This term is derived from abbot (Aramaic ~abba~, father), female superior of a community of 12 or more nuns, more properly Benedictines, although the term is used also among Poor Clares, Conceptionists, Bridgettines, and canonesses. Monastic communities of women spread from the East during the 4th century. Superiors were referred to as ~mater monasterii, mater monacharum, praeposita~; the term "abbess" appeared for the first time in the West on the tomb of a certain "Serena, abbatissa" (d. c. 514) in the Roman church of St. Agnes-Outside-the-Walls. Growing Benedictine influence endowed the office to abbess with a liturgical character, making it elective by vote of the community, prescribing episcopal benediction, and granting the right to the ring, pectoral cross, and crosier. During the Middle Ages, abbesses of great monastic houses exercised practically all the temporal power of abbots and feudal lords, ranking among the nobles of the realm, sitting in parliament and in councils, and recognizing no ecclesiastical authority other than the pope. Many abbesses assumed spiritual power over their nuns also, to the point of incurring stern papal prohibitions against interference in the administration of penance, conferring the veil, and giving benedictions and even sacramental absolution. . . With the breakdown of the feudal system, the temporal power of abbesses declined; their present status in Canon Law is simply that of major superior. (NCE 6-7).
BENEDICTINE: (BEN)
The oldest and the premier form of organized monastic life in the Western church and the one from which all religious orders subsequently derived. The term "Benedictine" seems to have been coined by Giovanni Bona, abbot general of the Cistercian Order (d. 1674); it rarely appears before the seventeenth century. In the Middle Ages the Benedictines were called "black monks" because of the color of their habit, which distinguished them from other monks, such as the Cistercians, who wore white. Benedictine life has always been based on two things: first and fundamentally, the Rule of St. Benedict (mid sixth century), which represents the accumulated wisdom of earlier centuries of monastic experience and which served as the constitution of Benedict's monastery at Monte Cassino; and second, the body of observances or customs, primarily interpretations of the Rule, that grew up at a particular monastery and gradually came to have the force of law for that house. Benedict legislated for a cenobitic community of laymen, governed benevolently by an abbot, a family whose purpose was the glorification of God and the salvation of the individual monk. Monastic profession, made after a year's novitiate or probation, included three vows - stability, the reformation of life, and obedience - that consecrated the monk to God. (DMA 171-2).
The Order of Citeaux, a Roman Catholic monastic order based on the Rule of St. Benedict, originated in 1098, and was named after the first establishment, Ceteaux, in Burgundy, France. Ceteaux was founded by (St.) Robert of Molesme (d.1111). As Benedictine abbot of Molesme he had failed to achieve real monastic reform, so he left that abbey with 21 of his adherents, and in 1098 founded Citeaux in a wooded wilderness, near Dijon. The purpose of the new establishment was the instituting of a life of poverty, simplicity, and eremitical solitude under the guidance of the Rule of St. Benedict in its strictest interpretation. Such a program was no novelty at the end of the 11th century, but Citeaux found itself exposed to the hostile criticism of neighboring monasteries.
In 1100, Pope Paschal II approved the new foundation and placed Ceteaux under papal protection. According to tradition, it was under Alberic that the monks adopted their distinctive white or gray habit under a black scapular; hence the popular name, White Monks. After Alberic's death the Englishman (St.) Stephen Harding, an organizer of broad vision and experience, was elected abbot (1109-33). Although there were still many problems to be solved, a sound program and able leadership assured the survival of Citeaux. The first regulations, passed either under Alberic or Stephen, revealed Citeaux's uniqueness, for unlike other reformed Benedictine houses, the statutes rejected all feudal revenues and based the monastic economy on the manual labor of the monks themselves, assisted by lay brothers. Other measures simplified the overgrown monastic liturgy then customary in Benedictine houses and prescribed austere simplicity both in church vestments and in church furnishings (NCE 885-6).
During the tenth and eleventh centuries Cluny was a major center of monastic influence, and the Cluniac Order's spectacular growth coincided with a rich period of monastic culture. Cluny offers an example of how medieval monks could remain faithful to their Benedictine ideals while attending to the spiritual needs of Christians outside the cloister. Cluny's origins lie in Carolingian reforms. Charlemagne and Louis the Pious incorporated monks into the church's liturgical and educational life. Benedict of Aniane wanted to integrate Frankish monasteries into a uniform network founded on the Rule of St. Benedict. Through his efforts the communal praying of the divine office became more central than it had been. But the subsequent disruptions of the ninth century caused may abbeys to fall under the control of local lay magnates, often to the detriment of monastic discipline. Despite the failure of Benedict of Aniane's ambitious scheme, however, many of his ideals and customs later influenced Cluniac ways. . . . The chief characteristic of Cluniac spirituality was its openness to the world. Cluniac monks did not strive to cut themselves off from a corrupt society; rather, they saw themselves as weak members of a weak human race. They rarely played the traditional prophetic role of castigating a wayward city of man. (DMA 468-71).
The name given to monastic foundations or cloisters joined together under a common superior and bound by juridical and economic bonds. When the two monasteries were occupied by the same sex, as at Monkwearmouth/Jarrow or Stavelot-Malmedy, or the convent of women was enclosed in its own cloister, this type of foundation presented no problem. It was normal for nuns to put themselves under the direction of noted ascetical directors and to employ monastic males for the care of their spiritual and temporal necessities. The superior of a men's monastery, by virtue of his priesthood and his experience, intervened in the direction of the nuns, and at times the abbess--who might be of a superior social condition--controlled the temporal possessions of the convent and governed its inhabitants. The enthusiasm that accompanied the origins of monasticism tended to promote the condition of women in accordance with Gal. 3.28, which suppressed the inequality of the sexes; and double monasteries took rise in this perspective (NCE 1021).
An extinct medieval religious order for men and women founded in England by Gilbert of Sempringham. The order originated in 1131 with seven young women who, under Gilbert's direction and with the support of Bishop Alexander of Lincoln, formed a convent at Sempringham on property belonging to their founder's estate. Gilbert seems to have copied Cistercian customs rather closely, but a general chapter of the Cistercians meeting at Citeaux in 1147 refused to assume the government of the community of nuns. At the suggestion of William, Abbot of Rievaulx, Gilbert had already added lay sisters to attend to the needs of the nuns, and lay brothers for the heavy agricultural labor on their property. He then proceeded to introduce a small number of Canons Regular of St. Augustine, who would undertake the spiritual direction of the community, and thereafter the Gilbertines usually lived in double monasteries, marked by great austerity in style and decoration. Papal approval of the new order came from the Cistercian Pope Eugene III in 1148. The nuns were to live by the Benedictine Rule, the canons by the Rule of St. Augustine, and the lay brothers were to be governed by a modification of the usages of the ~conversi~ of Citeaux. The Gilbertines founded their second house in 1139 and numbered some 13 communities in 1189, when Gilbert died. The order continued to receive special favors from the English crown, for, unlike the Cistercians and the monks of Cluny, it had no foreign connections, its priories being located for the most part in Lincolnshire, with one house in Scotland and two in Westmeath, Ireland. In time the order began to decline, and its financial status was so critical that King Henry VI found it necessary to exempt all its foundations from payments of any kind. Even so, the Gilbertines still controlled some 25 houses, with 150 canons and 120 nuns, when Henry VIII forced them to surrender all property in the dissolution (1538-40). (NCE 481-2).
A person who has retired into solitude to lead the religious life. Although there were probably Christian solitaries before his time, an Egyptian named Paul was the first to popularize the eremitic life. From the beginning of the 4th century, this life was one of the standard ways, especially in the East, in which Christian asceticism expressed itself. In the East, after a first period of dramatic and often excessive austerity among hermits, ecclesiastical authority brought the eremitic life under control and provided that hermits should live adjacent to monasteries and under the control of superiors, as they still do at Mt. Athos and other places in the East. In the West, the 6th-century Rule of St. Benedict provided for the exceptional case of the ascetic who might be permitted to become a solitary, a provision modeled on the precepts of St. Basil. In the West the cenobitic life has tended to obscure the eremitic life more completely than it has in the East, but several periods of spiritual revival sent a comparatively large number into the desert places of western Europe; this occurred especially in the 11th century, and again with the mystical movements of the 13th and 14th centuries. (NCE 1077).
In early usage, in its strict etymological sense, the term monastery denoted a hermit's cell or a group of cells surrounded by a protective wall. Later it applied to the dwelling of monks and clerics living a common life. In the West the word refers specifically to the houses of Benedictines and of other orders derivatively using the Benedictine Rule. Despite the many inaccuracies of popular terminology in matters pertaining to the religious life, some elements of monasticism have always remained reasonable constant; only with reference to them can one speak properly of a monastery as the dwelling place of monks. The following seem to be the most basic distinguishing marks of the monastery in this restricted acceptance: 1) well-defined separation from the world and permanent attachment to the place of the monk's profession through the vow of stability; this is monasticism's principal identifying feature; 2) an almost complete autonomy of internal government of the individual house; 3) commitment to one of the classical rules of monasticism; and 4) concentration on work identified with the region, since a monastery's influence is usually wielded locally, in distinction to that of centrally controlled undertakings which call for large numbers of specially trained personnel (NCE 1021-23).
Until 1066 the history of the British Isles was dominated by the political, institutional, religious, and cultural achievements of the Anglo-Saxon state. After the middle of the tenth century this state stretched north from the English Channel to the southern border of the kingdom of Scotland, which ran southwest from the Tweed to the Irish Sea, and west to that squarish peninsula known as Wales, which was never incorporated into the Anglo-Saxon kingdom but was held by a number of Welsh chiefs descended from the Celts. Also outside the Anglo-Saxon orbit was Ireland, the eastern part of which, however, had succumbed to bands of Norwegians after 850. In 1066 this long period of Anglo-Saxon ascendancy was terminated by a political regime that wrought change so fundamental historians have considered this year a major watershed in the history of England. It was then that the Normans crossed the English Channel to conquer Anglo-Saxon England and to build what soon became the most remarkable political structure of western Europe. The Normans ruled England from 1066 to 1154, and their descendants, the Angevins, from 1154 to 1216. The two exceptionally able dynasties laid the foundation for political and legal institutions, unique in western Europe, that with modification still function today. After 1066 England became part of a complex of lands encompassing much of northwest France that has sometimes been called the Angevin Empire. (DMA 460-1).
Roman masonry technique in which a floor was made of concrete laid on a bed of small stones and surfaced with powdered brick, which gave it a pinkish surface (Brown 67).
Parchment is a term derived from Pergamum (an ancient Greek city in Mysia, on the site of modern Bergama, Turkey), where parchment was supposedly first produced. The preparation of parchment, a durable writing material produced from hides (as of goats, sheep, or cattle), differs from that of leather essentially in that the soaked hide is stretched during drying. This procedure produces a transformation in the hide's fiber network and lends parchment its unique characteristics of flexibility and durability. Except in the very highest grades of parchment, it is usually possible to distinguish the original hide's hair side (marked by follicles) from its flesh side. To judge by surviving books, technical mastery of the parchment-making process was achieved no later than the fourth or fifth century. For deluxe books, parchment was sometimes dyed purple. In the seventh and eighth centuries, Arab control of Egypt limited European access to that country's papyrus production, so that book producers of the Latin West and Byzantium turned increasingly to locally manufactured parchment. Parchment remained the predominant material support for permanent books and records until, from about 1000 on, it began to be replaced by a new, seemingly cheaper, writing material: paper. By the sixteenth century, parchment had become the exception and paper the rule (DMA 400).
An exterior structure forming a covered approach to the entrance of a building; sometimes applied to an interior space serving as a vestibule. In the north of England, the term is applied to a transept or side chapel in a church (OED 1128).
The Scriptorium is a place where manuscripts were written and copied. In the West, most scriptoria seem to have been housed in monasteries until the late Middle Ages. Orders such as the Cistercians regulated the production of books in their scriptoria. Hence, characteristic paleographical and patterns sometimes allow scholars to group together isolated manuscripts and hypothesize their place of origin. The existence of permanent scriptoria in Byzantium is less certain. Scholars have linked small groups of manuscripts to imperial or monastic centers - both types are documented - but private enterprise also produced manuscripts, perhaps on an ad hoc basis (DMA 119).
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