Lauren Mancia is Associate Professor of History at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. She is the author of Emotional Monasticism: Affective Piety in the Eleventh-Century Monastery of John of Fécamp (2019).

• AcknowledgmentsIntroductionChapter One: What Were “Meditation” and “Prayer” in the Medieval Monastery?Chapter Two: The Journey to God through Meditation and Prayer, according to Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Monastic ThinkersChapter Three: From Theory to Practice: The Experience of Monastic Meditation and Prayer in the Eleventh and Twelfth CenturiesChapter Four: Envisioning the Invisible: The Use of Art in Monastic MeditationConclusionSelect English-Language Bibliography

"[A]n admirably clear and direct introduction to a key area of medieval studies: the nature of monastic prayer. In her account of high medieval monasticism, Mancia centers the complex, evolving practices of prayer and meditation that structured and drove the lives of monks and nuns, both day to day and at the foundational level of motivation and purpose. This approach is timely and much needed: the book will be of great use as a primer on how and why medieval monks and nuns prayed, and a demonstration of the significance of that practice for our scholarship on medieval life, religious and otherwise. [...] Meditation and Prayer is overall exemplary in its accessible, urgent communication of the value and complexity of the medieval monastic life of prayer, and offers a compelling invitation to consider it more holistically as a way of reading, thinking, and living from which real inspiration and learning can be derived."