal, Catholic, spiritual gypsy. These are some of the ways that Carol Bonomo has described herself. Like many of her generation, she had trouble finding a spiritual home. "I'm one of those 'seekers' who doesn't known what she's looking for, and wouldn't recognize an answer to the meaning of life if she tripped on it in the dark."

Her spiritual adventures included the Catholic Church, the Episcopal Church, Alcoholics Anonymous, and her attempt to become a lay associate of the Franciscans. But the Franciscans sent her away. "Run, don't walk, to the abbey up the hill, " they advised her. And so she did, heading to the Benedictine abbey she was pointed to. Much to her surprise, there she found the home she'd been seeking for so long.

The Abbey Up the Hill is Bonomo's reflection on her first year as a Benedictine oblate -- a lay person vowing to live according to the 6th century Rule of St. Benedict, a monastic guide to living a balanced life with God at the center. Month-by-month, she records her spiritual growth with honesty, humor, and insight. This is the unforgettable story of a pilgrim's struggles to leave off wandering and finally come home.

In the sixth century when the Roman Empire was breaking apart and politics, cultural life and even the Church were in disarray - tumultuous times not unlike our own - Benedict of Nursia designed what he termed "a little rule" that showed his monks the way to peace as they learned to prefer Christ above all things. The Rule of Benedict offers timeless and practical tools for living this Christ-centered life today. * Revised and expanded 10th anniversary edition * Practical, down-to-earth writing style; explains the content of the Rule of St. Benedict and how to use the practices in daily life * Contains historical background to the Rule and a new chapter on relationships and community * Includes guide for group use