The Culture of Medieval English Monasticism (review)

Late-medieval English monasticism has traditionally suffered from at worst a bad, or at best an indifferent, press. In contrast to their so-called “golden age” of the twelfth century, the religious houses of late-medieval England have been held to be lukewarm in their observances and low in reputation, if not in a state of terminal decay. This collection of twelve essays is a welcome addition to the revisionist literature that not only challenges this view but also seeks to place the monasteries and nunneries of late-medieval England in a cultural context that was in many ways quite distinct from that of earlier centuries.

In the first of two essays in the section “Observant Culture,” Roger Bowers argues that the stability and indeed vitality of many houses, particularly the larger ones, allowed for intellectual and artistic enterprise, such as the introduction of virtuoso polyphonic music into the liturgy. He demonstrates that this was emulated at the lesser monasteries, so that by the 1530s this produced a significant—and rejuvenated—liturgical and musical observance. Miriam Gill moves the discussion to text and image, more specifically focusing on the evidence of mural paintings. Her challenge in interpreting this material is the comparative lack of evidence from a monastic—as opposed to a parish—context, but Gill argues effectively for the existence of a “bookishness” in monastic murals that was consciously chosen for a monastic context and extended the culture of reading. Part of her discussion is based on the fragments of an Apocalypse from Coventry Abbey discovered in 2000 and 2002.

Three essays constitute the section on “Learned Culture.” Gillian Evans takes as her starting point—which could indeed have been the starting point for the book—the question of the meaning of monastic culture and how the word cultus, originally meaning worship, developed to embrace a wider set of values. Evans begins with the texts, such as the Regula Benedicti and Lanfranc’s Monastic Constitutions, that formed the core values of English medieval monasticism and discusses some of its distinctive features. Her essay raises the question of monastic education and leads on to Alan Piper’s exploration of the rich legacies from the library of Durham Cathedral Priory to investigate scriptural study by the monks. Although the scholarly output of the Durham monks lay in the area of historical and hagiographical rather than scriptural study, Piper demonstrates that the Scriptures nevertheless infused much of what the monks wrote and that the evidence of the books and their annotations reveals the community to have been well abreast of scriptural studies in the later Middle Ages. Rodney Thomson focuses on the surviving books from another cathedral priory, Worcester, that were associated with its monks who attended the University of Oxford. He demonstrates that the priory was keen to participate in the intellectual life of the university and from the 1290s, when Gloucester College was founded for the Benedictine monks from the southern province, until the Dissolution, maintained two monks there almost constantly.

Three essays are concerned with the culture of religious women in late-medieval England. David Bell revisits his 1995 book, What Nuns Read, in the light of advances over the last decade, while Mary Erler argues that modifications in the communal life of medieval religious houses for women, manifest in the decline of communal dining and the division of the dormitory into private cells, changed the practice of reading, from a communal activity to one more closely resembling modern concepts of reading. This did not, she argues, diminish the spirituality of nuns but on the contrary rejuvenated it. Female religious experience is also the theme of Barry Collet’s essay, which focuses on female vocations in the diocese of Winchester in the sixteenth century, based on Bishop Fox’s translation of Regula Benedicti for nuns, his form and order of profession, and visitation returns. These produce a picture of the...