Black Monks Research Articles

The extinction inventories of convents in 1834

In 1834, by Decree of 30 May and as part of the general ecclesiastical reform undertaken by Joaquim António de Aguiar, Minister and Secretary of State, and carried out by the Commission for the General Reform of the Clergy (1833-1837), all convents, monasteries, colleges, hospices and religious houses of all religious orders were extinguished, with the female houses remaining subject to their respective bishops until the death of the last nun, the date of their definitive closure. The process of extinction of religious houses involved the drawing up of hundreds of inventories currently in the Torre do Tombo National Archive. This wealth of information makes it possible to carry out countless archival, history, and art history studies associated with economic and sociological studies. In this study, we intend to focus on the inventories of the Santo André de Rendufe monastery and the Convent of Christ in Tomar. The fact that both institutions have a Benedictine character (in the first case, black monks and in the second, friars of the Order of Christ) but are located in different places in the kingdom will allow us to make comparisons, propose hypotheses and draw conclusions that may help us to understand better how the above-mentioned processes of extinction of religious houses and the collection of their archives and documentary collections were conducted.

Black Monks Сontra Black Robes: the Origin of Animosity between the Dominican and the Jesuit Orders in China (16th — 18th Centuries)

The article examines the key theoretical and theological disagreements between theorists of the two Catholic monastic orders — Dominicans and Jesuits — on key issues of the Christian faith and preaching. The author sets out the task of showing how these discrepancies were reflected in the enmity of the two monastic foreign missions in the preaching of Christianity in China in the 16th — 18th centuries, coming to the conclusion that such ideological prerequisites defined the stratedy of the Jesuit order’s proselytization doctrine, placing it and its Chinese missionaries in a position equally rejected by both the Vatican and the emperors of the Chinese Qing Empire .

The Black Cistercians: The Reactions of Black Monks to Bernard of Clairvaux and the Challenges of Increased Competition

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Black Monks possessed more works by Bernard of Clairvaux than the Cistercians themselves. This situation has historically been taken as evidence for the Black Monks' great admiration for Bernard's spiritual message. Based on a comparison of booklists from Southern Germany, England, and the Southern Low Countries, this article argues that the reality was more acomplicated. In the Southern Low Countries, the Black Monks studied Bernard's works and for a while attempted to counter the pull of Clairvaux by becoming more like the Cistercians themselves. In England and Southern Germany, where Bernard posed less of a threat, the Black Monks were significantly less interested in his writings.

Black Space and Trauma Ruins

This text compares two artistic works and two ways of playing with leftovers to ask how they perform in those two seemingly different contexts. It presents two models of thinking about the relationship between history and present day mediated by leftovers, remains and ruins proposing “leftovers theory” in relation to famous Bill Brown's “Thing theory”.Black space is a term used by American artist Theaster Gates in reference to places abandoned by their inhabitants due to process of gentrification. In one of most well-known Gates’ works, band called The Black Monks of Missippi performs in the decommissioned St Laurence church in Chicago. In this instance, black space becomes a model for affirmation of the black identity described by famous philosopher Fred Moten as nothingness. The material traces, ruins, leftovers of capitalism become a space of something that in Moten work is called non-performance: specific ability to constitute the identity on the denial of agency. Blackness is always fragmented; it has a structure of leftovers that deny to become new building, new better reality.On the other side of the world Polish artist Robert Kuśmirowski reconstructed ruins that never existed. His Traumagutstrasse was site-specific work produced for gallery belonging to Warsaw Academy of Fine Art. In Polish context, the relation between body, ruin and leftovers is almost always, even if not directly, marked by the experience of II World War. In Kuśmirowski's body of work Marianne Hirsches postmemory reveals its performative potential: it is a field of “scriptive things” directing our bodies and motions to re-enact those missing in the ruins. Kuśmirowski's leftovers are a way to make history present and to make present time already historical.In the end leftovers can be understood as performative things, becoming material expression of time.

The Life and Writings of Reginald of St. Augustine's Canterbury

The monastic poet and musician Reginald, or Renauld de la Faye, was born probably around 1030 AD in the French villa of Faye-la-Vineuse in the northeastern region of Poitou, in the Duchy of Aquitaine. Sometime in the early 1090s the Frenchman Reginald was established at the abbey of St. Augustine’s in Canterbury where as a master of music and verse he wrote hymns, dedicatory poems and letters to his friends as well as his greatest legacy, a versified life of the hermit saint Malchus which he wrote, corrected and enlarged probably between the years 1096 to 1107. Generally speaking, Reginald belongs to that group of continental religious men who came to England in the years and decades following the Conquest; some who, like Lanfranc and his colleagues and Anselm from Bec, were elected to positions of importance among England’s abbeys and cathedrals, some who like Gilbert Crispin were students of Anselm at Bec and others, like Goscelin of St. Bertin, who were invited to England by noted ecclesiasts to compose the lives of English saints. The connections between Poitou and Normandy and Norman England are many, as Beech has demonstrated. Altogether, Reginald’s life and writings were products of the age of the Gregorian Reform which had swept southern and central France in the 11th century; but they also reflect the particular circumstances of Post-Conquest Norman Canterbury where as a consequence of the industries of Lanfranc changes were being felt in the daily life and habits of the black monks living among the ancient abbeys and cathedrals of England. Though during his years in England Reginald as a Frenchman was an outsider to the old English community at Canterbury, represented by such men as Osbern of Christ Church, his writings and musical interests can nevertheless be seen to be representative of a new and initial wave of French tastes in both English literature and music. Although almost completely French in origin and inspiration, Reginald’s writings as well as his life, straddling two worlds brought together in Post-Conquest England, predict and foreshadow the cultural transformations of Anglo-Norman literature written in England during the 12th and 13th centuries.

The English Benedictine Cathedral Priories: Rule and Practice, c.1270–c.1420, by Joan Greatrex

The monastic cathedral was an English anomaly, a singular facet of the clerical establishment which reflected the (largely) episcopal origins of regular (and especially Benedictine) observance in the province. Secured in the Lanfrancian reform to serve as an instrument of regular and pastoral renewal, the nine cathedral convents of Black Monks became established as the keystones of monastic England, providing that large and diverse constituency with leadership, intellectual power and an unrivalled experience of life on the frontier between the cloister and the world. Their unique position, and the continuity that it afforded them at the Reformation, has also served to set them apart in the historical record: with the possible exception of Westminster Abbey (at any rate briefly a cathedral chapter) these are the best documented of all England’s medieval monasteries, retaining not only a fair proportion of their fabric, a sizeable fraction of their libraries (sometimes still in situ) but also many of their administrative records—among them complete chronological sequences of the compotus rolls of the obedientiaries, the only documents which can offer a comprehensive view of life within the monastic enclosure. Joan Greatrex has mined these records for more than thirty years, and surely there is no other current researcher who can match her perspective on the internal dynamics—and the personalities—of these eight communities. Some fifteen years ago, she captured the human dimension in her compendious Biographical Register, which recorded the life-histories of the men who made their profession at the priories between the Conquest and the Dissolution. The present work is intended as a companion volume, providing a comparative survey of the monastic life of the priories in the period when their independence and influence was greatest: before c.1270 they could scarcely secure a superior unhindered; after c.1420 they were challenged by the external pressure for reform and, internally, Greatrex suggests, by a pervasive, existential ennui.

Black Monks and White Gold The Solovetskii Monastery's Prosperous Salt Trade during the Time of Troubles of the Early Seventeenth Century

AbstractThis article represents a study of extant business records of the Vologda podvor'e of the Solovotskii Monastery from the Time of Troubles (1598-1613). The archival records show that the monastery continued to take in impressive sums from its salt trade during this period of crisis, and in fact was able to increase its revenue during the first two thirds of the Troubles. The study additionally demonstrates that both prices and sales volume oscillated (rose and fell) in a yearly pattern. However, over the longer term, volume remained constant while prices rose, thus producing the increase in net income. The detailed records of prices also enable a comparison to the late Prof. Hellie's data set in The Ecomomy and Material Culture of Russia. The Solovki salt prices recorded at Vologda manifest distinct price levels and behavior and thus significantly enhance Hellie's charts for the Time of Troubles period. The study as a whole illustrates that the Time of Troubles exerted quite an uneven effect on the population of Muscovy, with the wealthy monasteries often economically unaffected or at least less affected than the general population. It also reveals the extent to which economic profit remained a principal driving force of the monasterial “corporation” at this time.

The English Cathedral Priories and the Pursuit of Learning in the Later Middle Ages

It has frequently been observed that the intellectual activities of the English Black Monks were in decline during the last two-and-a-half centuries before the Dissolution. There is, indeed, a remarkable contrast between the fecundity of the monastic scriptoria in the two centuries after the Conquest and the apparent inertia of later years, when the creative stimulus seems to have dwindled to the verge of extinction and few, if any, original minds are found at work within the cloister. This generalisation cannot be challenged, as the evidence leaves little room for doubt, but the ‘apparent inertia’ may be questioned since it is a contradiction of the emerging facts. The latter suggest not apathy but persistence in the pursuit of learning, that is, a continuing concern for study on the part of the monastic community; and this should not be disparaged because it bore little more than the practical, commonplace fruits of preaching and teaching. We cannot regard these as fruits of scholarship to be compared with the original compositions which grew out of the philosophical and theological disputations at the centre of university life; they were daily or weekly activities, quite unremarkable, and probably for this very reason left scant record of their occurrence. Moreover, the Black Monk Chapter was promoting these fruits by stating unequivocally, in its statutes of c. 1363, that the principal reason behind the joint decision to send one monk in twenty for further study at the university was to fulfil these precise and practical requirements. A clear indication of the enduring commitment to this policy on the part of most of the cathedral monasteries is to be found in many of the surviving documents, which affirm a consistent adherence to their obligations.

DE EERSTE CISTERCIËNSERS EN HET OUDE MONNIKSWEZEN

Summary The early Cistercians considered themselves the true heirs of ancient monasticism in the way in which they practised the rule of Saint Benedict; in contradistinction to the then prevailing, traditional Benedictine monasticism, which was accused of having bartered part of this rule for their own customs. The Cistercians, when they first started, were men of their time and closely linked with social change, both from an economic and a spiritual point of view. The much emphasized differences between them and the Benedictines, namely the poverty of the monasteries and the austerity of the liturgy for the sake of manual labour, soon disappeared to a large extent. This was true in particular of the Cluniacs, whom the Cistercians continued to consider as their rivals. More important differences concerned the organization of both orders and the colour of their habits. This last point was something largely emotional: the black monks mostly accusing the white monks of pride and hypocrisy. These feelings of ...

Some Statistics of Religious Motivation

Motives are the inner springs of action, the invisible causes which are apprehended only in their visible effects. The latter, when collected and classified as numerical data, are known as statistics, through which at least one aspect of the former can be explored and analysed. Thus, while we cannot ask them to reveal such fundamental questions as to what moved men to enter or leave the monastic life, we can legitimately seek an answer in quantitative terms to what is preliminary and, as such, vital to our understanding of the problem of religious motivation: what do statistics disclose with regard to the force of religious motivation and to its rise and decline among the black monks in England in the two centuries between the first catastrophic onslaught of the Black Death and the dissolution (AD 1350–1540)? This question encompasses a vast field and, for the purposes of this present study, our attention must be limited to the three cathedral priories of Ely, Norwich and Worcester.

King Stephen and the Black Monks Abbatial Elections during 'The Anarchy'

King Stephen and the Black Monks Abbatial Elections during 'The Anarchy'

A Reevaluation of the Anarchy of Stephen's Reign, 1135-1154: The Case of the Black Monks

A Reevaluation of the Anarchy of Stephen's Reign, 1135-1154: The Case of the Black Monks

English black monks and episcopal elections in the II20s

English black monks and episcopal elections in the II20s Get access D. L. BETHELL D. L. BETHELL University CollegeDublin Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The English Historical Review, Volume LXXXIV, Issue CCCXXXIII, October 1969, Pages 673–698, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/LXXXIV.CCCXXXIII.673 Published: 01 October 1969

The Crisis of Western Monasticism, 1050–1130

THE second half of the eleventh century and the first three decades of the twelfth long been regarded as an extremely critical period in the development of Western monasticism. Generally speaking, these eight decades witnessed the ending of the Benedictine centuries, that long period of early medieval history, stretching over half a millenium, in which the fate not only of religion but also of culture and civilization in Western Europe was in large part determined by the work of the black monks. Several great scholars, among them Hauck, Sackut, Knowles, and Hallinger,' made clear this central theme in early medieval history. It has been shown that St. Benedict intended to create a religious institution which would be a refuge for the more devout Latin Christians who have lost faith in civilization but will not give up faith in God, as Dean Inge said of the early medieval mystics.2 In the midst of a falling world, a widespread pessimism encouraged the conviction that the promised salvation could only be attained by withdrawal from society. But in succeeding centuries it became evident that the walls of the monastery could not effectively cut off the monks from the life of the surrounding society, as St. Benedict had intended. Early medieval society, so pitifully lacking in adequate leadership and effective institutions, could not afford to lose the labor and talents of the monks, nor could it fail to enlist in its service an institution that exhibited remarkable powers of survival in the midst of political disorganization. Consequently by the Carolingian period the Benedictine monastery had, as it were, come to be absorbed into society. By the ninth century its mem-

Chapters of the English Black Monks

Chapters of the English Black Monks

The General and Provincial Chapters Of the English Black Monks, 1215–1540

In accordance with the decree “In singulis regnis’2 of the fourth Council of the Lateran, 1215, the hitherto unconnected monasteries of the Black Monks of St. Benedict in England, as in other countries, were required to unite themselves by holding every three years, a general or provincial chapter of the heads of all their independent houses, and the work of the chapters was to be enforced by triennial visitations made by the monks themselves, as distinct from those made by the bishops. Until the constitutions of Benedict XII in 1336 the monks in the provinces of Canterbury and York met in separate chapters: after that date there was a single chapter for the whole of England.

The Method and Degree of Fasting and Abstinence of the Black Monks in England before the Reformation

The Method and Degree of Fasting and Abstinence of the Black Monks in England before the Reformation

The English Black Monks of St. Benedict; A Sketch of Their History from the Coming of St. Augustine to the Present Day. Ethelred L. Taunton

Previous articleNext article FreeRecent Theological LiteratureThe English Black Monks of St. Benedict; A Sketch of Their History from the Coming of St. Augustine to the Present Day. Ethelred L. Taunton Ralph C. H. CatterallRalph C. H. Catterall Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Volume 3, Number 1Jan., 1899 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/477061 Views: 92Total views on this site Journal History This article was published in The American Journal of Theology (1897-1920), which is continued by The Journal of Religion (1921-present). PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Reviews of Books

Journal Article Reviews of Books Get access The English Black Monks of St. Benedict: a Sketch of their History from the Coming of St. Augustine to the Present Day. By the ETHELRED L. TAUNTON 2 vols (London: John C. Nimmo. 1897.) MARY BATESON MARY BATESON Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The English Historical Review, Volume XIII, Issue LI, July 1898, Pages 556–558, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/XIII.LI.556 Published: 01 July 1898

Review of Book: The English Black Monks of St. Benedict; A Sketch of Their History from the Coming of St. Augustine to the Present Day

Review of Book: The English Black Monks of St. Benedict; A Sketch of Their History from the Coming of St. Augustine to the Present Day