Monastic Identity Research Articles

In search of new monastic identities

This paper considers how the reformist abbot Estêvão de Aguiar, in close association with the Portuguese crown, managed the coexistence of two antagonistic notions at the helm of Portugal’s principal Cistercian house: the Cistercian ideal of Santa Maria of Alcobaça as Domus Spiritualis and the temporal reality of a community where travel and circulation were vital.

Masculinizing Religious Life: Sexual Prowess, the Battle for Chastity and Monastic Identity

With the increasing turn to celibacy for monks and priests over the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, one avenue for performing masculinity – sexual prowess and the engendering of children – closed for monks and priests. Jacqueline Murray explores the ways in which the myth of uncontrollable male lust became deployed to enable clerics to redefine masculinity: instead of actual battle, these second sons of the military aristocracy displayed strength and prowess through fighting lust; instead of actual sexual prowess, “real men” could demonstrate masculinity through rationally controlling sexual desires.

A monastic angelology in stone: the sculpted angels at Conques

ABSTRACT In the Middle Ages, angels were a constant presence and participated with the faithful in praising God. Due to the manifold roles played by angels in Christian theology, it is not surprising that they were a popular subject for church decoration. At the abbey church of Sainte-Foy at Conques, the attention paid to and regard for angels was expressed to an exceptional degree and therefore provide an excellent case study through which to understand how monumental sculpture communicated monastic identity and exegesis. This article considers the formal attributes and spatial arrangement of the sculpted angels at Conques as they relate to early medieval monastic conceptions of angels’ function and role within the heavenly community, providing the monks with a celestial model to negotiate the boundaries between the active and contemplative life as articulated by Gregory the Great and the Venerable Bede.

Fully Ordained Nuns in Fourteenth-to-Seventeenth Tibetan Hagiographical Narratives

Many contemporary efforts have been put to (re-)establish the order of fully ordained nuns in Tibetan Buddhism. Those who are in favor of such practice often refer to premodern Tibetan hagiographies to claim the existence of indigenous fully ordained nuns in the past. A series of female practitioners, indeed, appear as fully ordained nuns in such narratives dating from approximately the fourteenth century to the seventeenth century. Their monastic identities as such, however, are contested by Tibetan Buddhist masters because the methods of their ordinations, seemingly conferred by the male saṃgha alone, do not strictly follow the Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinaya tradition, which is observed by the Tibetan Buddhists. In an effort to investigate as to how these female practitioners were fully ordained and the purposes of composing such narratives about their ordinations, this article revisits relevant hagiographies with particular reference to The biography of Chokyi Dronma, the Third incarnation of the WisdomḌākinī Sonam Peldren (Ye shes mkha’ ‘gro bsod nams dpal ‘dren gyi sku skye gsum pa rje btsun ma chos kyi sgron ma’i rnam thar) and a detailed exposition of The biography of Shākya Chokden (Shākya mchog ldan gyi rnam thar zhib mo rnam par ‘byed pa). It suggests that depicting these personas as fully ordained nuns serves the purpose of highlighting the hagiography subjects’ outstanding spiritual performance, while the recognition of monastic identity as such may not go beyond the context of these writings.

Taiwanese Nuns and Education Issues in Contemporary Taiwan

In this article, I discuss the Buddhist educational profile of nuns in contemporary Taiwan by introducing the development of monastic education for women. Taiwanese women’s mass ordination created a Buddhist renaissance after postwar Taiwan, a national ordination system based on monastic discipline, as well as the revival of monastic education. Both ordination and monastic education are very strong institutional settings for women’s monastic identity. Its findings, firstly, shed light on how the increased opportunities for women’s education in Taiwanese Buddhism have continuously attracted young female university students. Secondly, these so-called scholarly nuns come to Buddhist academies as students and eventually become instructors. These scholarly nuns elevate the standards of their Buddhist academies and use their original academic specializations to expand the educational curriculum of their school. The role of scholarly nuns in contemporary Taiwan exemplifies that Buddhism provides educational resources for women, as educational resources enhance women’s engagement in Buddhism.

Monastic Identity of Constantine the Philosopher and Methodius and the First Slavic Translations of Ascetic Texts

Konštantínove listy/Constantine’s Letters is an international scientific journal which has been published in Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra since 2008. The main goal of the journal is to present problems and themes intertwined with the cultural and political history of Great Moravia during the 9th century as well as continuity of Cyrillo-Methodian tradition in later times. Next, there is also space for other adjacent topics connected with Slavonic and Byzantine history, philology, philosophy, literature, cultural relations as well as medieval and early modern age ecclesiastical history and iconography.

Experience in preserving monastic identity in the cloisters of the Podmoskovye in the context of the Soviet regime's museum policy (1917-1930)

Experience in preserving monastic identity in the cloisters of the Podmoskovye in the context of the Soviet regime's museum policy (1917-1930)

Austeridad versus lujo. El vestido y los freiles de la Orden de Santiago durante la Edad Media

Cet article traite de la création et de la transformation des signes d'identité à travers les vêtements dans l'Ordre Militaire de Santiago (ou Ordre de Saint Jacques de l'Epée) pendant l'époque qui couvre sa fondation en 1171 jusqu’à la fin du Moyen âge. Dans l'introduction l'auteur analyse l'utilisation des couleurs, le genre de vêtements, la forme et les signes emblématiques qui forment les structures de l'identité monastique. Les ordres militaires qui apparaissent au XIIeme siècle, ont hérité de cette tradition monastique et l'utilisent pour établir leur identité de moine-soldat. Les fondateurs de l'ordre de Santiago -un groupe de chevaliers- marquent leur conversion religieuse en adoptant une croix rouge en forme d'épée sur la poitrine, et en renonçant à arborer des couleurs voyantes et des tissus précieux. Mais leur code, qui se manifeste à travers les vêtements, change vers la fin du Moyen-âge en accord avec la transformation du sens que prend le fait d’être membre de l'Ordre. La dernière partie de l'article tente d'interpréter ces changements, en analysant à la fois le règlement du Chapitre Général de Santiago et les sources littéraires en relation avec l'Ordre.

The ‘Greening’ of Christian Monasticism and the Future of Monastic Landscapes in North America

Christian monasticism has an ancient land-based foundation. The desert fathers and later reform movements appealed to the land for sustenance, spiritual metaphor, and as a marker of authentic monastic identity. Contemporary Roman Catholic monastics with this history in mind, have actively engaged environmental discourse in ways that draw from their respective monastic lineages, a process sociologist Stephen Ellingson calls ‘bridging’. Though this study is of limited scope, this bridging between monastic lineages and environmental discourse could cautiously be identified with the broader phenomenon of the ‘greening’ of Christianity. Looking to the future, while the footprint of North American monastic communities is quite small, and their numbers are slowly declining, a variety of conservation-minded management schemes implemented since the 1990s by some communities suggests that the impact will remain for many decades to come.

The Grammar of Prayer According to Origen: On Prayer as Technê Askêtikê

The Grammar of Prayer According to Origen:On Prayer as Technê Askêtikê John Solheid (bio) I. INTRODUCTION Catherine Chin has explored the role of grammar and grammarians in the construction of Christian concepts and discourse in late antiquity. She argued that through the teaching of language, Christian grammarians transformed literary concepts into explicitly religious concepts, transforming "linguistic work into incipient religious practice."1 Building on Chin's argument, Rebecca Krawiec explored John Cassian's use of grammar in constructing a monastic identity.2 The role of grammarians in constructing Christian discourse and practice thus provides an intriguing framework to understanding the aims of third-century theological treatises, such as Origen's On Prayer, Peri Euchês (PE), a text explicitly composed to inform the Christian practice of prayer for its readers. I will apply Chin's work on Christian grammarians of the fourth and fifth centuries to a reading of PE. I argue that both Origen's background as a grammarian and his ascetic values provided him with the literary skills and spiritual vision to construct an understanding of prayer for other ascetically-minded Christians. The confluence of these two worlds (grammar and ascesis) allowed Origen to develop a spiritual theology of prayer rooted in his exegesis of Scripture. However, PE should be considered more than a treatise on the practice of prayer. I argue that in PE, Origen provided his readers a language with which to talk about Christian asceticism. In other words, PE can be seen as a technê askêtikê: a set of rules for the Christian spiritual life. This paper will be organized into three parts. First, I will focus on several passages from PE highlighting Origen's grammatical work, in order to demonstrate how Origen's grammatical training informed his understanding of Christian prayer. In this section, I will focus specifically on Origen's grammatical exegesis of words and passages from Scripture. This will situate Origen's treatment of the subject of prayer within the context of his grammatical engagement with the biblical text. In the second section, I will focus on the first part of Origen's treatise, his response to certain "problems" pertaining to prayer. Responding to these problems formed the content and structure of the first [End Page 283] half of PE.3 Here, Origen constructed a definition of prayer itself. Third, I will focus on Origen's commentary on the Lord's Prayer, which formed the content and structure of the second half of PE, and argue that Origen transformed the Lord's Prayer into a device for his ascetic pedagogy. The combined picture will show the extent to which Origen's training as a grammatikos (grammarian) allowed him to use biblical texts to inform a life of Christian ascesis. II. A GRAMMAR OF PRAYER From Eusebius of Caesarea, it is known that Origen spent some of his young adult years as a teacher of grammar in Alexandria. After the martyrdom of his father, the "necessities of life" dictated that Origen needed an occupation to support his family. According to Eusebius, Origen "applied himself more eagerly to the training in literature, so that he had a considerable preparation in letters" (ἐϰθυμóτεϱον τε [ϰαὶ] μετὰ τὴν ἐϰείνου τελευτὴν τῇ πεϱὶ τοὺς λóγους ἀσϰήσει ὅλον ἐπιδοὺς ἑαυτὸν, ὡς ϰαὶ παϱασϰευὴν ἐπὶ τὰ γϱαμματιϰὰ μετϱίαν ἔϰειν).4 According to Ronald Heine, as a grammatikos, Origen would have taught grammar at the second level of a child's education. This would have entailed a grammatical study of the classical authors, such as Homer, Herodotus, Xenophon, and Thucydides.5 Raffaella Cribiore has demonstrated the tedious methods of grammatical scholarship in late antiquity. Of note was the grammarian's habit of deconstructing a text, or a passage, into its various components, leaving the text as a whole neglected.6 This microscopic parsing of a passage indicated that for the ancient grammarian, the text was understood according to the meaning of each of its individual units, not the units taken together as a whole. This is seen in the preface to Origen's PE. While introducing his readers to the subject of prayer, he immediately appealed to the passage from Romans 8:26 ("What we ought to pray for as we ought we do not know").7 In his interpretation of this passage, Origen immediately distinguished two individual units: "what...

Praying with St. Juliana: Female Monastic Devotion, the Salzinnes Antiphonal, and the Cantus Database

Julienne de Glymes commissioned the Salzinnes Antiphonal (Halifax, Saint Mary’s University, Patrick Power Library, M2149.L4 1554) in the mid sixteenth century for use at the abbey of Salzinnes during the winter season of Advent to Easter. The manuscript is unusual in its depiction of thirty-four named nuns within twelve different illuminations. The antiphonal also includes depictions of multiple Julianas: Julienne de Glymes, St. Juliana of Nicomedia, and, arguably, St. Juliana of Cornillon. Examining the significance of these depictions sheds light on the importance of female saints to personal and corporate monastic identities at Salzinnes during a period of Cistercian reform, including renewed emphasis on enclosure. Examination of Juliana of Cornillon’s residency at Salzinnes in the thirteenth century and her early office for Corpus Christi suggests the role of the Salzinnes nuns in preserving Juliana of Cornillon’s legacy. Exploring the presence of all three Julianas in the Cantus Database demonstrates the potential of Cantus to support scholarship on female monasticism.

Saucepans and Saints? The Sacred and the Mundane in Forest Landscapes

ABSTRACTThis paper outlines one component of a multi-disciplinary AHRC project ‘The Sacred Landscapes of Medieval Monasticism’, running between 2019 and 2022 but rooted in existing long-term studies in Ceredigion (Wales) and Lincolnshire (England). It encapsulates several strands of landscape analysis undertaken over many years which form a basis for the Lincolnshire contribution to the AHRC project. After a superficial characterisation of ‘forest’ land in the English Midlands, particular attention is paid to the landscape context of certain religious houses, exploring their connections with the social performance and ritual of hunting. General conclusions about the character of monasteries in ‘forest’ land are used to review the monastic landscape of the Lincolnshire limewoods, a ‘forest’ area in the middle Witham valley. It is suggested that during the high middle ages a concentration of monasteries exploited the pre-existing rituality of a forest and chase landscape in order to establish their sacred authority in local contemporary perceptions. The paper thus identifies the part played by sacred significance in the landscape setting in establishing monastic identity, considerations often crowded-out of monastic studies by economic analyses, but which generate an alternative academic agenda for the subject to be addressed through the forthcoming project.

The Monks of Tiron: A Monastic Community and Religious Reform in the Twelfth Century, by Kathleen Thompson

The group of monastic houses founded from Tiron in the county of Perche, west of Chartres, has, until now, been given only a footnote in medieval history. It is the achievement of Kathleen Thompson to provide this monastic network with a treatment that is careful, thoughtful and illuminating. She speaks of ‘an affiliation of houses’ that was found not only in northern France and England, but also in Scotland. The successors of Bernard of Tiron maintained their monastic identity and did not become absorbed into the new monastic orders, as the congregation of Savigny did with the Cistercians. Thanks to the Vita beati Bernardi Tironensis, we have one of the most detailed examples of medieval monastic hagiography and can get a good idea of the early years of the movement. Thompson succeeds in placing this Vita in its historical context, especially in considering the fact that its abbreviated version, the so-called Brevis description, casts fresh light on Bernard of Tiron and his world. A careful appendix goes through the contents of the Vita, while a second appendix lists the possessions of Tiron. The first chapter, ‘Developing the Tiron narrative’, provides an analysis of the Vita, which is ‘indeed a good story’ with ‘a very strong narrative drive’ (p. 11). The author looks at other sources from later in the twelfth century, including William of Newburgh’s narrative from the 1190s, which sees Bernard and his companions as preachers, thus in harmony with the perceived needs of a more pastoral church. A number of pages are devoted to a comparison of the Vita Bernardi and the Brevis descriptio. Thompson concludes that the Vita cannot be ‘what it purports to be—a near eyewitness account of events’ (p. 33). The source can be seen rather as contributing to the history of Tiron by providing an indication of how the monks understood and interpreted their history.

Portraying Monks in Illuminated Service Books in the Fourteenth Century

생드니교회를 위해 제작된 14세기 중엽 채색 미사전서에 나타난 베네딕틴 수도승의 초상화는 중세 말기에 유행하는 수도원 구성원의 초상적 표현으로 이해할 수 있다. 같은 시기의 다른 채색 미사전서 혹은 찬송전서에도 주교, 대주교, 수녀원장, 수도원장을 비롯한 수도원 혹은 카톨릭 교회의 주요인물들이 이름과 함께 혹은 가문의 문장과 재현되어 종교인물의 초상적 표현도 세속군주 혹은 귀족 후원자들과 더불어 유행하였다고 볼 수 있다. 왕족 혹은 귀족의 초상과 다른 점은 본인의 개성보다는 본인이 속한 수도원의 집단정체성을 중시하여 초상화가 들어간 전례서가 교회 혹은 수도원에 다시 기증되어 다른 구성원들이 여러 세대에 걸쳐 사용할 수도 있다는 점이 주목할 만하다. 이런 점에서 개인의 추모를 목적으로 한 개인용 기도서와는 성격이 조금 다르다고 볼 수 있다.BR 14세기 채색 전례서에 나타나는 이러한 초상적 인물화는, 15세기 미술계에 중요한 장르로 대두하는 사실적인 초상화에 나타나는 유일무이한 개인적 재현은 아직 나타나지 않았기에 “초상화”라는 장르에 대입할 수는 없지만 이름 혹은 문장 등의 다른 기재를 통해 개인화를 시도하였다는 점은 중요하다. 15-16세기에 유화 혹은 조각 등에 자주 나타나는 사실적인 초상화 장르의 유행으로 나아가는 도입적인 단계라고 해석할 수 있다.

Multisensory Memories and Monastic Identity at Sant’Elia near Nepi (VT)

When confronted with pictorial details emphasizing such bodily actions as singing, observing, gesturing, or moving in other ways, art historians typically follow one of three interpretive approaches, either using the details as signs of a specific iconographic source or markers of a particular artistic style or understanding them as generic flourishes designed to lend vivacity to an image. The field’s recent expansion to consider sensory dimensions beyond the visual or spatial offers new pathways to making sense of such elements in painting and sculpture. This article argues that images of open mouths and gesturing hands within a set of twelfth-century frescoes preserved in the monastic church of Sant’Elia near Nepi (VT), built and decorated ca. 1125 to serve as the abbey church of a male Benedictine community known as the monastery of Elijah, guided medieval audiences (and should guide modern scholars) into a world of gesture, movement, ritual, and voice. These paintings were inseparable from daily ritual, from liturgical elements spoken and sung at specific times, and from commemorative practices followed on such occasions as the feast days of saints and the deaths of terrestrial leaders—in sum, even if presenting themselves initially as motionless two-dimensional images, these images were profoundly intertwined with the monastery’s existence as a lived ritual site. These links between image and site served a further purpose: to establish and promote a distinct communal identity among the monastery of Elijah’s brethren by depicting and then activating specific concepts regarding their community’s sacred history, the history of monasticism more generally, and appropriate monastic behaviors and aspirations. Crucial in this regard were a series of images depicting the monastery’s local saint, the abbot Anastasius, and its exceedingly rare titular saint, the Old Testament prophet Elijah. While the process of generating communal identity may have begun at a visual level, it was only effected through, first, the use of mediums including, in addition to painting, architecture, furnishings, pavement, inscriptions, and topography, and, second, the activation of multiple bodily actions and sensations, including physical movement through the monastery’s wider landscape. Likewise, a scholarly discussion that begins within the field of art history necessarily expands to encompass history, liturgy, and theology, but always with a close focus on twelfth-century Italy.

Negotiating the Landscape: Environment and Monastic Identity in the Medieval Ardennes by Ellen F. Arnold, and: The Medieval Discovery of Nature by Steven A. Epstein

Negotiating the Landscape: Environment and Monastic Identity in the Medieval Ardennes by Ellen F. Arnold, and: The Medieval Discovery of Nature by Steven A. Epstein

The Canons of Our Fathers: Monastic Rules of Shenoute by Bentley Layton

Reviewed by: The Canons of Our Fathers: Monastic Rules of Shenoute by Bentley Layton Malcolm Choat Bentley Layton The Canons of Our Fathers: Monastic Rules of Shenoute Oxford Early Christian Studies Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014 Pp. 384. $145.00. Unlike the rules of Pachomius, those of Shenoute (ca. 347–465) were never brought together in one corpus (at least not one that survives). Rather, Shenoute embedded them within nine volumes of Canons that he personally arranged and bequeathed to the federation of three monasteries that sat near one another at the edge of the western desert in the Panopolite nome in Upper Egypt. Nor—again unlike the Pachomian rules, transmitted via Greek and Latin translations beyond their Upper Egyptian origin—were Shenoute’s rules ever translated from Coptic, until now. With painstaking erudition, Layton has extracted no fewer than 595 rules from the vast and largely unedited Shenoutean corpus. Their presentation here, in both the original Coptic and English translation, provides access to many of them for the first time, in a magnificent new resource for the study of Egyptian monasticism. The rules themselves are prefaced by a valuable discussion of what they tell us about early Egyptian monasticism. Chapter One provides background, addressing the early history of the federation, notably its founder and the author of the nucleus of the rules, Shenoute’s uncle Pgol. The discussion centres on the “Naples fragment,” a lacunose and acephalous hagiographical text that refers to Pgol and an unnamed actor who Layton argues convincingly is Pshoi, founder of the Red Monastery to the north of Shenoute’s coenobium. From this and a few other sources, Layton spins a hypothetical but nonetheless convincing reconstruction of the federation’s early history, followed by a brief narration of Shenoute’s early monastic career. Chapter Two addresses the rules themselves, discussing in turn how they survive; their author(s) (largely Pgol and Shenoute); their form and content; and language. The chapter closes with consideration of the unusual fact that of the 595 rules, only around 20 specify a physical punishment: the rules prescribed behavioral norms and seemingly left the exact punishment for monks who disobeyed them to the one judging them. The insights the rules provide into the history of Egyptian monasticism are [End Page 615] explored in two chapters. Chapter Three investigates “Monastic Life as Seen in the Rules.” Here Layton explores the “vivid . . . incomplete and ideal” (51) image of Shenoutean monasticism in the rules, isolating within them details on the social history of the monastery. Here is a wealth of information, as valuable to the modern observer as it was incidental to Shenoute, on the coenobium’s physical institutions; the people who comprised the community; ascetic observances; the congregation’s hierarchy; liturgy; and the monastic economy. Chapter Four, on the “Monastic Experience,” addresses three critical features: conversion to, and initial experiences of, the monastic life; the way the rules articulated the acquisition of monastic identity; and how they helped maintain it. Throughout these two chapters, the historian of monasticism and late antique society will find novel insights and perspectives, be it the presence of children in the monastery (55); the “knocking signal” (a wooden gong?) that summoned the monks to gatherings (72); or the routines constructed by the rules that kept the monks’ identity intact, even when they passed beyond the “non-porous boundary” formed by the monastery’s walls and gates (83–84). The centerpiece of the work is of course the rules themselves, presented with Coptic text and facing English translation over 248 pages, numbered from 1 to 595, and arranged by the order in which they occur in Shenoute’s Canons. It is for others to assess the translation in detail, but it is readable. And when it shepherds Shenoute’s Coptic style into more straightforward English, it sometimes offers a literal translation in a footnote (e.g. 99n8; 229n93). Most of the rules appear here in English for the first time, which means the volume will be valuable for determining how Shenoute is viewed in the coming years. Where Layton subdivides continuous sections of text into separate rules, “Continues as follows” is placed between the rules. Where (as frequently) there...

Guthlac Betwixt and Between: Literacy, Cross-Temporal Affiliation, and an Anglo-Saxon Anchorite

ABSTRACT Guthlac's saintly “career” saw his transformation from aristocratic warrior to monastic visionary. It saw him move physically from a warrior's secular hall to a monastic community and then to an anchorite's cell. Beyond this, however, even the ways later generations came to know—and perhaps be stimulated to emulate—Guthlac move betwixt and between. That is, they involve repeated translations, movements between languages, between genres, between reading contexts. Felix's original Anglo-Latin vita must itself be triangulated among a variety of previous textual models. That Latin text was variously re-created as it was translated from Latin into multiple Old English texts. The Old English prose translations, vita and sermon, situate and invoke a significantly different Guthlac from that readable in the two (or perhaps three) extant devotional poems. Multiply liminal, Guthlac—the man and the textual memory—offers his readers an exemplar through whom they engage in the reconstruction of monastic identity and literary subjectivity.

The Augustinian Heart: Late Medieval Images of Augustine as a Monastic Identity

This study focuses on fourteenth- and fifteenth-century images, commissioned by the Ordo Eremitarum Sancti Augustini, of Augustine in rapture at the Trinity, revealing a wounded heart. This imagery begins an iconographical trend within the order that portrays Augustine as the Doctor of Love and departs from the image initiated by Possidius of Augustine as the rational thinker and bishop. A comparison with contemporaneous images of Francis receiving the stigmata reveals a new understanding of the relationship of the body to fourteenth- and fifteenth-century mendicant piety, and the importance of the iconisation of the body in the Hermits' understanding of Augustine.

Negotiating the Landscape: Environment and Monastic Identity in the Medieval Ardennes. By Ellen F. Arnold. The Middle Ages Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. 301 pp. + 2 maps. $65.00 cloth.

Negotiating the Landscape: Environment and Monastic Identity in the Medieval Ardennes. By Ellen F. Arnold. The Middle Ages Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. 301 pp. + 2 maps. $65.00 cloth.