Fear not! More have been ordered, and the readings for next week can all be accessed online.
You should prepare the essential readings labelled "Week 2" (in the Unit Guide, or in your purple book) for next Monday. These are:
- The Benedictine Rule (http://www.fordham.edu/Halsall/source/rul-benedict.asp)
- A Chapter in the book called "Medieval Worlds" by Moran Cruz and Gerberding entitled "The Early Medieval Church and the West, 500-800". (Available as a digital copy by following the relevant links on the Library Readings List to be found on the right hand panel.)
The Week 2 tute blog will go up tomorrow morning.
Thanks everyone!
7 comments:
thanks for the information. This is really a test to see if i'm actually blogging [first time]
With regards to the Benedict Rule:
Are the precepts that at highlighted in the article the actual guidelines that they lived by? Or is it an interpretation?
Thanks so much
hey Lauren, I looked up St Benedict, and I found this which may be helpful for your question (however I don't know how reliable the sources are etc etc) but it gives a short overview and background.
http://www.osb.org/gen/rule.html (and hopefully that's the right link)
Great find Bronwyn! I've had a quick squizz and this site looks reasonably reliable and informative. Interesting to see that the best (i.e. closest to the original) surviving manuscript that records the Benedictine Rule is stored in none other than St Gall's monastic library!
We can talk more about what a manuscript actually is, and how scholars identify the age and 'goodness' of a copy in tutorials over the enxt few weeks. Fun!
Hi Lauren,
Monastic Rules like the Benedictine one (there were lots of others but this one probably had the widest influence) were intended to be followed quite closely. Monks really did attend services that many times a day, for example, and they could only get out of it through serious illness or very important conflicting duties. 'Wagging' without permission would have been punished by assigning penance: extra prayers or duties, decreased rations, or similar hardships, depending on the nature of the offence. This was because the most important rule of all was to obey: to obey the Rule, and to obey one's superiors (the abbott, the prior, and the other members of the monastic hierarchy). Rules like the number of hours a day that had to be dedicated to work were a bit more flexible: some interpreted 'work' as reading or copying scripture, for example, while others thought it meant literally tilling the fields.
We mentioned in tutes last week the book 'Pillars of the Earth', which, although fictional, captures some of the trials and tribulations of medieval monastic life in a way that we can relate to now. Some of you might also know the Brother Cadfael books by Ellis Peters in which the life of a medieval (12th century) monk in Shrewsbury is imagined. Cadfael is a bit of an anomaly, a 'detective monk' with some pretty un-medieval ideas about evidence etc., but the descriptions of his environment and daily life are useful for thinking yourself into a medieval world very foreign to ours.
I would think that the Benedictian Rules where to be strictly adheaded too, though the individual Abbot who is responsible for organising his flock (his abbey)would apply various alternative rulings, building upon original Benedictian Rules perhaps, provided they did not directly contradict St.Benedict. Not one Abbey, Benedictian or otherwise would have been the same, Benedictians still exist today and I would doubt weather they follow the identical lifestyle rulings as they did in the 12th century ; there is a school in Salzburg, Austria that I visited briefly in 2008, its teaching staff were composed entirely of Benedictian monks, they had computers, and the utmost modern information and practises. Benedictians did not once believe in laughing feeling it an indulgence, as we well know that is unhealthy, and obviously all didn't follow through with such a rule, though it may infact be an interpretation, as many laws could be interpreted, and loopholes found.
The Benedictians have also entered phases where they are less observent than other times when they were stricter often coming into confrontations with other Orders of Monestries, and Papal authority, like during the Great Schism.
Yes - you are right Matthew. We mustn't assume that a proscriptive text like a rule or law is necessarily descriptive of practices that actually took place. In some cases, it may be evidence of the opposite: e.g. maybe there was lots of laughter even though it was considered inappropriate, so they needed a rule against it...
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