Religious Houses

Abstract

The religious houses were central to the development of literary culture in the British Isles throughout the Middle Ages. In the earliest medieval centuries their contribution was as the most developed and settled environments in which the written word was used and preserved; as the Latin Roman church advanced across Britain they became a natural focus for linguistic exchanges and translation. The growth and growing ecclesiastical and seigniorial power of religious houses in the tenth and eleventh centuries saw them established as the principal focus for the production and transmission of literature in Latin and the vernacular. This energy was not entirely displaced by the Norman Conquest and in the century that followed the religious houses led England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland in the development of literary genres – in history, epic, and hagiography – and, as before, in translation. While secular clerical courtly and urban centers increasingly contributed to literary culture after 1250 the role of the religious orders did not recede: withstanding the effects of the Black Death they were the major cultural patrons in late medieval and pre‐Reformation England; they were also commercial and editorial pioneers of printing and proponents of the new currents of Italian humanism. Their contribution to cultural life was still developing when they were suppressed by the Henrician and Scots Calvinist reforms of 1536–61.