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Chapter  Gendering the Benedictine Rule Chapter 38 of the Benedictine Rule draws the audience’s attention to the special skills required of the weekly reader (the lector) as well as the spiritual dangers associated with the practice of public reading (the lectio) performed during meals taken in the monastery’s refectory. When eating, monks are to remain absolutely silent—no whispering, no speaking of any kind is to occur in the dining hall. Speech belongs solely to the designated lector, though intriguingly the Rule does allow the seated congregation to request things during repasts by making audible signals in ways other than through verbal communication (RB 38.7).1 The ritual setting of the refectory creates tension between a speaking monk, who serves as the community’s public voice, and a silent congregation, who function as receptive ears to biblical language. In fact, the first body part mentioned in the Rule is the ear, a literary strategy accentuating the audience’s standing as passive receptors to the language of monastic discipline (RB prologue 1). Moreover, chapter 6 of the Rule highlights this metaphoric anatomy by stating that ‘‘speaking and teaching are the master’s task; the disciple is to be silent and listen.’’2 Anxious to equip the leadership of the monastery with ultimate verbal power, the Rule makes an exception to the community-wide ban on speech in the refectory: ‘‘The prior, however, may wish to say a few words of instruction’’ (RB 38.9).3 The early medieval monastic art of reading is a charged theological and political activity. Yet the practice of reading broke through the carefully orchestrated hierarchy of the community: ‘‘Brothers will read and sing, not according to rank, but according to their ability to benefit their hearers’’ (RB 38.12).4 The lector possesses the power to yoke the community to the hierarchy of the heavens, as the Rule’s directive makes clear by commanding the weekly reader to begin with the scriptural verse: ‘‘Lord, open my lips’’ (Psalm 70 chapter 3 51.15). The lector, whose lips God now has parted, is not allowed to eat with his mute brothers during the meal. Instead, he is given diluted wine to drink to ward off hunger and, more important, to function as a ritual mouthwash with which to cleanse his palate so that he may partake of the delicacies of the Word.5 Taking the Word of God into the mouth is a singular, powerful activity in the monastic community, one subject to meticulous human and divine surveillance and one capable of sparking intense anxiety. After all, the lectio is a perilous venture—it could ignite pride in its ritual experts, for the Rule sets lectores apart as exceptional on account of their talents: ‘‘The reader should not be the one who just happens to pick up the book.’’6 Furthermore, the Rule describes the refectory as a space open to demonic assault, especially when its all-encompassing silence is violated by loquacious monks. In the refectory silence operates as a mystical prophylactic against the Evil One; sanctioned speech serves as the community’s conduit to the Crucified One.7 The goal of Benedictine practice is to transform, symbolically speaking, the most proficient votaries into ‘‘all voice’’ and ‘‘no body.’’ Chapter 38 of the Rule makes this ritual system clear: the lector, whose voice and purified mouth fills the refectory like a disembodied spirit, stands in stark contrast to the seated brothers, who are engaged in an act that both sustains life and underscores the body, eating. Significantly, the Benedictine body parallels that of its upper-class Roman male (vir) counterpart, as redefined by classicists , who assert: ‘‘The definition of the vir can thus be restated more simply as freedom from or transcendence of the body, penetrated as it is by a host of pleasures and pains.’’8 Nowhere was this definition more pronounced— and more tested—than within the space of the Roman dining room, the sumptuous triclinium with its opulent fare, paintings and statues, garden views, perfumed diners, and sexually available slaves. Dining in ancient Rome occasioned stress among its elite banqueters because on the one hand, viri were to distance themselves from their bodily appetites, sensations too closely associated with those experienced by the insatiable prostitute or the starving slave, both of whom were deeply immersed in the body. As Cicero saw it, the Roman triclinium should serve more as an expression of community and shared paideia and less as a...

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