A Benedictine Reader, 530-1530, has been more than twenty years in the making. A collaboration of a dozen scholars, this project gives as broad and deep a sense of the reality of the first one thousand years of Benedictine monasticism as can be done in one volume, using primary sources in English translation. The texts included are drawn from many different genres and from several languages and areas of Europe. The introduction to each of the thirty-two chapters aims to situate each author and text and to make connections with other texts and studies within and outside the Reader. The general introduction summarizes the main ideas and practices that are present in the Rule of Saint Benedict and in the first thousand years of Benedictine monasticism while suggesting questions that a reader might bring to the texts.

This volume offers translations of the twelfth-century Latin "vitae" of four monks of the Monastery of Savigny: Abbot Vitalis, Abbot Godfrey, Peter of Avranches, and Blessed Hamo. Founded in 1113 by Vitalis of Mortain, an influential hermit-preacher, Savigny expanded to a congregation of thirty monasteries under his successor Godfrey (1122-1138). In 1147, the entire congregation joined the Cistercian Order. Around 1172, two monks of Savigny, Peter of Avranches and Hamo, friends but very different personalities, died. Their stories were told in two further "vitae."The "vitae" of these four men exemplify the variety of people and movements found in the monastic ferment of the twelfth century.