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.
Alison I. Beach, The Trauma of Monastic Reform: Community and Conflict in Twelfth-century Germany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. x, 190; 11 black-and-white figures, 4 maps, and 3 tables. £75. ISBN: 978-1-108-41731-0.
