Examinations of the culture - artistic, material, musical - of English monasteries in the six centuries between the Conquest and the Dissolution. The cultural remains of England's abbeys and priories have always attracted scholarly attention but too often they have been studied in isolation, appreciated only for their artistic, codicological or intellectual features and notfor the insights they offer into the patterns of life and thought - the underlying norms, values and mentalite - of the communities of men and women which made them. Indeed, the distinguished monastic historian David Knowles doubted there would ever be sufficient evidence to recover "the mentality of the ordinary cloister monk". These twelve essays challenge this view. They exploit newly catalogued and newly discovered evidence - manuscript books,wall paintings, and even the traces of original monastic music - to recover the cultural dynamics of a cross-section of male and female communities. It is often claimed that over time the cultural traditions of the monasteries were suffocated by secular trends but here it is suggested that many houses remained a major cultural force even on the verge of the Reformation. James G. Clark is Professor of History at the University of Exeter. Contributors: DAVID BELL, ROGER BOWERS, JAMES CLARK, BARRIE COLLETT, MARY ERLER, G. R. EVANS, MIRIAM GILL, JOAN GREATREX, JULIAN HASELDINE, J. D. NORTH, ALAN PIPER, AND R. M. THOMSON.

This volume includes the works of three Englishwomen: Julian of Norwich (1342-c.1416) whose Revelations were first printed in 1670; Margery Kempe (c.1373-c.1438) from whose Boke of Marjorie Kempe a few extracts were printed in 1501 and again in 1512; Juliana Berners (possibly c.1388) whose treatise on hawkyng and huntyng was first printed in 1486, with a second edition containing an additional treatise on fishing. The writings of these three women are brought together in this book because they are amongst the earliest female writers in the English language, they each reflected everyday lives, and reveal with passion, insight and compassion spiritualities not separate from the physical world but entwined with it. Julian of Norwich brings contemplative insights of God's love to a sinful and suffering humanity; Margery Kempe actively weeps for her own sin and the sins and suffering of the world and Juliana Berners lives actively with expertise and serenity in the world of nature.

This gendered translation of the Benedictine Rule for women in 1517 is also a handbook for women on exercising authority, management skills and the art of good governance, including monastic property and relations with the outside world. Barry Collett here provides a modern facsimile edition of Fox's translation, written in the tumbling phrases of passionate prose that make Fox stand out as a literary figure of the English Renaissance. Collett also provides an extensive introduction that argues that Fox's experience as an administrator and senior political adviser with special responsibility for foreign affairs, mainly with Scotland and France, the political situation in 1516, and social concerns Fox shared with Thomas More, all provide keys to understanding this translation of the rule. Richard Fox was king's secretary, Lord Privy Seal and Bishop of Winchester, and founder of Corpus Christi College in Oxford. He was an administrator who reflected much on the proper exercise of authority and responsibility at all levels, especially through negotiated co-operation. He strongly supported monastic reforms, and when a group of abbesses requested a translation for sisters unable to understand Latin, this was his response. It provides a unique window into the world of female spirituality just a few months before Luther's reformation began. The exercise of God-given authority by women is described in the same-possibly stronger-terms as for men. Fox expressed no reservations about the exercise of authority by women. His indifference to sexual distinctions arose, paradoxically, from his preoccupation with the skilful use of God-given functioning of authority in a hierarchical society.

European history from 1480 to 1570 was a period of turbulent change, political upheaval, profound moral questioning, and urgent philosophical speculation. This book explores the intriguing role of the almost-forgotten Congregation of Benedictine monks of Italy and southern France in the events of these tumultuous years. From archival and published records, the picture emerges of a closely-knit order of humanist scholars whose religious and philosophical studies later put them in a unique position to understand the Reformers. The book also casts light on the monks' fascinating reaction to the Reformation, as they poured out a stream of academic books, tracts, sermons, and poems in their attempt to heal the deepening rift between Rome and the Reformers. Critized and misunderstood by all sides, the Congregation gradually fell into decline until it was finally suppressed under the Napoleanic invasions.

This edition of the building accounts is put into a wider context with a study of its founder, Richard Fox. Corpus Christi College, Oxford, was founded in 1517 by Richard Fox, bishop of Winchester. He intended it to educate students in classical Greek, Latin and Hebrew, and their literature; Erasmus praised it as a scholarly achievement, and a beacon of Renaissance classical learning. The heart of this book is an edition of the original fortnightly building site accounts of 1517-1518, giving us a window onto a late-medieval building site, with its detailsof early sixteenth-century building materials, craft techniques, project management skills and working conditions, including siesta periods and sub-contracting. The introduction describes Fox's long road to 1517: his motives far more complicated than a bishop looking for worldly fame and heavenly reward. Born into a Lincolnshire yeoman, Fox studied law at Oxford, rebelled against Richard III and became Henry VII's closest political adviser. Taken together,they provide a detailed account of the foundation of the College, both literal and metaphorical.