This collection of essays appreciative of English medieval monasteries gives ample evidence of their cultural vitality right up to their dissolution under Henry VIII. In the title essay, James G. Clark provides an overview of changing monastic beliefs and values—“monastic mentalities”—between the Conquest and the Dissolution, an appraisal that is possible now that scholars have shifted their attention from treasures, “the cultural remains,” to the monastic communities that created them. Clark sees the “culture of cenobitic life” envisioned in the Benedictine Rule evolving dynamically, permitting “certain universal values” to coexist with those of “distinct cultural environments” shaped by “gender, economic conditions, or social status” (4, 5).

One development Clark highlights is an increased emphasis on reading: the pursuit of learning “more than any other pattern of life … separates the nuns of the later Middle Ages from their predecessors” (14). The resultant “cultural exchanges between the cloister and the world” were positive because they required nuns and monks to participate in “a process of critical engagement” (17) about what to accept or reject, a discernment that permitted innovation in spiritual literature, liturgy, and art. “There can now be no doubt,” Clark concludes, “that the treasures recovered from the ruins of the religious houses after 1540 were not the fossils of a long forgotten world but fragments of a cultural tradition that—at the time of its destruction—was still very much alive” (18).

The essays are arranged under four types of cultures—observant, learned, of women, and of community—though often the articles seem more about books read, art observed, and liturgy performed than about monastic culture more broadly conceived. That is partly because, as G. R. Evans explains, medieval monks and nuns did not have a word for culture understood as a “set of assumptions hanging together in the make-up of persons or systems” and “determining their ways of approaching and doing things.” Their word was cultus—like our word culture, one of the “metaphorical developments of cultura” (cultivation or tillage)—and it “meant simply ‘worship.’” Despite the terminological disjunction, Evans sets out to discover how some monks “understood what they were doing”; he finds in the writings of Anselm of Canterbury and Aelred of Rievaulx the cultural assumption that “monks are to be occupied in a spiritually profitable way at all times” (75–76).

Another author who also explores culture as a set of assumptions—Julian Haseldine in “The Monastic Culture of Friendship”—also relies heavily on the writings of Anselm and Aelred. Haseldine challenges the claim that Aelred was an advocate of friendships based on strong personal and emotional bonds, our modern, romantic notion of friendship. Rather, Aelred's ideal friends were those who aided him on his journey to God, friends fully in keeping with the Benedictine Rule, examples of a “distinctively monastic culture of friendship” (179). Concerned about our tendency to read into medieval texts our assumptions about sexuality and friendship, Haseldine also cautions against interpreting Aelred's statement that he had close ties with a man before becoming a monk as evidence that they were sexually intimate; in Haseldine's view, Aelred's remark may not even have been autobiographic. Haseldine would apparently not be a promoter of modern devotion to Aelred, the Homosexual Saint.

To get at “monastic mentalities,” several authors consider what monks and nuns might have read and how they interpreted it. A. J. Piper, looking at the study of scripture in the monastery of Durham, and R. M. Thomson, considering the education of monks at Worcester about 1300, move from descriptions of what writings were available to a discussion of what their use says about the monasteries' “learned culture.” Nuns' intellectual achievement in the later medieval period is reassessed by David Bell, who shows ways it has been seriously underestimated. Mary Elder illustrates one of these ways in “Private Reading in the Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century English Nunnery”: the greater orientation toward the individual, usually seen as a decline of monastic ideals, might instead have given nuns privacy that permitted more reading and study. In the diocese of Winchester in 1517, nuns received from their bishop, at their request, a new translation of the Benedictine Rule; Barry Collett identifies how the translation reflects the distinct culture in which it was embedded.

Art is the topic of two essays. Using the notebook of a fifteenth-century monk at Canterbury, Joan Greatrex explores the theological significance of twelve cathedral windows. Similarly, Miriam Gill relates complex wall murals to what monks read, revealing “a self-consciously erudite form of art” that used scripture in ways akin to that “quintessential monastic practice of lectio divina” (71).

It was the monasteries' vitality, not their decadence, that may have sped their demise, or so Roger Bowers argues in “An Early Tudor Monastic Enterprise: Choral Polyphony for the Liturgical Service.” Bower describes the half century before the Dissolution as a time of stability and even economic prosperity for the great monasteries that offered elaborate liturgies with polyphonic music and virtuous soloists. Henry may have acted in haste to dissolve the monasteries once he had decided to do so because delaying would give the monastic liturgical revival time to gain even more momentum and support.

The collection concludes with J. D. North's essay on “Monastic Time.” After the invention in the late thirteenth century of the fully mechanical clock, monastic time quit being measured in unequal hours (each hour being an equal percentage of day or night). Having the hours equal in length brought a profound shift to the monastic daily rhythms. But monks and nuns continued to “measure out time in hours and minutes” to pay “homage to the work of the Creator of the world” and to summon members to the worship of that Creator (211), a central component of monastic culture.