Culture of Medieval English Monasticism

James G. Clark is Professor of History at the University of Exeter. He has published widely on the later Middle Ages and early modern period, most recently The Dissolution of the Monasteries (Yale, 2021) James G. Clark is Professor of History at the University of Exeter. He has published widely on the later Middle Ages and early modern period, most recently The Dissolution of the Monasteries (Yale, 2021) RODNEY M. THOMSON is Emeritus Professor of Medieval History at the University of Tasmania.

• Introduction: The Culture of English Monasticism - James G. ClarkAn Early Tudor Monastic Enterprise: Choral Polyphony for the Liturgical Service - Roger BowersMonastic Murals and Lectio in the Later Middle Ages - Miriam GillThe Meaning of Monastic Culture: Anselm and his Contemporaries - Gillian R EvansThe Monks of Durham and the Study of Scripture - A. J. PiperWorcester Monks and Education, c. 1300 - R. M. ThomsonWhat Nuns Read: The State of the Question - David BellPrivate Reading in the Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century English Nunnery - Mary C. ErlerHoly Expectations: The Female Monastic Vocation in the Diocese of Winchester on the Eve of the Reformation - Barry CollettCulture at Canterbury in the Fifteenth Century: Some Indications of the Cultural Environment of a Monk of Christ Church - Joan GreatrexThe Monastic Culture of Friendship - Julian P HaseldineMonastic Time - J D North

This collection is unusual, therefore, in its tight focus on post-Conquest Benedictine life. But it is all the stronger for this, the essays building a core thesis through their very breadth of evidence. Within a clear chronological framework, the excellent introduction presents at once a cogent survey of a complex, active field and a challenge to reassess the relationship between the rule, conventual life and its cultural products. [...] This collection ties English Benedictine life firmly into wider secular and clerical trends, while illuminating its distinctive cultural expressions and its many contributions to their forms.