Frankish monks more clothing than the Rule, written in Italy, had countenanced. Benedict
assembled a group of a dozen monasteries, all uniformly following the Rule, into a
monastic “family,” including Inde, the imperial model monastery near Aix-la-Chapelle.
Although the uniformity quickly broke down after Benedict’s death, his idea of
monasteries organized as a family later influenced the Cluniacs and ultimately the
Cistercians.
Constance B.Bouchard
[See also: BENEDICT, RULE OF ST.; BENEDICTINE ORDER; MONASTICISM]
Ardo. Vita Benedicti abbatis Anianensis et Indensis. In MGHSS 15.200–20.
Lackner, Bede K. The Eleventh-Century Background of Cîteaux. Washington, D.C.: Cistercian,
1972.
Lourdaux, William, and Daniel Verhelst, eds. Benedictine Culture, 750–1050. Louvain: Louvain
University Press, 1983.
BENEDICTINE ORDER
. When St. Benedict of Nursia wrote his monastic rule for Monte Cassino, in the early 6th
century, he had no intention of founding an order. But from the 7th century onward, the
Rule was adopted at a large number of French houses. Institutional ties among these
houses were rare, however, and if the abbot of one Benedictine house became abbot of
another as well such a tie rarely lasted more than a generation. Benedict of Aniane, with
his family of monasteries established in 817, and Cluny with its permanent priories of the
10th and 11th centuries, were exceptions. Almost every house of Black Monks, as the
Benedictines were often called, followed the Rule somewhat differently.
Cîteaux, mother house of the Cistercian order, which began to spread in the first
decades of the 12th century, began the first institutionalized, organized system of
affiliated monasteries within Benedictine monasticism. In the 13th century, those houses
of Black Monks that had not been affiliated with any other order created their own group,
called the Benedictine order, although they certainly had no exclusive claim to Benedict’s
Rule. The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 ordered all unaffiliated monasteries to group
together for a chapter general meeting every four years, in imitation of the Cistercian
annual meeting; a number of independent houses long resisted such bonds.
Constance B.Bouchard
[See also: BENEDICT OF ANIANE; BENEDICT, RULE OF ST.; CISTERCIAN
ORDER; CÎTEAUX; CLUNY; MONASTICISM; NUNNERIES]
Knowles, David. Christian Monasticism. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969.
Lawrence, Clifford H. Medieval Monasticism: Forms of Religious Life in Western Europe in the
Middle Ages. 2nd ed. London: Longman, 1989.
Lourdaux, William, and Daniel Verhelst, eds. Benedictine Culture, 750–1050. Louvain: Louvain
University Press, 1983.
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