Carthusian Monk Research Articles

Virtuous Legislation: The Royal Decree for the Sustainable Management of the Woods of Serra San Bruno, Stilo, Mongiana, and Ferdinandea

The Saving Forests Decree of 1773, issued by Ferdinand IV of Bourbon, marked a fundamental step in the sustainable management of the forests of the Serre Calabresi. Metal mining and processing in the region dates back to ancient times, with Greek colonies exploiting local resources for tools and coins. With the arrival of the Normans, the mines became strategic and were granted to the Carthusian monks, and the Norman smelting furnace improved military production. Under Ferdinand II, the Ferdinandea foundry reached its peak, producing high-quality weapons. The Salvaboschi decree demonstrated a growing awareness of the need to balance industrial needs with environmental protection. This study analyzes the decree, examining how its provisions are in line with modern environmental protection laws. The analysis of this study focuses on the provisions of the Salvaboschi decree and their compliance with current environmental protection laws. The main objective of the decree was to implement sustainable forestry practices through regulated logging cycles to prevent deforestation and promote natural regeneration. Analysis of the law reveals its progressive nature and its conformity with modern principles of environmental conservation. This historic legislation testifies to the early recognition of the importance of sustainable resource management and the foresight of the Bourbon administration in implementing practices that would benefit both the environment and industrial development. Through the study and analysis of the rules present in the document, it was possible to make significant comparisons with the laws in force. The decree demonstrates considerable foresight in the protection of natural and forest heritage. This document represents an important step towards environmental protection, highlighting a concrete and proactive commitment to the protection of natural resources. The ability to compare existing regulations with new provisions offers a clear and in-depth perspective on legislative evolution in environmental matters, confirming the importance of regulatory updates to address contemporary ecological challenges.

Palynology of Gardens and Archaeobotany for the Environmental Reconstruction of the Charterhouse of Calci-Pisa in Tuscany (Central Italy)

In central Italy, the Charterhouse of Calci hosts the Natural History Museum of the University of Pisa. This monumental monastery was founded in 1366 by Carthusian monks. The Charterhouse has experienced various transformations over the centuries, until its abandonment in the 1970s. Since 2018, interdisciplinary archaeological research focused on the monks’ gardens (and particularly: the Prior’s, the Apothecary’s, and the Master’s garden) and the green spaces outside the cloister walls, consisting of courtyards and orchards, to determine the individual (gardens) and collective (green spaces and surrounding woods) practices adopted by Carthusians. Palynology and archaeobotany have allowed to reconstruct the plant biodiversity, with flowers and ornamental, aromatic, and medicinal herbs that grew in the gardens, as well as the management of local hilly woods and agricultural practices, including the cultivation of fruit trees, such as chestnut, olive tree, almond tree, and grapevine. Our research has been based on a solid theoretical approach, interpreting archaeological and archaeobotanical data in relation to the intricate network of human and non-human connections. Gardens are seen as a co-creation made together by human and non-human agencies, and their diachronic transformation is read as an expression of personalities of the monks, feelings, and connections with nature and divinity.

Saint Jerome as a Model and Author for Nuns in Early Hungarian Texts

Saint Jerome was a prominent figure in the Hungarian-language literature prepared mainly for nuns in the last decade of the fifteenth and the first decades of the sixteenth century. A Dominican codex contains two legends about him (one of them is the translation of Pseudo-Augustine’s Epistola ad Cyrillum de magnificentiis beati Hieronymi), while a Franciscan manuscript preserved the Hungarian version of the Regula monachorum attributed to Jerome. The Franciscan András Nyujtódi represented the Church Father as a model teacher and translator when quoting the great biblical philologist’s dedicatory lines to the Book of Judith in his translation of the same biblical book, which this Transylvanian friar prepared as a private reading for his sister, a Franciscan tertiary. Another self-proclaimed follower of Jerome’s translating activity was an anonymous Carthusian monk, who mentioned the Slavic Bible and liturgy prepared by the saintly scholar. – The paper presents the texts by and about Jerome, which can be found in the not very extensive late medieval Hungarian-language literature, and traces the image of the saintly author as represented for the audience of the corpus produced for Observant Dominican and Franciscan nuns, tertiaries, and in a few cases perhaps laypersons.

Pieza dramática inédita de Francisco Galeas para la festividad del Corpus

Estudio y edición de la única pieza dramática del fraile cartujo Francisco Galeas (Sevilla, 1567-1614) compuesta en loor del Sacramento. Su condición de inédita, brevedad, argumento y virtualidades escénicas muestran a su autor como conocedor de las técnicas dramáticas y dueño de la puesta en escena, aconsejando su incorporación al patrimonio teatral de un período en el que es abundante la producción perdida o no exhumada.

Jazz cats

Jazz cats

“Writing-to the moment”: Narrative Immediacy, Mystical Theology, and the Sanctification of Time in Richard Methley’sRefectorium Salutis

Richard Methley (d. 1527/8), a Carthusian monk in the north of England, wrote a series of mystical treatises in Latin that have received minimal attention from modern scholars. For that reason it has gone unnoticed that in his diary-like work Refectorium salutis (The Refectory of Salvation) Methley employs a quite unusual narrative strategy: he writes down his visionary experiences as they are happening, giving an immediacy to his text that the British literary tradition does not see the likes of until hundreds of years later with the development of the novel and Samuel Richardson’s experimentations with “writing-to the moment.” This essay sets Methley’s own precocious moments of “writing-to the moment” in the context of his text’s coherent program of temporal markers, extending from the liturgical year, to the hours of the Divine Office, to the indivisible instant and the “now” of the eternal present shared by narrator and reader-and God. With the help of Augustine and Paul Ricoeur, this article argues that Methley’s whole chronological system, and especially his narrative immediacy, captures to some extent the eternity of the divine and the time-rupturing mystical unity achieved by Methley in his ecstasies. Such an innovative intersection of literary and theological effects highlights how the Refectorium forces us to rethink a newly elongated history of “writing-to the moment” in terms of the sacred and not just the fictional.

Der kompetente Sünder. Zur auktorialen Selbstdarstellung Francesco Petrarcas in De otio religioso

Abstract Francis Petrarch has developed many diverse strategies to present himself as an author. When constructing his own figura auctoris, he refers to a highly stylized version of his autobiographical ego to which he ascribes a particular epistemic competence. Indeed, such competence serves as the basis of both authority and authorship. In his De otio religioso, Petrarch addresses the community of the Carthusian monks of the Abbey of Montrieux in Southern France. Paradoxically, he introduces himself to them as being competent with regard to questions of monastic life, although in this respect his addressees should be much more competent than Petrarch can be. At the same time the author depicts himself as a great sinner. As such, he cannot dispose of considerable knowledge in religious matters. Instead, he points out his extraordinary cultural expertise as a philologist, humanist and owner of books, a knowledge that makes him, the sinner, become an author able to instruct the monks. Petrarch negotiates the claims to validity asserted by two different cultures (Christian vs. pagan, late antique/medieval vs. antique/early-modern) and seeks to position himself as an author with authority in both fields.

The salience of silence: the silence of salience

This is a unique study of an almost silent and still film of the organization of silence. The film “Into Great Silence” (IGS) shows how Carthusian monks organize silence, punctuating and structuring it with recurring rituals and routines. Carthusian silence is discourse: it is their way of communicating, interacting, and sustaining their organization. The salience of Carthusian silence is that it is where they can discern divine presence. By studying IGS, the researcher overcame the challenges of access to the monastery, of studying silence, and of appraising the implicit salience of Carthusian silence. The film invites viewers to silent introspection through sound art, visual poetry, and a silent metaphorical discourse that relies on symbols. IGS utilizes reverse visual metaphor, with metaphorical images that move the audience from images to abstract territories. The researcher also reflects on his own personal experience during his stays at a Carthusian Charterhouse, when he was a novitiate candidate in the sole English Carthusian Monastery (St. Hugh’s Charterhouse, Parkminster, near Horsham in West Sussex, England). Although he did not pursue this vocation, his two periods in the monastery left him with an indelible impression of a religious order that has not changed for nearly a millennium, and which imparted a deep awareness and appreciation of silence, solitude, and stillness. The paper draws out lessons for research and organizations.

TRA ASCESI MONASTICA E DOTTRINE MEDICHE: I CERTOSINI E IL PROBLEMA DELLA CARNE

The article reconstructs the debate that took place in the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries on the prohibition for the Carthusian monks to eat meat, even in case of illness. The positions taken by Arnaldo of Villanova, William of Ivrea, Giovanni Gerson and Dionigi the Carthusian are analyzed in the light the of the Order’s Constitutions that make abstinence and fasting one of his qualifying and most important points. This debate illustrates the meaning of the unpublished document published in the appendix, which contains the recipe for a restaurativum to substitute the meat specifically dedicated to the sick Carthusian monks.

Regime de discurso e laços sociais: o silêncio e a escrita monástica na primeira metade do século XII

Resumo Momento de importante expansão urbana e econômica, o século XII foi também marcado por vozes que clamavam pelos desertos europeus. Social e religiosamente, esse foi um tempo marcado pela tensão entre a reestruturação da vida em comunidade e a valorização do isolamento eremítico. O aparecimento dos monges cartuxos (talvez a mais importante ordem eremítica medieval), ocorrido nesse contexto, oferece uma ocasião privilegiada para o estudo do que venho chamando de “monopólio da solidão” (o controle do isolamento pela Ecclesia). Pretendo aqui demonstrar como a escrita e o silêncio (ligados ao studium e à noção de comunicação “per litteras”) constituem um verdadeiro “regime de discurso” responsável por solucionar dialeticamente a contradição existente entre o propositum eremítico de abandono do mundo e sua inserção na comunidade eclesial.

Sic vivere est devote vivere

This essay outlines the theology of “modern-day” devotion, as it can be found in the works of the Carthusian monk Henry of Coesfeld (d. 1410). This theology consists of a classical Thomist framework, infused with ideas from Brabantine and Rhineland mysticism (e.g., Ruusbroec, Suso) and Carthusian spirituality, in which contempt for the world, purity of the heart, progression in the virtues, repentance and inner renewal, Eucharistic piety, meditation on Christ’s humanity and passion, “Christiformity,” and the imitation of Christ, play a central role. While pointing at the “present-day” moral decline in the religious orders and the church, Henry’s idea of devotion relates to personal reform, a process of becoming congruent with the “ancient” examples of Christ and the saints. His theology is not anti-mystical and anti-intellectual in nature, but at the same time it warns against the pitfalls of curiosity (curiositas) and the excesses of mysticism.

Monasteries – The layered capture of rhythm in space and time through rituals by ‘moulage’

Monasteries have represented a unique quest to balance daily life and sacredness for more than 1,500 years. The subject of this paper is their community life through rituals, and rhythm in time and space. We start with Philip Gröning’s movie, ‘Die Große Stille’ (2005), a poetical and intimate portrait of the everyday lives of Carthusian monks in Grande Chartreuse, high up in the French Alps. The movie shows great respect for rituals in prayer, but equally in the monks’ dealings with space and ritual objects. Monks live ‘together alone’ following traditions that are over one thousand years’ old, concerning identity and spiritual regeneration in a collective site.We then look at a twentieth century Benedictine monk, the architect and theorist Dom Hans van der Laan. He fostered a link between space and clothing as a progressive separation between individual and infinite nature. He defines our personal atmosphere as part of a larger whole, a relationship which is strengthened by rituals. We examine his designs of liturgical clothing as metaphoric of this relationship.To conclude we introduce the concept of ‘moulage’ as a potential architectural tool in the discourse of the adaptive reuse of monasteries.

Michelangelo and the English Martyrs by Anne Dillon (review)

Reviewed by: Michelangelo and the English Martyrs by Anne Dillon Bernadine Barnes Michelangelo and the English Martyrs. By Anne Dillon. (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing. 2013. Pp. xxviii, 356. $134.95. ISBN 978-0-7546-6447-5.) This engaging book deals with a broadsheet published in 1555. Engraved in Rome probably by Beatrizet, it visually and verbally reports on events that happened twenty years earlier in England during the reign of King Henry VIII. The Carthusian monks in London refused to acknowledge Henry’s role as head of the church in England and were condemned for treason. They were dragged from their charterhouse and hanged but cut down before they expired; they were then stripped, castrated, and disemboweled while still alive. Their bodies were dismembered and the parts publicly displayed. The murders caused an outcry at the time, but it was only in 1555 during the brief reign of the Catholic Queen Mary I that a public examination of the events was possible. The pope asked Cardinal Reginald Pole, the legate of the Holy See to England, to investigate the atrocities. The author proposes that Pole himself wrote the extensive text on the broadsheet, which is translated in an appendix. Martyrdom as an expression of faith is a powerful theme in Pole’s other writings, and the brutally straightforward depiction of the monks’ torture and deaths on the broadsheet—without reference to any later miracles—may well reflect Pole’s ideas. The imagery is complex, and the author proposes three readings that operate at the same time. Although the events depicted happened mostly in London, the backgrounds in the broadsheet recall Rome. Dillon suggests, quite convincingly, that the setting is meant to create a parallel between the Carthusian and the early Christian martyrs of Rome. The second reading comes from contemporary references—some of the onlookers to the executions can perhaps be associated with Henry VIII’s courtiers and staff. The third reading suggests that the monks were imitating Christ as they went to their deaths. A scaffold in the distance recalls the cross on Calvary, for example. The author sometimes undermines her argument by imposing consistency on the images. She states, for example, that all the figures are dressed in classical garments, but a few pages later she not only acknowledges that many are not but also uses those very figures as evidence for her second reading. Michelangelo is connected to the making of the broadsheet through his friendship with Pole. Pole’s involvement with artists in the 1540s is a neglected topic, and Dillon’s suggestion that he may have been an adviser to Michelangelo as he painted the Pauline Chapel frescoes deserves more study. The subject of St. Peter’s martyrdom in the Pauline chapel (the Donation of the Keys to Peter would be the more expected theme) is tied to Pole’s own emphasis on true martyrdom as the ultimate sign of faith. Since several of the figures on the broadsheet are in poses that reflect knowledge of the Pauline Chapel frescoes, Dillon would like to say that he provided drawings for the broadsheet. [End Page 613] In the end, it is not Michelangelo but one of his followers, Gaspar Beccera, who may have supplied drawings to the printmaker. Dillon’s method for making the attribution is circuitous and might be called circumstantial. Beccera is a Spanish artist who supplied drawings to Beatrizet for Juan Valverde’s anatomical book. At least one of the figures who is being disemboweled recalls some of those anatomical illustrations. The patron of the broadsheet is the Spanish Cardinal Juan Álvarez, who was also the patron of Valverde’s book. Dillon goes on to argue that the “actual recipient” of the broadsheet is Philip II, king of Spain and husband to Queen Mary of England. These Spanish connections are more convincing than the suggestion that Michelangelo was involved in the design. Whether or not Beccera saw Michelangelo’s drawings, it is difficult to believe that Michelangelo’s ideas about sola fide were transmitted through the broadsheet, especially since (as Dillon strongly argues) Michelangelo hid his beliefs from others. The tendency to overstatement in the quest for certainty is a problem throughout this...

Genius Loci: digital heritage augmentation for immersive performance

Genius Loci is an art installation and a theater play based on audiovisual augmented reality combined with contemporary writings and religious texts. The scenography takes place in a disused church and begins with a dialog between a contemporary author in residence and the ghost of a Carthusian monk during which the graphical rendering of historical hypotheses is progressively revealed. In the second part, the silhouette of the monk emerges from contemporary visuals that combine fluid and animated graphical patterns anchored to the church geometry. After saying a psalm, the monk vanishes in an apocalyptic audiovisual crescendo. Both historical and contemporary visuals are animated spatial augmented reality installations based on 3D scans of the church enriched with historical furniture and ornamentation. This study shows how digitalised heritage can be used for situated performance, and offers insights on artistic and technological issues that can ensure a better immersion of the audience through enhanced believability and empathy with the performance.

How Soon Is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time and Opening Up Middle English Manuscripts: Literary and Visual Approaches

How Soon Is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time and Opening Up Middle English Manuscripts: Literary and Visual Approaches

Monasticism and the Public Contemplative in Late Medieval England: Richard Methley and His Spiritual Formation

This essay explores the late medieval rhetoric of self-representation and conceptions of audience through an examination of the writings of the fifteenth-century Carthusian monk Richard Methley. Methley is considered as a “public contemplative” — a writer who offers his own contemplative experiences to a greater audience. Because these experiences, unlike visions, involved embodied ecstasies that are inseparable from the contemplative who experiences them, communicating them involved narrating the self as well as the experience. Methley’s position as a Carthusian, simultaneously solitary hermit and communal monk, allowed him to explore the possible relations between self and community. The essay demonstrates Methley’s self-conscious construction of his first-person narration by comparing and constrasting it to one of his most influential models, the fourteenth-century hermit, Richard Rolle, as well as to materials from vernacular traditions — the keeping of spiritual diaries promoted by the Devotio Moderna and the English text of The Cloud of Unknowing.

Artists, Patrons, and Trust in Seventeenth-Century Naples: The Case of the Certosa di San Martino

The present article explores the theme of trust, as conceived by Paolo Mattia Doria, with reference to the professional relationships forged between artists and patrons at the Carthusian monastery in Naples, the Certosa di San Martino, during the seventeenth century. This specific case study is of particular relevance for several reasons. First, it falls within the chronological scope of Spanish viceregal rule observed by Doria. Second, the Carthusian monks at San Martino employed a large number of painters, sculptors, architects, embroiderers, and silversmiths in redecorating their monastery, and they kept careful records of their payments to these artists. The payments, conserved in the Archivio di Stato in Naples, provide a body of recorded transactions that can rarely be reconstructed in any other industry in the city during this period. Third, the amount of money spent by the Carthusians on refurbishing and redecorating their monastery assumes macro-economic proportions. The Carthusian monks paid the premier sculptor-architect in Naples, Cosimo Fanzago, a total of 57,000 ducats over the course of 33 years of work at San Martino, thereby producing an average of 1,900 ducats worth of architectural sculpture at the monastery per year.

Refuga legis ac Christi hostis e subtilis Commentator: Averroè nelle opere di Dionigi il Certosino

Denys of Rijkel (1402-1471), Carthusian monk, devotes a large part of his huge literary production to philosophy, which, in his view, is the lowest level of a hierarchy rising through scholastic theology and culminating in mystical theology. Philosophy adumbrates the superior modes of supernatural knowledge at a natural level. Since Averroes is certainly among the philosophers most cited by Denys, this article examines Denys’s attitude towards him and points out that it oscillates between a respect for Averroes as an authoritative representative of philosophic wisdom and a disapproval of the perfidious Averroes who denies the basic Christian truths. The essay first examines Denys’s invectives against Averroes, casting light on the philosophical reasons behind the rhetoric of the damned and impious Averroes; it demonstrates how thirteenth-century Scholastics influenced Denys’s approach to Averroes’s philosophical doctrines; finally, it reconstructs Denys views on two crucial noetic issues related to Averro...

Two Stories

62 WORLD LITERATURE TODAY photo : paul schirnhofer Two Stories Clemens Setz The Two Corpses Aman stood in front of a small salamander. The salamander was lying motionlessly on a boundary stone in the sun. The man knelt down, took off his straw hat, and eyed the dainty creature from all sides. “He’s lying there completely still,” the man thought. “I wonder if he’s dead . . .” He got up, patted the dust of the country road off his knees, and put his hat back on. “He is wandering restlessly through the world, his head immersed in shadows,” the salamander thought. “I wonder if he’s dead.” On the Conductivity of Monks In 1746 Abbé Jean-Antoine Nollet had 700 Carthusian monks stand in a circle in a field and wired them together. The wire led to a Leyden jar, a simple capacitor that generated electricity. The experiment was to test whether the monks would all cry out in pain at the same instant. It was a success, as it had already been once before with 180 soldiers of the National Guard. Nollet was subsequently showered with honors by the king and appointed professor of experimental physics in Paris. Translations from the German By Peter Constantine Clemens Setz (b. 1982, Graz) is one of the foremost young writers in the Germanspeaking world. He was a runner-up for the prestigious German Book Award and has received numerous prizes. Peter Constantine translates literature from many languages, including The Essential Writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, forthcoming in 2013. He has received numerous prizes and awards. Q&A with Clemens Setz tr. Peter Constantine Q: Is there a quote you like or think is particularly fitting or relevant to very short fiction, whether by a fiction writer or by someone in a field other than literature, be it the arts, sciences, philosophy , religion, or other area? A: “Just speak your self, that’s riddle enough,” the Sphinx says in the second part of Goethe’s Faust. Q: Do you have a favorite flash story or writer, or favorite book of very short fictions? A: Félix Fénéon, a French writer and journalist. He wrote what he called “Stories in three lines” for Figaro—small, dense spotlights on the inexhaustible strangeness of human interactions. One example: “Madame Couderc, of Saint-Ouen, was constantly kept from hanging herself from her window latch. At her wit’s end, she fled across the fields.” Q: What are you reading now? A: Kristin Lavransdatter, by Sigrid Undset—quite the opposite of flash fiction. Q: What does flash fiction offer readers that slow fiction doesn’t? A: The delightfully paradoxical feeling of reading that’s reflected in Hamlet’s words: “O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space.” Q: Did any of your longer work begin as a shortshort story, or vice versa? A: Yes, it happens quite often. A story only gradually divulges the form it needs to lead a life of its own. ...

The Canonisation of the Forty English Martyrs: An Ecumenical Dilemma

In October 1970, amidst jubilant celebrations at St Peter's in Rome, Pope Paul VI canonised forty English and Welsh martyrs as saints. Auberon Waugh called it ‘the biggest moment for English Catholicism since Catholic emancipation in 1829’. It marked the culmination of a long campaign which had begun in earnest in the mid-nineteenth century under Cardinals Wiseman and Manning, shortly after the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy. By 1935 nearly two hundred Reformation martyrs had been beatified, but only two of these had been canonised, John Fisher and Thomas More—the first Englishmen to be made saints since John of Bridlington in 1401. After the hiatus of the Second World War, the cause was revived in 1960 seeking the canonisation of another forty English martyrs. All were Roman Catholics executed under the Tudor and Stuart monarchs or the Puritan Commonwealth, ranging from Carthusian monks who fell foul in 1535 of Henry VIII's Act of Supremacy, to seminary priests who were caught up in the ‘Popish Plot’ against Charles II in 1679. All but six of the forty had been hung, drawn and quartered, many of them on the gallows at Tyburn.