Introduction: The Culture of Medieval English Monasticism

Summary

The cultural remains of the medieval English monasteries have always been a source of scholarly fascination. Even at the Dissolution when their personnel were dispersed and their physical structures dismantled there were vigorous efforts to preserve the greatest of their treasures, their decorative objects, their vestments, their illuminated manuscripts and those whose contents were held to be of historical importance. The enthusiasm for collecting and conserving former monastic fragments intensified in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and, with the inauguration of the Rolls and other record series in the middle years of the nineteenth century, monastic culture emerged at the very heart of the national historical enterprise. In recent times the research agenda has expanded and it is the culture, and cultural remains, of the laity (so long eclipsed by the clergy) that now preoccupy many medievalists, but new discoveries,displays, and reproductions of monastic art, manuscripts and music continue to command academic and – perhaps increasingly – public attention.

The appreciation of monastic culture has always tended to treat the surviving fragments – whether they are manuscripts, vestments or wall paintings – in separation from the monastic community whose beliefs and values had first given them form. For the first generation of antiquarians this was undoubtedly a political imperative: the monasteries’ manuscripts and other remains were to be stripped, just as their former churches had been, of every trace of the old monastic ‘mumpsimus’. Such prejudices may not be shared by medievalists of the modern era but they have still tended to treat monastic art, book production and scholarship in isolation from the patterns and preoccupations of conventual life itself. The architectural and other artistic remains of English monasteries have been studied in depth and served as the basis for new interpretations of insular trends and for new typologies, but only rarely for a new understanding of the communities that created them. The books and book learning of English monks have formed the focus of much research and (re)interpretation, but for the most part the emphasis has been upon the insights they offer into the development of scholarly disciplines and cultural trends – history, theology, science, and humanism, for example – or on the development of the canons of celebrated monastic authors, Anselm of Canterbury, William of Malmesbury, and Matthew Paris.