Is there a ‘monastic culture’? It is important to keep in mind the difficulties of bridging the enormous divide between the understanding the mediaeval monk had of what he was doing and the relatively modern ideas the word ‘culture’ is likely to bring to mind. Cultus to a medieval monk meant simply ‘worship’. It was a long and largely post-medieval journey from there to a sense of the English term ‘culture’ which would fit my title. We are not concerned with cultivation or tillage but with the metaphorical developments of cultura which led in one direction to the notion of worship, and in the other to ‘culture’ in its modern senses of a set of assumptions hanging together in the make-up of a person or system or style, and determining their ways of approaching and doing things. For that we are probably indebted to the influence of the Romantic Movement and nineteenth-century Germany.

We need to begin by drawing a key preliminary distinction, between Eastern and Western monasticism. Western thought set off down a somewhat different track when the late Roman world divided into its Latin and Greek speaking halves; the Western monastic library had few volumes from the Greek Fathers on its shelves in the Middle Ages, and it largely got its Platonism second-hand. This denied Western monasticism direct access to the currents of thought that still eddy on Mount Athos, and which lent a Neoplatonist spiritual colouring to the monastic culture of the Greek East. The Western monk of the earlier Middle Ages cultivated a thoughtful spirituality, affective in its urgings, but essentially rational, and in many respects distinctive to the monastic culture of the West. Medieval English monasticism is of its age and of the West, and whatever the special features of its local exemplifications, its culture is shared with others in that world. I propose to take a few examples of figures responsible for writings which have something to tell us about the way those engaged in living within this culture understood what they were doing; it would be absurd to suggest that Anselm of Canterbury or Aelred of Rievaulx was simply ‘English’.