James G. Clark 
The Culture of Medieval English Monasticism 

Examinations of the culture – artistic, material, musical – of English monasteries in the six centuries between the Conquest and the Dissolution.


The cultural remains of England’s abbeys and priories have always attracted scholarly attention but too often they have been studied in isolation, appreciated only for their artistic, codicological or intellectual features and notfor the insights they offer into the patterns of life and thought – the underlying norms, values and
mentalité – of the communities of men and women which made them. Indeed, the distinguished monastic historian David Knowles doubted there would ever be sufficient evidence to recover ‘the mentality of the ordinary cloister monk’. These twelve essays challenge this view. They exploit newly catalogued and newly discovered evidence – manuscript books, wall paintings, and even the traces of original monastic music – to recover the cultural dynamics of a cross-section of male and female communities. It is often claimed that over time the cultural traditions of the monasteries were suffocated by secular trends but here it is suggested that many houses remained a major cultural force even on the verge of the Reformation.


James G. Clark is Professor of History at the University of Exeter.


Contributors: DAVID BELL, ROGER BOWERS, JAMES CLARK, BARRIE COLLETT, MARY ERLER, G. R. EVANS, MIRIAM GILL, JOAN GREATREX, JULIAN HASELDINE, J. D. NORTH, ALAN PIPER, AND R. M. THOMSON.

Table of Content

Introduction: The Culture of English Monasticism – James G. Clark

An Early Tudor Monastic Enterprise: Choral Polyphony for the Liturgical Service – Roger Bowers

Monastic Murals and
Lectio in the Later Middle Ages – Miriam Gill

The Meaning of Monastic Culture: Anselm and his Contemporaries – Gillian R Evans

The Monks of Durham and the Study of Scripture – A. J. Piper

Worcester Monks and Education,
c. 1300 – R. M. Thomson

What Nuns Read: The State of the Question – David Bell

Private Reading in the Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century English Nunnery – Mary C. Erler

Holy Expectations: The Female Monastic Vocation in the Diocese of Winchester on the Eve of the Reformation – Barry Collett

Culture at Canterbury in the Fifteenth Century: Some Indications of the Cultural Environment of a Monk of Christ Church – Joan Greatrex

The Monastic Culture of Friendship – Julian P Haseldine

Monastic Time – J D North

About the author

RODNEY M. THOMSON is Emeritus Professor of Medieval History at the University of Tasmania.