Augustinian Rule Research Articles

Feeling for Augustine

This essay promotes affective engagement with the texts we read, arguing that we should attend both to recognizing emotion within the texts and to allowing ourselves to feel emotion as we read. The essay thus aligns itself with contemporary theories of non-hermeneutic or surface reading. The argument is illustrated specifically by the relationship of Augustine of Hippo (354–430 CE) to the emotion of anger. The transcripts of the Council of Carthage, held in 411, show an eruption of anger on Augustine’s part. The essay then traces his thinking on anger through various texts, notably the City of God, the Augustinian Rule, and the personal letters to Nebridius. Using the reflections on anger of the contemporary philosopher Agnes Callard, I argue that Augustine saw anger as a unique type of moral problem, something that, once experienced, was ineradicable and distorted a sense of justice and order. It is only through an emotionally engaged reading that such a position is perceptible.

Painting the Hortus Deliciarum—Medieval Women, Wisdom, and Time by Danielle B. Joyner

Reviewed by: Painting the Hortus Deliciarum—Medieval Women, Wisdom, and Time by Danielle B. Joyner Mihaela L. Florescu Danielle B. Joyner, Painting the Hortus Deliciarum—Medieval Women, Wisdom, and Time (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press 2016) 242 pp. The Hortus deliciarum, which translates into English as "the garden of delights," is an important twelfth-century manuscript because it challenges the traditional view that only men created texts in medieval European culture. The HD was made by women with an immediate female audience in mind beyond the wider audience of men. Danielle B. Joyner has produced a magnificent book on the creation and meaning of the HD. Her informed text connects perfectly with the beautiful images culled from the HD. Unfortunately for medieval purists, the only surviving proof that the HD ever existed comes from later sources. In 1818, Christian Moritz Engelhardt portrayed medieval life as an interpretation of the HD. The mid-nineteenth century saw a study of this important work by Comte Auguste de Bastard. Baptiste Petit-Gerard also studied the codex, his notes only being published in the 1950s. Medieval scholars only have a partial facsimile of the HD, published in 1979 by the Warburg Institute. The facsimile, gathered from nineteenth-century sources, represents the recreation of nearly half of the imagery and two-thirds of the text of the original manuscript. The history of the HD is closely tied to that of the history of the small monastic community of Hohenbourg, in Alsace. Duke Frederick II of Swabia invaded Hohenbourg in the early twelfth century. His son, Frederick Barbarossa, appointed Relinde as abbess and it was under her rule that the [End Page 218] community was rebuilt, Augustinian rule was adopted, and work on the HD was presumably begun. In the early 1170s, Herrad succeeded Relinde as abbess and work on the HD continued. In the manuscript, Herrad is portrayed as producing the codex and directing the work of the nuns, yet nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century scholars were so biased by the mores of their times, they refused to consider that women were capable of such work. The existence of the HD challenged established male hierarchies. Today, however, there is no doubt, and it is openly recognized, that women in the twelfth century were indeed responsible for the production of this magnificent manuscript. The content of the HD features themes from the Bible. It includes the following: fols. 1r–v: introductory texts; fols. 2r–66v: Old Testament visual and textual narratives; fols. 67r–84r: Old Testament textual recapitulation; visual and textual transitional material; fols. 84v–167r: visual and textual narratives of Christ's life; fols. 167v–199r: visual and textual narratives of apostolic missionary work; fols. 199v–241r: visual and textual narratives of moralizing allegories on the soul and Ecclesia; fols. 241v–263v: visual and textual narratives of prophetic end-times; fols. 264r–315v: textual recapitulation, texts on church synods, canon law; fols. 316r–322r: computus tables and texts; fols. 322v–323r: portrait of Hohenbourg past and present; fols. 323v–324v: concluding verses. Chapter 1, "Feminae, Libri, et 'Hortus deliciarum'", places the HD in the context of its times. Herrad is portrayed as giving instructions on iconographies featured in both the Guta-Sintram Codex and the Rupertsberg Scivias. In addition, similar moralizing themes appear in an array of medieval manuscripts. On the topics of pride and virginity the HD is similar to works such as the Speculum virginum, the Liber floridus, and the Zwiefalten. Chapter 1 brings to light a number of further comparisons. Visual distinctions are noted between the HD and St. Albans Psalter. Yet, the HD stands apart from its brethren by its sophisticated imagery and by its use of visuals in places where text would normally be employed. Chapter 2, "Stellae et Tempora", examines the first folios of the manuscript which are devoted to the story of Creation. The addition of sin into the world is compared to the existence of the Trinity and the creation of times. Narrative imagery and diagrammatic images and texts are used to portray the story of Genesis in a display of fluid twelfth century style. In Chapter 3, "Artes et Computus," the liberal arts...

The Augustinian Reform, the Panormia Glosses, and Reading the Bible in the Medieval Latin Liturgy of Jerusalem

This study aims to discuss some of the intellectual traditions informing the liturgical rites instituted by the Latin clergy of Outremer. At the height of the clerical reform’s proliferation in Western Europe, in 1114, the canons of the Church of Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem adopted the rule of Augustinian rule. Recent scholarship reveals how the ordinal of Jerusalem (Rome, Bib. Vat. Barb. Lat. 659) contains a passage of liturgical prescriptions copied from the Panormia, a twelfth-century collection of canon law long associated with Ivo of Chartres. This passage stipulates the distribution of biblical readings for the entire liturgical year, the accompanying chants, and introduces novel glosses on the season’s devotional meanings. A comparative analysis of this text with the practices of continental sister rites, and a discussion of the patristic texts used to interpret the Biblical readings it stipulates, allows the present study to demonstrate two conclusions: The marked influence of the Augustinian reform on the rite of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem, and also equally significant, the distinctiveness of this liturgy’s devotional character in comparison to European counterparts.

‘The Hours that They Ought to Direct to the Study of Letters’: Literate Practices in the Constitutions and Rule for the Dominican Sisters

The place of reading and learning in the lives of Dominican nuns has, in recent years, been the focus of significant scholarly study. This research has examined the ways in which religious women engaged with, and contributed to, literate cultures. Here, attention is focused on the requirements for reading and learning in the thirteenth-century constitutions for the Dominican Sisters. These are read in conjunction with the requirements of the Augustinian Rule and the Friars Preachers’ constitutions to elucidate the possibilities that were enabled for the literate practices of Dominican women.

An Apostolic Vocation: The Formation of the Religious LIfe for the Dominican Sisters in the Thirteenth Century

ominic’s decision to establish the women’s communities of his Order in accordance with the Rule of St. Augustine has been understood either as simply aligning the Sisters’ religio with that of the Preachers or as complying with the requirements of Lateran IV. 1 However, this misunderstands Dominic’s intentions, and those of the Sisters themselves, and misrepresents the Sisters’ vocation. Both women and men heeded the call to the vita apostolica in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, though the perceived unfitness of women for preaching was, and has continued to be, understood as excluding them from the realization of an apostolic vocation. This presumes that the authentic apostolic life is premised on preaching, though the call that Jesus made to his followers was much broader than this and was made to both women and men. The Dominican vocation sprang from complex historical understandings of the vita apostolica, and the Dominican women’s religio should be approached as part of these same contexts and perceptions. 2 This can be most readily achieved through studying the representation of the apostolic vocation that was achieved in the yoking of the Augustinian Rule with the Dominican women’s institutes. 3 In this way, the fundamental premise of the female Dominican religio may be better understood. Hence, this study takes as its focus the n ormathe normative texts that were intended to shape the Sisters’ lives and to enable or authorize a particular vocation and that were cultural products springing from their particular religious and monastic environments. This is not a study of the lived experience of the Sisters or of how the rules and institutes may have been implemented or interpreted—that is an entirely different endeavor. Firstly, a brief historical overview of the steps that made possible

Das Augustinerchorherrenstift Bernried (review)

Das Augustinerchorherrenstift Bernried. By Walburga Scherbaum. [Germania Sacra: Die Kirche des Alten Reiches und ihre Institutionen, Dritte Folge, 3: Die Bistumer der Kirchenprovinz Mainz, Das Bistum Augsburg 3] (New York: Walter de Gruyter. 2011. Pp. xvi, 504. $225.00. ISBN 978-3-11025182-1.) There was an Augustinian canon bubble in twelfth-century Bavaria and Austria. Noble families like the Welfs, Babenbergs, Sulzbachs, and WeyarnFalkensteins and such bishops as Conrad I of Salzburg (1106-47) and Hartmann of Brixen (1140-64), who were themselves Augustinian canons, founded collegiate churches to preserve their dynastic memories and/or to care for souls. Some such as Berchtesgaden- a Sulzbach foundation and princely provostry (Furstpropstef), which possessed lucrative salt workswere wealthy, but Berchtesgaden's location in what is now a national park was probably more conducive to the contemplative than the active life. (The location helps to explain its notoriety in the twentieth century.) The still-functioning house of Klosterneuburg, upstream from Vienna, benefited from its ties to its Babenberg benefactors and their Habsburg successors and the fact that the burial place of the patron saint of Austria, Margrave Leopold m, lay there. (The twelfth-century masterpiece, the altar of Nicholas of Verdun, where Leopold's bones rest, is a major tourist attraction today.) Other houses like Au and Gars on the Inn River- which owed their existence to a minor comital house, the Modlings- were insignificant. Bernried, on the west bank of the Starnberger see, southwest of Munich, fell into the latter category. The archives of Bernried, if they ever existed, do not survive; thus, we know virtually nothing about the church during the Middle Ages. (Bernried suffered from three major fires, and diocesan visitors and ducal officials criticized the later provosts for their poor record-keeping.) Both the village and the church, whose name means a place cleared by Bero, were mentioned for the first time in Pope Calixtus LTs privilege of protection, which copyists dated November 12 in either 1122 or 1123. The pope granted Bernried Roman liberty, but not exemption, from the jurisdiction of the bishop of Augsburg. The founder was Count Otto I of Valley, a member of one branch of the house of Scheyern-Wittelsbach. Since Valley is situated on the Mangiali, a tributary of the Inn, we can only speculate why Otto chose a location distant from the heart of his power. Perhaps, it was too close to the rival foundation of Weyarn, but the site may have been part of his wife's inheritance. Moreover, Otto was an ally of the Welfs, who were the advocates of the nearby Augustinian houses of Polling and Rottenbuch, the latter, a major center for the dissemination of the Augustinian Rule. Bernried provided refuge in the early 1120s for a number of reformers, most notably Paul of Bernried (d. 11 46/50), Pope Gregory Vus biographer, who had been forced to leave Regensburg. Paul procured Calixtus 's privilege and wrote the vita of the seer Herluca (died c. …

Prouille, Madrid, Rome: the evolution of the earliest Dominican Instituta for nuns

The lifestyles of the three earliest Dominican women's communities were formulated according to their specific historical conditions and exigencies during the years 1206–21. Initially, the women associated with the preaching mission of Diego of Osma and Dominic Guzman were based at Prouille in the Languedoc and followed the Augustinian Rule. The development of the first instituta for Dominican nuns was the result of 15 years of overseeing the lives of the sisters. However, enclosure, and the institutional requirement for its observance, only came about in 1220 with the establishment of San Sisto, when St Dominic wrote an instituta specifically intended for a cloistered nunnery. This paper retraces and elucidates the historical development of the first Dominican instituta for women, and considers the remarkable choice of the Augustinian Rule as the basis for an enclosed women's order.

“GOD HAS CALLED ME TO BE FREE”: ALEPPAN NUNS AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF CATHOLICISM IN 18TH-CENTURY BILAD AL-SHAM

On 10 June 1738 Maria Qari wrote her Catholic Melkite bishop, Athnasius Dahhan, an emphatic letter rejecting the authority of the Melkite church to impose the Eastern rite Rule of Saint Basil upon her and her fellowʿabidāt(devotees). She unequivocally states, “It is important that your Excellency knows once and for all that I will only adopt the Augustinian Rule with the Ordinances of Saint Francis de Sales. I will not become a nun under any other circumstances, for God has called me to be free from all that binds my spirit, and I will not accept any oversight [from the Melkite church] . . . Four Jesuit missionaries are in agreement with me on this point.” This is but one missive in a voluminous record of equally rancorous discourses that spanned the better part of two decades (1730–48) and entangled the ten Aleppan devotees, their Jesuit confessors and supporters, the Melkite Church, and the Vatican.

The Naughty Canon of Catalonia and the Sack Friars: The Dynamics of "Passage" From Monk to Mendicant

This sordid tale of the runaway monk Ramon de Moranta during the tumultuous reign of King Jaume the Conqueror (1228-76) affords a glimpse into the intersecting worlds of the feudalistic Gregorian Reform, the cresting mendicantism of the doomed Friars of the Sack and the decline of the military orders, the complexities of monastic prisons, the punitive of clerical lifestyles, and the staged ritual and rhetoric in the theater of religious life in the medieval Catalan realms. It also illumines the historiographical resources of the king's archives today. King Jaume the Conqueror (1228-76) is the most celebrated ruler of the realms of Arago-Catalonia, a congeries of kingdoms and polities stretching from Southern France down the coast of Mediterranean Spain and overseas. His wide-ranging conquests from Islam, the concomitant mercantile ascendancy and cultural renaissance, the lively proliferation of ecclesiastical institutions, and his several comprehensive law codes all contributed to his rise as a Mediterranean world figure. Today that status is reflected in his administrative archives, notably in the unique registers, volume after volume preserving many thousands of charters on fragile early paper. Lesser collections of the great monarch here include particularly the Pergamins or Parchments, some three thousand disparate charters incised on animal skins. Oddly enough, few of those parchments pertain to the king himself or to his affairs but serve as a grab bag and depository for chance contemporary items. Researchers encounter a given parchment by happenstance; unless that item resonates with the peculiar interests of the rummaging scholar, it is, of course, passed over with only a glance. One such charter from a local Catalan monastery, recovered and reproduced here, is valuable simultaneously on several neglected historiographical fronts.1 On its face, the long document narrates the case of one Ramon de Moranta, a canon regular making amends in 1272 for an appalling fall from grace; at that level, the charter forms part of the monastic and religious order network then expanding under the patronage of King Jaume. At another level, the main story illustrates a dynamic of medieval religious life, the transitus or transfer of a monk from one order into another, and the more important dynamic of shifting a criminal cleric from one order into a monitored and punitive environment. Both topics hold practical and metaphysical pitfalls for the investigator.Their unfolding here also touches on the bizarre practice of monastic prison. At still another level, the principals have drawn a psychological profile of poignant human interest. More exciting, the document incorporates a rare glimpse of the Friars of the Sack, a vital new mendicant order that quickly spread like wildfire until brutally suppressed. For many years, I have been hunting down the scattered survivals of Sacks' archives around the western Mediterranean for just such glimpses of its reputation and inner life. Finally, the parchment as an artifact calls for due attention as a mode of legal procedure with its rhetorical parts, lawyerly boilerplate, dual-letter format, and script peculiarities, necessitating as well a full transcription and translation. The monastery of Santa Maria de l'Estany lay in a small, rainy valley, where a central marshy pond or pool yields the Latin name stagnum, Catalan I'estany. The town itself, including at that time about twentyfive newly arrived families, stands outside Manresa in the diocese of Vic(h), which is north of Barcelona on Catalonia's inland district called El Bages.The remnants of the monastery are a gem of Romanesque architecture, the unique cloister particularly a magnet for tourists. Critical to its role in our tawdry story was its fame as a center of Europe's Gregorian Reform. It had begun life in 1080 as a chapter of Canons Regular under a version of Augustinian rule. By the time of our 1272 episode, a dozen priest-canons served its liturgical life, as well as another dozen associates (beneficiats comensals), with a dozen lay maintenance workers. …

In houses of nuns, in houses of canons: a liturgical dimension to double monasteries

Liturgical celebration tied male clergy to houses of religious women in a wide variety of so-called double monasteries. St Gilbert founded the Order of Sempringham to provide for women’s religious vocation, but like other contemporary new orders, the Gilbertines needed a population of male religious to assist the nuns in their vocations. St Gilbert, and ultimately his successors, placed the nuns under the Rule of St Benedict and added regular canons who followed the Augustinian Rule. Historians of monastic life and female religious treat this organisation of the Gilbertines nearly like a commonplace. With regard to liturgy, this combination of two rules in one institution was remarkable, for the Benedictine monastic liturgy differed significantly from the divine offices among Augustinian canons. The liturgical dimension of double houses has not been sufficiently explored. The Gilbertine liturgical manuscripts represent an Augustinian liturgical cursus, while their Institutes, reflecting Cistercian models, mix both traditions. This article examines the issue and concludes that the Augustinian cursus dominated the order and that it seemed more important to identify the Gilbertine nuns as Benedictine than for the nuns to practice a Benedictine liturgy.

The Violeta of S. Caterina de' Vigri

S AINT Caterina de' Vigri was born in 1413 at Bologna.1 She devoted herself to the Augustinian rule up to the year 1432 and afterwards to the S. Claire's order until she died in 1463. After 1456, the date of the Corpus Domini Monastery's foundation in Bologna, she was the Abbess of the Monastery. The body of S. Caterina is still preserved with many relics, among which is the Violeta (P1. XIII and XIV). The shrine is placed in S. Caterina's chapel which was built in the I7th century. The oldest notice of the violeta (1492) is to be found in the Spechio de Illuminatione of Beata Illuminata Bembo, a nun in the confidence of S. Caterina. During a serious illness the Saint asked for a violeta to play and to praise with. The instrument now preserved must have pleased her. There is a laud in honour of S. Caterina (i 5thcentury) in which a 'sweet violeta' was named. Besides the hagiographical writings, an article by Benvenuto Disertori2 exists about the same subject. This seems to be the unique though little known contribution to research on the musical relic. Because of the unusual situation in which this instrument has been

Richard of Saint Victor and the Anonymous of Bridlington

Only since 1932 has the existence been known of the Bridlington Dialogue — or, more properly, Colloquium magistri et discipuli in regulam beati Au- gustini de uita clericorum — a conversation between master and student on the Augustinian Rule. In that year the Bodleian Library of Oxford acquired from the bookdealer E. P. Goldschmidt what is now Bodleian MS. Lat. th. d. 17, a codex which was executed about 1200 and contains the Dialogue on folios 1 to 97v. Nearly twenty years later J. C. Dickinson published some excerpts from the work and discussed it in his The Origins of the Austin Canons and their Introduction into England. Later, Sister Penelope, C.S.M.V., under-took to edit the complete Dialogue. Her edition was well advanced when, in 1955, she learned from Winfrid Hümpfner, Ο.S.A., of another medieval manuscript of the text: Durham College Library MS. Β III 8, folios 222v to 253v, written about 1300. In 1960, she published an edition based upon a study of both manuscripts.

XI.—Excavations at Merton Priory

The earlier history of the Canons Regular of St. Augustine, or Black Canons as they were commonly called, can hardly now be traced. They do not seem to have made their appearance in England until after the beginning of the twelfth century. It is true of course that certain houses, such as Huntingdon and Taunton, which subsequently followed the Augustinian Rule, were founded at a far earlier date, but the whole matter needs a discussion into which we cannot here enter. Like the Benedictines, each house was a separate corporation bound in no way to other houses. Each canon was sworn to ‘stabilitas’ or permanence in the house of his profession. Like the Benedictines, too, the Canons Regular held their triennial Chapters in accordance with the Lateran Council of the year 1215. Unlike them, however, the Austin Canons might serve the cures of souls, in particular those attached to their own houses. This last is an interesting point as bearing upon the fact that Thomas Becket, who as a child of ten began his education at Merton, at a later date wore the habit of the Merton Canons, while Hubert Walter, bishop of Salisbury, soon after his enthronement as archbishop of Canterbury became a professed Canon of Merton. The first house to be settled in England would appear to be that of St. Botolph, Colchester, which was established within a year or two of the beginning of the twelfth century. The foundation of Merton must have followed shortly afterwards.