Non-instrumental. This favorite album of background sounds has several tracks that offer an aural reproduction of noises from medieval daily life.
(Partial track below. Allow a moment for player to load.)
In the Near Distance the Cathedral Stirs to the Sounds of Lamenting Monks:
By the fourteenth century, England remained culturally deferential to France and spiritually dependent on Rome. Since the Norman invasion, most non-Latin texts available in England were in either Old French or Anglo-Norman. Since literature written in Middle English was a relatively new development, there were far fewer vernacular books available in England than common French books in France. Accordingly, the contributions of English authors writing in their native tongue became significant not only to their readers but also for the national pride of the country itself, as England gave birth to its own literary tradition.
- Ann Scott -
Tres Riches Heures (March 1410)
Monasteries become one of the most important institutions in Europe and played a fundamental role in the evolving transformation of land and community structures in the West. The land-monastery relationship aided the development of small-town Christianity as it existed throughout Middle Ages. Monastic communities often patterned themselves after fortified, Antique Roman villas, functioning as socio-economic units.
Wealthy citizens often donated cultivated lands for monastic use, along with the laborers and dwellings attached to the land. A codependent relationship emerged between these agricultural communities and the monasteries whose lands they worked, further contributing to the centralization of small space and the familiar visual landscape of the Middle Ages.
- Ann Scott -
Non-instrumental. This favorite album of background sounds has several tracks that offer an aural reproduction of noises from medieval daily life. (Partial track below. Allow a moment for player to load.)
Opening a large wooden door, you walk into the palace cloisters where a barrel-maker and craftsmen attend to their work. A wagon of goods is unloaded:
This infusion of Augustine’s new doctrines drew Christians to a deeper interest in external measurements of holiness and inspired many religious ascetics to adopt a monastic way of life in order to maintain pious behavior and pursue a more intense spiritual experience. Monasticism had emerged first in the eastern desserts, establishing various sets of rules to govern their communities. Cenobitic[1] monasticism arrived later to the West, inheriting this random assortment of rules and traditions.
Augustine’s spiritual insights encouraged Benedict of Nursia to write a regula (set of rules) for ascetic living and monastic stability. A hermit-turned-abbot, Benedict had established several small monasteries in Italy, including his famous monastery at Monte Cassino (first constructed around 529 CE on the site of an old temple to Apollo.) Benedict’s Rule built upon the theological-philosophical transformation set in motion by Augustine while assimilating time-honored forms of order for the functional arrangement of monastic life.
See Part IX
Augustine’s City of God and Benedict’s Rule: Innovative Worldview and Preserved Paradigm
Benedictine Abbey at Monte Cassino
The Rule of Saint Benedict (Published by Vintage Press)
At the time Benedict wrote his regula, likely between about 535 and 540, Ostrogothic Italy was in complete turmoil. In 535, Eastern Emperor Justinian sent General Belisarius into Italy where he temporarily recaptured Rome in 536 and proceeded in 540 to cede Italy to the empire. In the midst of chaos, ascetic individuals looked to monasticism for peace and order. For many ascetics, monastic separation was, in a sense, a practical attempt to separate the City of God from the City of Man.
Benedict’s Rule, an organizational formula for holy cenobitism, met the needs of many new monastic communities in a timely manner. Although Benedict borrowed from earlier monastic rules and precepts, he infused his work with his own vision.
As he composed his regula, on the very doorstep of the early Middle Ages, Benedict had no idea that his modest formula for holy living would be a key element in the socio-religious transformation of the old Roman world into a medieval society. More specifically, his Rule was poised to become an integral part of the preservation of Antique culture by the Church. Benedict’s monastic law contained within it the vestiges of the legal, social and land systems of the Antique world, embodying a new mentality based on preexisting Roman forms.
See Part X
Augustine’s City of God and Benedict’s Rule: Innovative Worldview and Preserved Paradigm
St. Benedict gives his Rule to the monks of his order.
Benedict’s Rule, composed just after the issuance of Justinian’s newly compiled Roman law code, served as a communal law by which the monks within a monastery were required to orient every aspect of their daily lives. Benedict modeled the Rule on the organization and discipline of the old Roman army and it maintained an uncompro-mising policy of obedience. He prescribed a regimented schedule for all activities, during both day and night. Promptness was compulsory. He carefully outlined the times and protocol of Divine Offices and Vigils. Obeying the injunction of the apostle Paul, to “let all things be done decently and in order,” Benedict’s Rule prescribed the proper amount of food and drink, clothing and footwear and specified the sleeping arrangements and job descriptions for the monks.[1]
The Rule reinforced the benefits of the cenobitic lifestyle, stability through community, and utilized isolation, like military solitary confinement, as punishment. The Rule’s code of discipline sanctioned even corporal punishment as necessary, for boys within the monastery or anyone else simple enough to not to learn from less drastic measures.
See Part XI
Augustine’s City of God and Benedict’s Rule: Innovative Worldview and Preserved Paradigm
Monk Receiving Tonsure
Saint Benedict’s Rule replicated the Roman military system of authority through the hierarchical power structure it implemented within the monastery. The head of each monastic community, the Abbot, was due mutual obedience by all. Second in command to the Abbot was his assistant, the Prior, who in turn commanded deans—men selected to manage groups of ten monks each. Each monk fell into a line of community rank based upon his order of entry into the monastery.
Monastic Hierarchy
The job of the Abbot was to train these “soldiers of Christ” to wage spiritual war against the powers of evil under a trained commander (himself). Benedict admonished the Abbot to “so regulate and arrange all matters that souls may be saved.”[1] In proper military fashion, the Abbot-commander had the last word on any issue of life within the community, with the understanding that he would have render an account for his own behavior and the management of his men before the Great Judge on Judgment Day.
See Part XII
Augustine’s City of God and Benedict’s Rule: Innovative Worldview and Preserved Paradigm
www.aedificium.org/MonasticLife/GeneralAspects.html
The monastic system that developed from Benedict’s Rule assimilated another vestige of the Antique world, one reflected in its formula for self-supporting monastic communities. The establishment of remote monastic centers contributed to the continuing ruralization of the western population and reinforced ongoing trends in land division patterns. The land-monastery relationship aided the development of small-town Christianity as it would exist in the Middle Ages.
Benedict’s regula strengthened the tendency of monastic communities to pattern themselves after fortified, Antique Roman villas, functioning as socio-economic units. Consequently, monasteries arranged on the pattern of the Rule played a fundamental role in the evolving transformation of land and community structures in the West. Wealthy citizens often donated cultivated lands for monastic use, along with the laborers and dwellings attached to the land. A codependent relationship emerged between these agricultural communities and the monasteries whose lands they worked, further contributing to the centralization of small space and serving as a precursor for the land structures of the early Middle Ages.
See Part XIII
Augustine’s City of God and Benedict’s Rule: Innovative Worldview and Preserved Paradigm
Through the sixth and seventh centuries, Benedict’s formula for monastic living sustained its identity amid competing forms of monastic rules and became the most widely practiced regula in the West. From the mid-eighth to tenth centuries, a movement within the Church sought to make it the singular rule for monasticism, although that effort never fully succeeded. Through transformation and assimilation, Benedict’s Rule bridged the gap from the established desert monasticism of the Eastern Empire to the new religiosity emerging from the Late Antique period in the West.
By the early Middle Ages, monasticism, and especially Benedictine monasticism, became the very quintessence of asceticism. Everyday folk looked to the monks and nuns of the monastic orders for piety by proxy, in many ways shaping the socio-religious patterns of medieval life.
See Part XIV
Augustine’s City of God and Benedict’s Rule: Innovative Worldview and Preserved Paradigm
