2006/08/03 by Susan Wood · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · #Byzantine Studies and History #Historical and Religious Studies of Rome #Medieval Literature and History
paper · doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198206972.003.0006
openalex publication_date 2006/08/03 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2025/11/06
Great basilicas or baptismal churches, staffed by clergy living collegiately, were called monasteria; a solitary and his acolyte might call their oratory a monasteriolum; small domestic churches in Italian towns were casually called monasteries, some of them founded in the hope that they would grow and live by a Rule. There were monasteries in the West, great and small, that were unmistakably monastic, their members (whether or not in orders) living by a more or less ascetic Rule; but there was a wide, blurred borderland where monks under mixed and various Rules overlapped with the clergy, or were distinguishable but lived in the same establishment. The larger monasteries of the West became landowning and power-wielding bodies, whose control was important to bishops and attractive to rulers and lay nobles. This chapter considers what such control could amount to, and on what it would be based.