The English Monastic Cathedrals in the Fifteenth Century

Abstract

It might well appear an excessively abrupt change of pace to turn from Professor Bossy's topic to my own—to move from the most personal of all manifestations of individual Christian worship to the most formidably complex institutional corporations late medieval England has to offer for our contemplation. However, there is little about medieval monasticism, that ambivalent exercise in seeking one's own route to the divine but not in one's own company, which is quite what it seems. For perhaps no audiences in fifteenth-century England would have listened to Professor Bossy's lecture with greater fascination than the monastic communities of Canterbury, Durham, Ely, Norwich, Rochester, Winchester, and Worcester cathedrals. Not only did those Benedictine monks have an obligation to pray as assiduously as any religious in the country but they were also andipso factorequired to do so in the most public and exposed of all possible arenas, the formal prayer housespar excellenceas well as theecclesiae matricesof seven of late medieval England's nineteen dioceses. Precisely how those monks would have explained what they were doing when engaged in acts of communal and private prayer is no easy matter for a modern historian to surmise; but it seems certain that many of them must have been highly concerned about the purpose and quality of their devotions, not least because they could hardly have ignored the priority placed on theoratoriumandoratiowithin the Rule of St Benedict, to chapters of which they listened more or less attentively every day of their professed lives.

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