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Tag: monasticism

Ethics, Life, and Medieval Texts

All three texts concern lives: the formed life, the deformed life, and a life without a why – a useless life freed from subjection to transcendence.

Book Preview: Monastic Wales edited by Janet Burton and Karen Stöber

Medieval religious houses were more than enclosed communities of men or women who spent their lives in prayer and worship, striving for their own salvation and interceding for the salvation of humankind. Clearly this was part of the story – it was not for nothing that the medieval historian Orderic Vitalis called monasteries ‘citadels of the Lord’, or that monks were commonly regarded as spiritual soldiers fighting against the power of the Devil and his cohorts.