THE MONASTIC REALM
Texts by Raymond Oursel, Leo Moulin, Reginald Gregoire
New York: A Rizzoli International Publication, 1985
287 pp. $65
The market for large art books has spread, one supposes, with the popularity of coffee tables, the while the majority have remained objects of scholarly indifference, some of these art books deserve a more estimable fate. Not perhaps as a special literary genre, but as products of fine printing techniques through which an epoch or a movement of art may be more fully understood, or the work of a great master rendered in its actual significance. There are, of course, many such art books. Let me mention two before turning to the third, under review. One is a Franco-German co-production dealing with Odysseus in myth, history, and art (1965); the other a Franco-Italian work on "Greco's later years in Toledo" (1972), the latter published by Rizzoli, a house specializing in this kind of volume. I say specializing, because such minor monuments require discrimination in assembling pertinent illustrations and knowledgeable men not only in art, but also in history and usually a number of other disciplines.
The third such volume was published in 1985, also a Rizzoli publication, entitled The Monastic Realm, a title not too felicitously chosen (in Italian: La civilta dei monastery, slightly better worded). I say this because the history of Western monasticism, one of the most undervalued chapters of Western history, cannot be embraced in one book; and the present volume wisely is limited to consideration of only one - albeit the main - branch, the Benedictines. On the other hand, the epoch is well chosen, the tenth and eleventh centuries, which some of our conventional textbooks (betraying their ignorance and prejudice) call the "Dark Ages.” This darkness was of great luminosity, in art equaled, but by no means surpassed, only by the best of what Egyptian, Periclean, and Abbaside times have produced. Consider: the tenth century is still that of the great invasions (Norman, Magyar, and continuing Arab raids), and the eleven his likewise unsettled. Both centuries were, however, witnesses of reforms in the Church, reflected principally in monastic organization, in a renewed architectural style, and in the rise of a more inward-turned religious sensitivity.
The initial date of the story here told in text and image is 910, the founding of Cluny, and the final date, 1098, that of Citeaux. Between the two dates, Raymond Oursel traces the comprehensive story of Romanesque art, while Reginald Gregoire and Leo Moulin describe, in turn, monastic life out of which there grew a certain civilization, that of second-millennium Europe. Before Cluny, Monte Cassino was the cultural nucleus of the post-Roman West, for a period of roughly three hundred years, also touched upon by the text. Monasteries of the time were islands of literacy, committed to the transmission of ancient literature, mostly sacred works (St. Gall, Montserrat, Iona, Lerins), and established often on hilltops or islands. Soon, however, the monks came to mix with the population, offering services that only they could perform: teaching, copying manuscripts, and cultivating medicinal herbs for the sick.
Monks were thus integrated with life around them. British scholar Peter Brown, in his Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity, dealing mostly with Syrian and Egyptian
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