Psychoanalysis, religion and architecture. Fray Gabriel Chávez de la Mora and the monastery of Santa María de la Resurrección

The monumental Latin play known as the Ludus de Antichristo (Play about the Antichrist) was created by Benedictine monks at the imperial abbey of Tegernsee in southern Bavaria around the year 1159 CE. A musical dramatization, it survives as one of the most unique and ambitious works of theatre from medieval Europe, folding into its scope matters of global geopolitics and Latin Christian eschatology. The Ludus de Antichristo survives as an artifact from a period in which the apocalypse served to capture the heightened anxieties and concerns of communities across Europe. The play expertly theatricalizes the monastic perspective on European politics, ecclesiastical reform, education, and the rites of Christian worship, all within an eschatological frame that bends the desired dramatic affect toward a greater sense of urgency. This chapter will contextualize the play’s eschatological sources alongside its goals for dramatizing an apocalyptic narrative specifically for monastic communities. Furthermore, we will explore how the play also dramatizes the sonic conditions of its performance such that musicality, speech, and cacophony all provide an affective source of theatrical meaning-making familiar to monastic communities beyond Tegernsee.

New Norcia, settled from 1846, is unique in Australia as its only monastic township. It is also special in terms of our historical and cultural heritage because of its Spanish origins. For those readers who are unfamiliar with New Norcia, it was founded by two Spanish Benedictine monks, Doms Salvado and Serra, as a mission to the Aboriginal tribes of the Victoria Plains district of the colony of Western Australia. From then on it developed not just as an aboriginal mission, its raison d'etre, but also as a Benedictine monastic community. The majority of that community were recruited from Spain. There were also others from Italy, France and the British Isles. However, in terms of its dominant cultural milieu it was an outpost of Hispanic influence in the Anglo-Saxon/Celtic colonies of Australia. 2 This was the situation until the second decade of the 20th century when Australians began to join the New Norcia Community as novices. This Hispanic influence was reinforced in 1921 with the formation by the then Spanish Abbot of New Norcia, Abbot Catalan, of an order of Spanish Benedictine sisters, later joined by several Australian women, including two aboriginals, who cared for and taught the Aboriginal girls of the mission and who also worked from 1931 at the aboriginal mission set up by the New Norcia Community at Kalumburu, in the north-west of Western Australia. 3 For information about the Spanish Benedictine Sisters at New Norcia, I am indebted to as yet unpublished material by Sr Anne Moynihan, North Perth. There are still a few Spanish Benedictine sisters working at Kalumburu although the last Spanish Benedictine sisters at New Norcia returned to Spain in 1975.

It might well appear an excessively abrupt change of pace to turn from Professor Bossy's topic to my own—to move from the most personal of all manifestations of individual Christian worship to the most formidably complex institutional corporations late medieval England has to offer for our contemplation. However, there is little about medieval monasticism, that ambivalent exercise in seeking one's own route to the divine but not in one's own company, which is quite what it seems. For perhaps no audiences in fifteenth-century England would have listened to Professor Bossy's lecture with greater fascination than the monastic communities of Canterbury, Durham, Ely, Norwich, Rochester, Winchester, and Worcester cathedrals. Not only did those Benedictine monks have an obligation to pray as assiduously as any religious in the country but they were also andipso factorequired to do so in the most public and exposed of all possible arenas, the formal prayer housespar excellenceas well as theecclesiae matricesof seven of late medieval England's nineteen dioceses. Precisely how those monks would have explained what they were doing when engaged in acts of communal and private prayer is no easy matter for a modern historian to surmise; but it seems certain that many of them must have been highly concerned about the purpose and quality of their devotions, not least because they could hardly have ignored the priority placed on theoratoriumandoratiowithin the Rule of St Benedict, to chapters of which they listened more or less attentively every day of their professed lives.

A set of thirteenth-century parchment fragments, including the remnants of two rolls and one manuscript codex, preserves a largely unstudied repertoire unique to medieval England. In addition to a single motet and a setting of a responsory verse, the Rawlinson Fragments preserve twelve three-voice Alleluya settings. While polyphonic Alleluyas are well known from the continental Magnus liber repertoire, these insular Alleluya settings are quite different. Most significantly, while composed on the text and pitches of plainchant, they include newly composed texts in at least one voice—that is, they are polytextual chant settings. Aspects of their musical style certainly draw on other polyphonic genres—organum, conductus, and motet. This article presents the paleographical and codicological evidence that corroborates an early date for these fragments (in the 1240s), confirms their connection to Reading Abbey, and situates their repertoire within a broader context. My analysis points to intriguing points of overlap with both the plainchant prosula tradition and the Magnus liber organa and motets. It reopens broader questions about the copying and performance practices of liturgical polyphony, including previous suggestions that motet texts may have been sung within the performance of the Magnus liber organa, regardless of the scribal copying conventions that separated organum and motet in the surviving Magnus liber manuscripts. The article also considers the role of the Rawlinson Fragments’ main scribe, Benedictine monk W. de Wicumbe, who was active within the monastic communities of Leominster and Reading as a composer of plainchant and polyphony, and as precentor, most likely in charge of his community's musical life.

According to the received history, the Cistercian order was founded in Citeaux, France, in 1098 by a group of Benedictine monks who wished for a stricter community. They sought a monastic life that called for extreme asceticism, rejection of feudal revenues, and manual labor for monks. Their third leader, Stephen Harding, issued a constitution, the Carta Caritatis, that called for the uniformity of custom in all Cistercian monasteries and the establishment of an annual general chapter meeting at Citeaux. The Cistercian order grew phenomenally in the mid-twelfth century, reaching beyond France to Portugal in the west, Sweden in the north, and the eastern Mediterranean, ostensibly through a process of apostolic gestation, whereby members of a motherhouse would go forth to establish a new house. The abbey at Clairvaux, founded by Bernard in 1115, was alone responsible for founding 68 of the 338 Cistercian abbeys in existence by 1153. But this well-established view of a centrally organized order whose founders envisioned the shape and form of a religious order at its prime is not borne out in the historical record. Through an investigation of early Cistercian documents, Constance Hoffman Berman proves that no reliable reference to Stephen's Carta Caritatis appears before the mid-twelfth century, and that the document is more likely to date from 1165 than from 1119. The implications of this fact are profound. Instead of being a charter by which more than 300 Cistercian houses were set up by a central authority, the document becomes a means of bringing under centralized administrative control a large number of loosely affiliated and already existing monastic houses of monks as well as nuns who shared Cistercian customs. The likely reason for this administrative structuring was to check the influence of the overdominant house of Clairvaux, which threatened the authority of Citeaux through Bernard's highly successful creation of new monastic communities. For centuries the growth of the Cistercian order has been presented as a spontaneous spirituality that swept western Europe through the power of the first house at Citeaux. Berman suggests instead that the creation of the religious order was a collaborative activity, less driven by centralized institutions; its formation was intended to solve practical problems about monastic administration. With the publication of The Cistercian Evolution, for the first time the mechanisms are revealed by which the monks of Citeaux reshaped fact to build and administer one of the most powerful and influential religious orders of the Middle Ages.

A History of Canterbury Cathedral. Edited by Patrick Collinson, Nigel Ramsay, and Margaret Sparks. (New York: Oxford University Press.1995. Pp. xxxii, 602. $39.95.) A Christian has existed in Roman town of Canterbury, later capital of Jutish kingdom of Kent in southeast England, since fourth century, but recorded history of Canterbury an episcopal see began in 597 with arrival of monk-missionary Augustine and King Ethelbert of Kent's grant to him of Christ Church.The present cathedral serves spiritual center of English Church and of world-wide Anglican communion. Constructed ca. 1070-1080 under Archbishop lanfranc, rebuilt after a disastrous fire in 1174, and continually expanded and remodelled between 1379 and 1503, magnificent late-Gothic building has attracted attention of several architectural historians, most recently Francis Woodman, The Architectural History of Canterbury Cathedral (1982; reviewed ante, LXX ,149-150). The book under review purports to study cathedral as a community of people (p. v). In fact, twelve authors of various articles comprising volume apply a very traditional ecclesiological understanding and identify church with administrators: priors of monastic community of Christ Church, and deans and canons who governed cathedral. If some attention is perforce given to cathedral a pilgrimage center, most efficacious prayerhouse in England, this work does not explore beliefs and attitudes of the silent majority, what historians have long called popular religion. Seven chapters treat history of cathedral from 602 to 1994; remaining five chapters discuss its archives and library; liturgy and music; medieval and post-Reformation monuments; and cathedral school. From days of Augustine to March 20,1540, when community was dissolved in an atmosphere of squalid pathos, Benedictine monks of Christ Church constituted cathedral staff. Since monks carried out a liturgy which since days of Lanfranc, if not Dunstan, had been elaborate and exhausting, conducted a school, and provided hospitality for thousands of visitors, judgment of one scholar that normal monastic concerns of performing liturgy, overseeing revenues, and criticizing archbishop (p. 56) seems harsh and refuted by evidence.Very close ties with monarchy-long community's greatest political asset, proved ultimately, under Henry VIII, its greatest weakness.The shrine of martyred Archbishop Thomas Becket drew a steady stream of distinguished visitors: Louis VII in 1179, setting French monarchy's seal of approval on cult; King John II of France in 1360;Aeneas Silvius (later Pope Pius In in 1436; and Emperor Charles V whom Henry VIII entertained at Canterbury during Pentecost season in 1520-these, in addition to tens of thousands of noble and ordinary visitors. …

The French Benedictine monk and Hindu sannyasin Abhishiktananda is one of the most radical pioneers of Hindu–Christian dialogue. He was born (Henri Le Saux) in 1910 and traveled to India in 1948 to join abbe Jules Monchanin in an effort to establish a Christian monastic community on the model of a Hindu ashram. Having immersed himself deeply in the Hindu spirituality of Advaita Vedanta, he spent much of his life attempting to reconcile its teachings and experience with the Christian tradition, going back and forth between interpreting Hindu teachings, such as the notion saccidānanda (Being–Consciousness–Bliss) in Christian terms, and reinterpreting Christian categories, such as the Trinity, in Hindu terms. His theological insights were often innovative and challenging. But more than his theology, it is his life of relentless pursuit of the ultimate religious experience, and his radical openness to learning from Hindu teachings and practices that remains a source of inspiration for anyone involved in Hindu–Christian dialogue.

Iona is renowned for its early monastery, founded following the arrival of Columba in AD 563. This paper uses palaeoecological data to provide insight into the social and environmental transformations that influenced the landscape of Iona during the later prehistoric and historic periods. The identification of cereal pollen suggests that arable farming occurred during the Bronze Age and possibly continued through the Iron Age. Pastoral farming was also practiced. It remains unclear as to whether there were people living on the island at the time of the monastic community’s arrival. Between AD 630 and 1100, woodland clearance and farming occurred. There were also two phases of woodland regeneration and agricultural decline. The first phase coincides with the period of Viking raids and may have witnessed a decline in population. The second phase occurred in conjunction with increased Scandinavian influence and political restructuring across the wider region; however, small-scale farming continued. After c. AD 1000 there was renewed intensification of landscape management prior to the arrival of Benedictine monks and Augustinian nuns (c. AD 1200). This may be linked to climatic amelioration during the Medieval Warm Period and economic growth in the Hebrides.

![Figure][1] CREDIT: INEA (2) The forest lore of Italian monks is going online. As of this week, Italy's National Institute of Agricultural Economics (INEA) in Rome and the Benedictine monks of the Monastic Community of Camaldoli in Arezzo have digitized and uploaded approximately 42,000

This article presents a reevaluation of the finds discovered in 1930s, during salvage excavations by J. Iliffe on behalf of the British Mandatory Department of Antiquities, conducted west of the YMCA site in Jerusalem. One of the most important discoveries made on the site was the Greek epitaph of Bishop Samuel – the first inscription found in Palestine mentioning Iberians (Georgians), which launched the archaeological study of the Georgian antiquities of the Holy Land. The documentation of YMCA excavations, preserved in the Mandatory Archive of the Israel Antiquities Authority contains the large quantity of unpublished materials, including field photos and plans, allowed for the complete layout of the large Byzantine complex to be distinguished, interpreted by its excavator as a monastery. The relationship of the YMCA site to the Georgian monastic community is discussed in connection with other evidence related to the "Monastery of the Iberians" – a monastic institution of Byzantine Jerusalem, known both from the historical sources and independent epigraphic evidence.