Culture of Medieval English Monasticism (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781843833215)

Examinations of the culture - artistic, material, musical - of English monasteries in the six centuries between the Conquest and the Dissolution.

The cultural remains of England's abbeys and priories have always attracted scholarly attention but too often they have been studied in isolation, appreciated only for their artistic, codicological or intellectual features and notfor the insights they offer into the patterns of life and thought - the underlying norms, values and mentalité - of the communities of men and women which made them. Indeed, the distinguished monastic historian David Knowles doubted there would ever be sufficient evidence to recover "the mentality of the ordinary cloister monk". These twelve essays challenge this view. They exploit newly catalogued and newly discovered evidence - manuscript books, wall paintings, and even the traces of original monastic music - to recover the cultural dynamics of a cross-section of male and female communities. It is often claimed that over time the cultural traditions of the monasteries were suffocated by secular trends but here it is suggested that many houses remained a major cultural force even on the verge of the Reformation.

James G. Clark is Professor of History at the University of Exeter.

Contributors: DAVID BELL, ROGER BOWERS, JAMES CLARK, BARRIE COLLETT, MARY ERLER, G. R. EVANS, MIRIAM GILL, JOAN GREATREX, JULIAN HASELDINE, J. D. NORTH, ALAN PIPER, AND R. M. THOMSON.

Author: James G. Clark
ISBN-10: 1843833212
ISBN-13: 9781843833215
Publisher: Boydell Press
Language: English
Published: 09/20/2007
Pages: 256
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.22lbs
Size: 9.49h x 6.32w x 0.93d