I.3. Guides for Good Living

The ultimate goal of the monastic life was not simply to pray and to acquire learning, but to live a good and moral life, defined in terms of asceticism and devotion to God. Throughout the monastic day, cenobites heard and read lessons on this ideal in liturgy, commentary, sermons, saints’ lives, and treatises on human nature. Monks were educated, regulated, and governed by various kinds of texts and documents that worked together to serve the communal and individual goals of living a good life.

This moral life required guidance and education. To serve this goal, a number of didactic tools developed that were designed to help students find their way. The twelfth century saw a massive increase in the number of texts being transcribed with marginal commentary, necessitating innovative and increasingly complex design and layout of text and illustration on the page. Readers needed to be able to navigate the text and accompanying commentary and to find their place upon returning to the book. A twelfth-century copy of Gilbert de la Porree’s Commentary on the Epistles of St. Paul (cat. no. 30), copied at Chartres during the author’s lifetime (1075-1154), incorporates many of the design innovations of this period. The large inhabited initials function not only as decorative elements but also serve to delineate sections of the text. The marginal commentary is written in a smaller script than the primary text, making the two easily distinguishable. The manuscript also includes a rare example of a volvelle (wheel) bookmark.

Young (“novice”) monks went through years of training and education before they were fully inducted into the monastic order. Large diagrams on single sheets of parchment, hung on walls or laid out on tables, helped novices understand complicated concepts and theological mysteries. The Septenarium pictum (cat. no. 32) is a schematic diagram of various sets of seven, also known as septenaries: Deadly Sins, Beatitudes, Petitions of the Pater noster, and Gifts of the Holy Spirit. Such diagrams, few of which survive, would have helped young monks understand the relationships between these complex concepts.

The dichotomies so clearly laid out in the Septenarium pictum would have been reinforced by guidebooks known as monastic rules. Each monastic order—Benedictine, Cistercian, Franciscan, Augustinian, among others—had a set of rules that governed daily life for the community. Cat. no. 36, for example, is a fifteenth-century manuscript preserving a set of rules governing the life of the Poor Clares, nuns of the Franciscan order. St. Clare of Assisi was a contemporary follower of St. Francis, and the women’s order she founded adhered to the same principles of poverty and simplicity as did its male counterpart. Cat. no. 35 is a rule for the male community of the Order of St. Jerome, compiled from the writings ofjerome himself by Lupus de Olmedo (1370-1433). Such rules were typically illustrated with a portrait of the founder (in these manuscripts, St. Clare and St. Jerome).

Though mostly living apart, monks could not help but be part of the outside world. Abbeys were by turns landowners and tenants, producers and consumers. Unless completely isolated, they were by necessity involved in worldly transactions. The administration of secular monastic affairs was governed by documents such as the collection of fifteen charters, some with seals intact, from Sawley Abbey, England, dated c. 1325-44 (cat. no. 41). Another document, cat. no. 42, preserves an inventory of the property of the Camadolese monastery of Santa Maria in Porciglia, Padua, illuminated in 1489 by Antonio Maria da Villafora. Such manuscripts are important resources for understanding an abbey’s relationship to the secular world.

In late medieval Venice, lay confraternities developed along the lines of modern faith-based organizations such as the Lions or Knights of Columbus, designed to emulate monastic virtues in a worldly environment. Confraternities were also governed by rules and regulations, known as mariegole. Cat. no. 37 is a typical mariegola (illuminated by Benedetto Bordon and workshop around 1504), made for the lay confraternity of the Holy Sacrament of the Church of San Geminiano, Venice. Most mariegole open with elaborate frontispieces such as this one, an image of members of the confraternity venerating the Eucharist in the form of an oversized chalice from which Christ emerges as a Man of Sorrows.