The Rule of Benedict. A Guide for Christian Living trans. by the Monks of Glenstal Abbey (review)

634BOOK REVIEWS with specialized knowledge of individual texts or archaeological sites, to point out areas where the author oversteps or perhaps misunderstands the evidence. Thus, it is odd diat he says that "not one of the early Christian basilicas built next to great shrines . . . survives___" (I, 118): but they do, at least enough to allow a study of "local basilica construction." Yet, Trombley is right in the larger sense, since no one has in fact done such a study. One thinks, on occasion, that the introduction of the ideas of Eliade, etc. (e.g., I, 149) may be a little "after the fact," but one has to praise Trombley for making the attempt and for realizing that such concepts have a place in the study of Late Antiquity, and we had better start to consider them! In short, the best review of the present book is the spate of discussion that will surely follow. Many scholars will take exception with one or another of Trombley's ideas—as well they might—and one hopes they will make their case as cogent and as carefully argued as he has. Nonetheless, this book is important (obviously an overworked term, but appropriate in the present instance): scholarship on Late Antiquity (and Early Christianityfor that matter) will from now on have to consider the serious and detailed arguments made in this text. Perhaps most seriously, anyone interested in the religious interaction in this period will benefit enormously from Trombley's consideration ofthe texts. They will certainly read his interpretation of the texts and then be driven inescapably back to the evidence itselffor confirmation or contradiction. One cannot ask for more in a modern analysis of an important problem. Timothy E. Gregory Ohio State University The Rule ofBenedict. A Guidefor Christian Living. The Full Text of the Rule in Latin and English with Commentary by George Holzherr [Abbot] of Einsiedeln. Translated by the Monks of Glenstal Abbey. (Blackrock, Co. Dublin: Four Courts Press. 1994. Pp. xii, 355. »2950 paperback.) It is a commonplace to scholars in many disciplines that in recent years historians have vastly expanded our understanding of the late antique, medieval , and monastic worlds, and ofthe short document that is the cornerstone of all organized religious life in the West, The Rule of St. Benedict. Much of this research elucidates particular chapters of the Rule: e.g., Peter Brown, The Body and Society. Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (1988), whose valuable discussion ofchastity bears on parts ofchapter 4 of the Rule; John Boswell, The Kindness of Strangers. The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance (1989), which explicitly informs chapters 59 and 58; Caroline Bynum, Holy Feast, Holy Fast (1987), whose provocative treatment of food and health interprets chapters 39 and 40; Jacques Le Goff, Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages (1982), which helps to explain chapters 48 and 49; Michel BOOK REVIEWS635 Mollat, The Poor in the Middle Ages (1986), whose appreciation of poverty, hospitality, sickness, and the porter of the monastery informs chapters 36, 53, and 66; Dom Pierre Salmon, The Abbot in Monastic Tradition, which treats chapters 2 and 64—to cite only a few obvious titles. The book under review, contrary to the opening sentence of the preface: "This chapter by chapter commentary on the Rule of St. Benedict incorporates much of the analytical study of many scholars in recent decades . . . ," reveals a blissful innocence of all historical research, European and American, of the last half-century. It is a work of spirituality, written on the premise that spirituality exists in a social, intellectual, political, and economic vacuum. The book provides an introduction which, apart from a modification of the dates of St. Benedict's life, contains very traditional information; an English translation of the Rule by the monks of Glenstal in County Limerick, Ireland, that "parallels" (?) a German translation by Abbot Holzherr of Einsiedeln in Switzerland, which in turn was based on the edition of H. Rocháis and E. Manning, Règle de Saint Benoît; the Latin text of the Rule; and a commentary and notes for each chapter. References to Benedict's scriptural sources are...