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

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 andmentalité - 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.

Introduction: The Culture of English Monasticism - James G. Clark
An Early Tudor Monastic Enterprise: Choral Polyphony for the Liturgical Service - Roger Bowers
Monastic Murals andLectio in the Later Middle Ages - Miriam Gill
The Meaning of Monastic Culture: Anselm and his Contemporaries - Gillian R Evans
The Monks of Durham and the Study of Scripture - A. J. Piper
Worcester Monks and Educationc. 1300 - R. M. Thomson
What Nuns Read: The State of the Question - David Bell
Private Reading in the Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century English Nunnery - Mary C. Erler
Holy Expectations: The Female Monastic Vocation in the Diocese of Winchester on the Eve of the Reformation - Barry Collett
Culture at Canterbury in the Fifteenth Century: Some Indications of the Cultural Environment of a Monk of Christ Church - Joan Greatrex
The Monastic Culture of Friendship - Julian P Haseldine
Monastic Time - J D North