Hortus Artium Medievalium

The monastery of St. Chrysogonus in Zadar was one of the most notable Benedictine abbeys on the eastern Adriatic coast. The monastery was first mentioned in the second half of the tenth century, but there is very little knowledge about the earliest (Benedictine) building. The presentday church of St. Chrysogonus, consecrated in 1175, is a monumental three-nave basilica and one of the most significant Romanesque religious monuments in the eastern Adriatic. One of the aims of the paper is to discuss the problem of the first church and monastery of St. Chrysogonus - therefore special attention will be given to the interpretation of Early Christian and Early Medieval fragments of liturgical furnishings and architectural decoration found in the well-preserved Romanesque monument. Attention will also be focused on the Romanesque church, especially on the interpretation of its architecture and surviving remains of architectural sculpture, and architectural influences that has always been in the centre of scientific interest. The purpose of this paper is to improve the existing knowledge of the Benedictine monastery in Zadar, which will contribute to a better understanding of Benedictine (medieval) monuments of the eastern Adriatic coast and the adjacent area.

The cloister of Santa Sofia in Benevento, of Lombard foundation, saves a group of capitals carved with various subjects. The main theme of the decoration is directed to the contemplation for the monastic community: scenes from the Old and New Testament stories, scenes from the monastic environment, scenes from the profane world. The decoration of the cloister is therefore a didactic path for the monks. The narrative that is seen in the capitals of the cloister of Santa Sofia in Benevento is one of the most important in South Italy, especially for the presence of the cycle of the months that finds the strongest iconographic comparisons with North Italy. But the realization of the sculptures is linked to a workshop of local artists in the late twelfth century, influenced by apulian and from the Abruzzo figurative culture.

The most ancient Norman Benedictine abbey in Sicilian area is S. Bartolomeo in Lipari. Count Roger I and his brother Robert Guiscard established it a couple of years before the death of the latter in 1085. In 1767, an earthquake damaged the church, which was rebuilt as a three naves basilica. The current right aisle has replaced the northern side of the cloister. The cloister is probably the oldest one in Southern Italy. The quality of the capitals’ sculptures, as well as the lack of narrative scenes, attests that the cloister was built some decades after the abbey’s foundation, during the first half of the 12^th century. The style of the sculptures has no comparisons in the Norman world, but it is possible to find similarities with the First-Romanesque production of Northern and Central Italy. The artists likely were part of the community of Lombard colonists invited in Sicily by count Roger and his wife Adelasia, as well as the first abbot, Ambrosius, and many monks. Both architecture and decoration of the monastic complex seem to have adapted themselves to the habits and the expectations of the first community of Lombard Benedictines, instead to them of their Norman patrons.

During the 9^th century, there was an important increase of monasteries in the Catalan counties. In few years, from 800 to 875, more than fifty new abbeys were founded; lots of them encouraged by the Carolingian authorities. Nevertheless, at the same time, some cloisters were established by founding pacts between their first monks and their abbot, without the intervention of any external power. In this article, I will study the survival of this pactual tradition, which was deeply connected to the Visigoth monasticism, during the Carolingian reform. The efforts made by their sovereigns in order to impose the Benedict’s Rule were not enough to eradicate the previous monastic tradition, which remained in some of those early monasteries until the first years of the 10^th century.

The contribution would like to offer some reflections on use of wood in the monastic building structures, considering both written and archaeological sources. Attention is particularly directed to the articulation of the monastic space, to constructive activities and to material culture.

The paper attempts to investigate, through the study of iron production, particularly in central and northern Italy, the development of the historical forms of property in close relationship with the unraveling control of the elites on the countryside. The entire set of sources (both archaeological and written), for the period under examination, seems to indicate that production was now strongly oriented/focused to meet the overriding interests of large landed property, a process to which the economic reorganization of the monasteries was certainly not alien but, on the contrary, it appears to have played a key role in the definition of new ways to control access to raw materials and to the territory in general.

The essay analyzes the function of the manual work in the monastic life between the late antiquity and the Middle Ages in South of Italy. The manual activities, before of the advent of St. Benedict, are little known because of the scarcity of sources, but with the great age of Benedictine monasticism the question of work becomes of great importance. The first communities strictly follow the rules of the founder, but in the big southern abbeys (as Montecassino and San Vincenzo al Volturno) the main care concerns the management of large land estates. A new impetus to manual labor comes only with the arrival of the Cistercians. Instead, from the tenth century, the work done by the Italian-Greek monks is completely different: they are known for the large land reclamations, for the foundations of monasteries and villages, for the abilities of amanuenses and for the pictorial exercises.

A research of “light” archeology conducted in the two year period 2002-2003 in the district of Urgup in Cappadocia has provided some significant information on the internal organization and the territory of the many rock monastic settlements still largely present. According to the recommendations that Girolamo sends to the monk Rustico di Tolosa in 411, the agricultural activity and the necessary channeling of water for irrigation has left signs referable to the monastic presence of VI-VIII century, but also other activities connected with it such as the breeding of pigeons and bees and the cultivation of vines, they have left substantial traces in the rock dwellings of the territory. A final chapter treats the places of the processing and consumption of food of Community.

The monks did not work the fields themselves; they only helped farm in cases of dire need. There was a tendency to entrust farm tasks to serfs-who were nearly slaves-and to farmers. As of the 10th century the latter were referred to as lay brothers, laymen who joined the monks. The lay brothers, their actions, and their need to work to earn their daily bread, to see to the community’s subsistence, yielded consequences essential to the formation of post- Roman European civilization. Serfs and lay brothers began tilling, irrigating, and draining the land around the monasteries to plant that necessary to their survival. They developed grain farming and zootechnics, cut down woods, and drained marshes, dug canals to irrigate the fields, planted vineyards, and prepared the ground for a type of economy that in the Early Middle Ages would classify as sustainable and perfectly integrated in an equal balance of resources and production capacity. Thus, it was the monks that sparked the development of an economic system, which provided adequate means and resources to organize fairs and markets in certain periods and to control important import-export activities. The profits were then used to purchase sculptures, paintings, gold objects, and precious stones.

Il santuario di San Michele ad Olevano sul Tusciano in provincia di Salerno, fu uno dei maggiori santuari mete di pellegrinaggio dell’età carolingia. La natura impervia del luogo consente di ammirare ancora oggi quasi inalterate le architetture e le decorazioni altomedievali. Scavi archeologici realizzati tra il 2002 e il 2015 hanno permesso di apportare dati utili alla ricostruzione della vicenda del santuario e alla conoscenza della società longobardo-meridionale.

Maintenance, enhancement or reconstruction, performed inside a monastery in any time period negatively affected the monastic life. This challenges equally impact males and females (both genders). Of course, nuns are more affected by the interventions of workers, whether lay or monastic inside the enclosure. Even if the textual sources are not explicit, archaeology reveals different strategies to approach these challenges.

The paper particularly analyzes the monastic culture in Early Middle Ages. A specific focus is made on the evidence of monastic status, with use of ‘monachus’ in subscriptions of mediaeval manuscripts before the 12^th century.

A typikon, stored in the library of the University of Turin under the signature Graecus 216 (ex-Royal Library Codex C III 17), portrays the industrious cultural activity of the monastery of St. Nicholas of Kasoulon, founded in 1098/99 by the monk Joseph, thanks to the patronage of Bohemund, prince of Taranto and Antioch, about a few miles south of Otranto (Lecce), in the south-eastern tip of Italy. According to the testimony of the manuscript, it can be given a broad outline of the scriptorium’s daily activity as a crucial centre of culture and knowledge’s transmission through the manuscripts’ copying. This factor allowed a considerable diffusion of texts both in the religious either in the secular milieu, by making the Hydruntine coenobium to become one of the Byzantine culture’s most outstanding centres in Southern Italy.

Although monastic rules are neither a penal code nor a treatise of moral theology, they provide some reflections on the nature of sin, whose origins are ascribed to the demon’s action, to the weakness of the flesh and to secular temptation. This is particularly evident in the Regula Magistri and in saint Columbanus’s Regula monachorum. To atone for sins, monastic rules suggest specific penances, the most important of which is excommunication. This includes or, alternatively, considers other forms of mortification, especially corporal punishment and fasting. The closer and closer relationship between a sin and its specific penance finds its culmination in saint Columbanus’s regula cenobialis and penitential, which will spread the Irish system of tariff penance on the continent, extending it to the secular clergy and the laity, as well.

The speech focuses on how disease and care are perceived and lived inside the monastic tradition. The sources, which have been used (hagiographies and monastic rules), show how in eastern monasticism, hermits and anchorites accept physical illness as a tool to reach the individual ascetic perfection, while the complex organisation of the coenobitic life introduces “diagnosis” as a new practice in order to distinguish the physical disease from the spiritual illness, and to uncover simulations. As a matter of fact, some monks pretended to be sick in order to avoid work and prayer spreading envy and disappointment inside the community. Therefore, it was necessary to create a designated room, the infirmary, not only in order to treat sick monks, but also to separate them from the others. Starting with S. Benedict, western monasticism, influenced by the Basilian tradition, accepted this kind of organisation and accorded a greater value to the care of the sick brothers, recognizing in this loving attention the spiritual enrichment of the monks (both the sick and the healthy ones) and of the whole of the monastic community. The custom of Cluny, moving from this theological and humanistic conception of care, includes disease and its spaces within the complex rites, whose forms appear as a severe anticipation of death.

A significant amount of land and marine malacofauna remains have been uncovered during the perennial excavations of St. Peter’s monastery in Osor, Croatia. This paper examines the dietary significance of edible land snail and marine shell based on extensive taphonomical analyses. In the theoretical part of the paper the interpretation of dietary restrictions in regard to the Rule of St. Benedict and specifically its interpretation by the monks of St. Peter’s monastery is given. Filtering the results of taphonomical analyses of this indirect evidence for subsistence through theoretical frameworks socially mediated food acquisition and consumption choices of Benedictine monks at St. Peter’s monastery are explored.

This paper aims to study the productive assets of the monastery of Sant Cugat del Valles between the 10th and 11th centuries from a territorial perspective. Georeferencing the information in its rich cartulary and through the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS), we intend to approach to the progressive increase of its possessions in the county of Barcelona and to the diversity of productive spaces (farmland, livestock, fisheries, food processing areas: mills and bread furnaces) that constituted their heritage. The maps resulting from this process will allow us to know the territorial evolution of the monastic property and their asset management strategies, designed to ensure both food sustenance of the monks and economic development of the community.