Description

With this book, the joint research programme Everyday Life in Eastern and Western Monasticisms (4th-10th century AD) reaches its end. A first volume presented the variety of sources to study daily monastic life for the first centuries, in geographical order. During a second colloquium held in Paris in 2011, a comparative perspective was applied to six transversal topics: monastic landscape, the monk's body, prayer, sociologies, productive economy, creation and dissemination of monastic rules. The present volume gathers twenty-two articles questioning these issues common to Egyptian, Nubian, Syro-Palestinian, Byzantine, North African, Visigothic, Italian, Frankish and Germanic, Anglo-Saxon or Irish monks. Although the approaches are manyfold, we have maintained our ambition to consider all forms of monastic life. Therefore, it was possible to grasp monasticism as a diverse phenomenon, which has been shaped by various environments. If daily monastic life is repetitive and does not always present salient features, it nonetheless mirrors the history of societies within which monks have settled down.