The White Cat and the Monk

The White Cat and the Monk
Author: Jo Ellen Bogart
Publisher: Groundwood Books Ltd
Total Pages: 36
Release: 2020-07-14
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 1773065599

A monk leads a simple life. He studies his books late into the evening and searches for truth in their pages. His cat, Pangur, leads a simple life, too, chasing prey in the darkness. As night turns to dawn, Pangur leads his companion to the truth he has been seeking. The White Cat and the Monk is a retelling of the classic Old Irish poem “Pangur Bán.” With Jo Ellen Bogart’s simple and elegant narration and Sydney Smith’s classically inspired images, this contemplative story pays tribute to the wisdom of animals and the wonders of the natural world.

The Cistercians in the Middle Ages

The Cistercians in the Middle Ages
Author: Janet E. Burton
Publisher: Boydell Press
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2011
Genre: History
ISBN: 184383667X

The Cistercians (White Monks) were the most successful monastic experiment to emerge from the tumultuous intellectual and religious fervour of the 11th and 12th centuries. This book seeks to explore the phenomenon that was the Cistercian Order.

The Lord as Their Portion

The Lord as Their Portion
Author: Elizabeth Rapley
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
Total Pages: 350
Release: 2011-03-29
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0802865887

A guided tour through the fascinating history of Catholic religious orders From their monastic prehistory in the Egyptian desert through their political heyday in Medieval and Renaissance Europe to their present-day work of education, human care, and the pursuit of social justice, the Catholic religious orders have been a driving force in Western civilization. In The Lord as Their Portion Elizabeth Rapley paints a broad portrait of the full spectrum of religious orders spanning the vast canvas of their history. Rapley shows how religious orders led the way in learning and inventiveness throughout the early periods of Western civilization. She explores how religious orders contributed to Western politics and the global spread of Christianity. She examines the ways in which religious orders have championed the poor, marginalized, and disenfranchised throughout history and gives attention the ongoing work of religious orders today. More than simply highlighting the sweeping progress of monasticism s past and present, however, Rapley also takes time to share, in a clear and engaging fashion, the fascinating stories of many of the men and women who chose to take the Lord as their portion and whose piety, devotion, and energetic pursuit of a holy life profoundly shaped the course of history.

Monastic Bodies

Monastic Bodies
Author: Caroline T. Schroeder
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 246
Release: 2013-03-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0812203380

Shenoute of Atripe led the White Monastery, a community of several thousand male and female Coptic monks in Upper Egypt, between approximately 395 and 465 C.E. Shenoute's letters, sermons, and treatises—one of the most detailed bodies of writing to survive from any early monastery—provide an unparalleled resource for the study of early Christian monasticism and asceticism. In Monastic Bodies, Caroline Schroeder offers an in-depth examination of the asceticism practiced at the White Monastery using diverse sources, including monastic rules, theological treatises, sermons, and material culture. Schroeder details Shenoute's arduous disciplinary code and philosophical structure, including the belief that individual sin corrupted not only the individual body but the entire "corporate body" of the community. Thus the purity of the community ultimately depended upon the integrity of each individual monk. Shenoute's ascetic discourse focused on purity of the body, but he categorized as impure not only activities such as sex but any disobedience and other more general transgressions. Shenoute emphasized the important practices of discipline, or askesis, in achieving this purity. Contextualizing Shenoute within the wider debates about asceticism, sexuality, and heresy that characterized late antiquity, Schroeder compares his views on bodily discipline, monastic punishments, the resurrection of the body, the incarnation of Christ, and monastic authority with those of figures such as Cyril of Alexandria, Paulinus of Nola, and Pachomius.

The Monastic Order in England

The Monastic Order in England
Author: David Knowles
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 808
Release: 2004-01-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780521548083

This book was originally published in 1940 and was quickly recognised as a scholarly classic and masterpiece of historical literature. It covers the period from about 940, when St Dunstan inaugurated the monastic reform by becoming abbot of Glastonbury, to the early thirteenth century.

Holy Entrepreneurs

Holy Entrepreneurs
Author: Constance Brittain Bouchard
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2018-10-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 1501721038

The twelfth century was characterized by intense spirituality as well as rapid economic development. Drawing on unprecedented research, Constance Brittain Bouchard demonstrates that the Cistercian monks of Burgundy were exemplary in both spheres. Bouchard explores the web of economic ties that linked the Cistercian monasteries with their secular neighbors, especially the knights, and reaches some surprising conclusions about Cistercian attitudes.

The White Nuns

The White Nuns
Author: Constance Hoffman Berman
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 364
Release: 2018-04-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 0812295080

Modern studies of the religious reform movement of the central Middle Ages have often relied on contemporary accounts penned by Cistercian monks, who routinely exaggerated the importance of their own institutions while paying scant attention to the remarkable expansion of abbeys of Cistercian women. Yet by the end of the thirteenth century, Constance Hoffman Berman contends, there were more houses of Cistercian nuns across Europe than of monks. In The White Nuns, she charts the stages in the nuns' gradual acceptance by the abbots of the Cistercian Order's General Chapter and describes the expansion of the nuns' communities and their adaptation to a variety of economic circumstances in France and throughout Europe. While some sought contemplative lives of prayer, the ambition of many of these religious women was to serve the poor, the sick, and the elderly. Focusing in particular on Cistercian nuns' abbeys founded between 1190 and 1250 in the northern French archdiocese of Sens, Berman reveals the frequency with which communities of Cistercian nuns were founded by rich and powerful women, including Queen Blanche of Castile, heiresses Countess Matilda of Courtenay and Countess Isabelle of Chartres, and esteemed ladies such as Agnes of Cressonessart. She shows how these founders and early patrons assisted early abbesses, nuns, and lay sisters by using written documents to secure rights and create endowments, and it is on the records of their considerable economic achievements that she centers her analysis. The White Nuns considers Cistercian women and the women who were their patrons in a clear-eyed reading of narrative texts in their contexts. It challenges conventional scholarship that accepts the words of medieval monastic writers as literal truth, as if they were written without rhetorical skill, bias, or self-interest. In its identification of long-accepted misogynies, its search for their origins, and its struggle to reject such misreadings, The White Nuns provides a robust model for historians writing against received traditions.

The Cistercian Way

The Cistercian Way
Author: André Louf
Publisher: Cistercian Studies Series
Total Pages: 184
Release: 1983
Genre: Religion
ISBN:

A sketch of the unique tradition of the 'white monks' as they have sought 'men and women alike' to leave all things to follow the Gospel. The paths leading to the monastery are diverse. But one day they will all converge and form a singe Way, meeting in him who said, "I am the Way", and "No one can come to the Father but me". The Christian who becomes a monk is seeking no other way than this. What he makes his own is what he has seen and heard in the words and deeds of Jesus. As Saint Benedict said in the Prologue to this Rule [for Monasteries], "Let us set out on this way with the Gospel for our guide...". In saying this, saint Benedict is saying no more than Saint John, who said, "We must live the same kind of life that Christ lived".

The Cambridge Companion to the Cistercian Order

The Cambridge Companion to the Cistercian Order
Author: Mette Birkedal Bruun
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 341
Release: 2013
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107001315

Presents the Order's figureheads, practical life and spiritual horizon, and its contribution to medieval Europe's religious, cultural and political climate.