A Monastery in Revolt

2019 ◽  
pp. 43-62
Author(s):  
Barbara B. Diefendorf
Keyword(s):  
Monastic Reform

King Henri III brought the reformed Cistercian congregation of Feuillants to Paris in 1587 out of admiration for the penitential piety of the congregation’s founder and abbot, Jean de La Barrière. Yet within two years, the Paris monks had rebelled against both their abbot’s royalist politics and the strict asceticism of his reform. Left in charge of the Paris house when La Barrière returned to Feuillants, Bernard de Montgaillard led the Paris monks to join the rebellion against Henri III, known as the Holy League, at the same time that they fought to free themselves from their abbot’s control. The chapter traces the parallels between the monks’ revolt against monastic absolutism and the city’s revolt against its monarch. Analyzing their claims to be perfecting—and not rejecting—the Feuillant reform by returning to their order’s original purity, it illuminates ongoing debates about the nature and ends of monastic reform.

The Old English Benedictine Rule: writing for women and men

2003 ◽  
Vol 32 ◽  
pp. 147-187 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rohini Jayatilaka
Keyword(s):  
Ninth Century ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
Reform Movement ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Monastic Reform ◽  
Monastic Life ◽  
Benedictine Reform ◽  
The Status ◽  
Linguistic Level

The Regula S. Benedicti was known and used in early Anglo-Saxon England, but it was not until the mid-tenth-century Benedictine reform that the RSB became established as the supreme and exclusive rule governing the monasteries of England. The tenth-century monastic reform movement, undertaken by Dunstan, Æthelwold and Oswald during the reign of Edgar (959–75), sought to revitalize monasticism in England which, according to the standards of these reformers, had ceased to exist during the ninth century. They took as a basis for restoring monastic life the RSB, which was regarded by them as the main embodiment of the essential principles of western monasticism, and in this capacity it was established as the primary document governing English monastic life. By elevating the status of the RSB as the central text of monastic practice in England and the basis of a uniform way of life the reformers raised for themselves the problem of ensuring that the RSB would be understood in detail by all monks, nuns and novices, whatever their background. Evidence of various attempts to make the text accessible, both at the linguistic level and at the level of substance, survives in manuscripts dating from the mid-tenth and eleventh centuries; the most important of these attempts is a vernacular translation of the RSB.

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