Introduction

Summary

The men and women that followed the sixth-century customs of Benedict of Nursia (c. 480–c. 547) formed the most enduring, influential, numerous and widespread religious order of the Latin Middle Ages. Their mode of life superseded the monastic codes of the early Christian fathers and before the close of the eleventh century it was the dominant form of monastic observance practised in the west. At this date their principal monasteries in France, Italy, Germany and the Low Countries held as many as 200 professed members, and there were the beginnings of a Benedictine presence on the eastern boundary of Christendom, in Poland-Lithuania, Bohemia and Hungary. Their Roman liturgical practice (the opus Dei) and their acquired taste for learning founded on the ancient liberal arts served as a model for the Church as a whole. New orders arose in the later Middle Ages, but still they took some of their customs, and something of their observant and spiritual outlook, from the Regula Benedicti; indeed, the reverent authority of the rule was amplified as the forms of corporate and personal religion proliferated. The plural religious culture of the later period did not extinguish the order or obviate its purpose. The opening of the sixteenth century may have seen a surge in vocations and even at the centre of the Reformation conflict (England, Germany) the Black Monks were among the last to surrender their houses.

The Benedictines may also be counted among the founders of medieval Europe. It was pioneers of the Regula Benedicti that created or consolidated the early Christian communities in the north and west of the Continent. These same missionary monks established many of the churches around which the social community began to cohere. Their monasteries directed the development of the new urban and extra-urban centres and the landscape on which they depended: in many regions of Europe patterns of agriculture, building and trade all bore the imprint of the Benedictines. They were also a transformative influence on cultural and social trends. To them in large part we owe the preservation of the literature of Latin antiquity. Perhaps it was the Black Monks that brought the codex itself into common use; there can be little doubt that it was their linguistic preferences and their mode of reading (at first, ruminatively, later, silently) that shaped the experience of literate Europe.