- Home
- Spirituality and Monasticism, East and West
- religion
- history
- Meditation and Prayer in the Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Monastery
Meditation and Prayer in the Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Monastery
Struggling towards God
Series: Spirituality and Monasticism, East and West
123 Pages, Trim size: 6 x 9 in
- Hardcover
- 9781641893121
- Published: May 2023
This book explores the dimensions of medieval monastic meditation, prayer, and contemplation in the heyday of Benedictine and Cistercian spiritual writing, the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Mancia aims to answer the following questions: What did extra-liturgical prayer and meditation look like for medieval monks and nuns in western medieval Europe? When, where, and how was it practised? Was there a set way to engage with monastic meditation, or were there a variety of medieval monastic meditative experiences in the eleventh and twelfth centuries? What did monks and nuns perceive as the limitations of monastic prayer and meditation, and how did they understand their own imperfections and failures to perform "perfect" devotion? What extra-textual tools—art, manuscripts, diagrams, spaces—did monks and nuns rely upon to stimulate their practices of meditation? What does monastic meditation reveal about the emotional lives of Benedictine and Cistercian monks and nuns in the high Middle Ages? And, finally, what does the monastic struggle to pursue a prayerful Christian life have to teach the secular world of the twenty-first century?
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter One: What Were “Meditation” and “Prayer” in the Medieval Monastery?
Chapter Two: The Journey to God through Meditation and Prayer, according to Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Monastic Thinkers
Chapter Three: From Theory to Practice: The Experience of Monastic Meditation and Prayer in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries
Chapter Four: Envisioning the Invisible: The Use of Art in Monastic Meditation
Conclusion
Select English-Language Bibliography
Lauren Mancia is Associate Professor of History at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. She is the author of Emotional Monasticism: Affective Piety in the Eleventh-Century Monastery of John of Fécamp (2019).
"[A]n admirably clear and direct introduction to a key area of medieval studies: the nature of monastic prayer. In her account of high medieval monasticism, Mancia centers the complex, evolving practices of prayer and meditation that structured and drove the lives of monks and nuns, both day to day and at the foundational level of motivation and purpose. This approach is timely and much needed: the book will be of great use as a primer on how and why medieval monks and nuns prayed, and a demonstration of the significance of that practice for our scholarship on medieval life, religious and otherwise. [...] Meditation and Prayer is overall exemplary in its accessible, urgent communication of the value and complexity of the medieval monastic life of prayer, and offers a compelling invitation to consider it more holistically as a way of reading, thinking, and living from which real inspiration and learning can be derived."
~Alicia Smith, Cistercian Studies Quarterly 59, no. 1 (2024): 146-52
[Mancia] draws on the writings of monastic authors of the time like Anselm, William of Saint-Thierry. Bernard of Clairvaux, Richard of Saint-Victor and Pierre de Celle, and predecessors like Cassian and Pseudo-Dionysius, to offer a new way of thinking about medieval monastic prayer. In the recent past the study of medieval Christian prayer has centered on the great "mystics" of the later Middle Ages. The prayer of the early medieval monks has often been dismissed as ritualized and perfunctory. Mancia suggests that the prayer experience of these monks was anything but perfunctory. [...] The author directed this book at a general audience; she doesn't try to say too much, her footnotes are many but brief, her explanations are clear, her sources, in English. I have spent much of the last fifty years enjoying the study of the monks and nuns of this medieval period, and her thesis about the effort and frustration of the prayer of these monks rings true. The author knows these monks in a scholarly, but also a heartfelt way. She reveals them as human beings like us, whose struggles to reach God are not irrelevant today.
~Hugh Feiss, American Benedictine Review 75, no. 1 (March 2024): 103-4
More books from Arc
