Monastic Narrative Practices

Abstract

Stories comprised the very fabric of devotional life and institutional identity in medieval European monasteries. The monastic habitus encouraged the reading, glossing, composition, and performance of many different kinds of narratives, and the religious men and women who took these tasks to heart became, in a sense, living books. This chapter describes three fundamental ways in which narratives shaped the medieval monastic experience in the Latin West: first, by promoting particular models of holiness; second, by creating a textual basis for coherent, resilient communal identities; and third, by defining boundaries, albeit flexible and permeable ones, between religious communities and the outside world. Each of these narrative functions represents a rich vein of recent scholarship on medieval monasteries as devotional and textual communities.