List of Illustrations List of Contributors Introduction - Santha Bhattacharji 1. Re-thinking the History of Monasticism East and West: A Modest tour d’horizon - Columba Stewart, O.S.B. 2. Not by Bread Alone: St Brendan meets Paul, the Irish Spiritual Hermit - Eamonn O’Carragain 3. Theology and the Paschal Controversy: Bede’s Case Against the British Church - Rowan Williams 4. Bede’s view of the place of the Eucharist in Anglo-Saxon Life: the evidence of the Histroia ecclesiasticus gentis Anglorum - Thomas O’Loughlin 5. Women, Prayer and Preaching in the Early English Church - Sarah Foot 6. What Was Supposed to be Going on in the Minds of Monks When they Prayed the Psalter in Carolingian times? - Henry Mayr-Harting 7. ‘The brother who may wish to pray by himself’: Sense of Self in Carolingian Prayers of Private Devotion - Renie Choy 8. St Boniface Monk and Missioner - Henry Wansbrough O.S.B. 9. Turning the World Upside-Down: St Peter Damian’s Theology of the Spiritual Life - Gordon Mursell 10. John of Fécamp and Anselm of Bec: A New Language of Prayer - Brian McGuire 11. ‘Minds Wandering’ and ‘Monastic stability’ in the Early Monastic Letters of Anselm of Bec - G.R. Evans 12. Between Dialectic and the Sacred Scripture: Anselm of Canterbury and the Bible - Giles Gasper 13. Miracles and the Crusading Mind: Monastic Meditations on Jerusalem’s Conquest - Jay Rubenstein 14. Reading Saints’ Lives in the Light of John of Forde’s Life of Wulfric of Haselbury - Pauline Matarasso 15. The Eye of Reason – The Eye of Love: ‘Divine Learning and Affective Prayer’ in the thought of William of St Thierry - E Rozanne Elder 16. Concerning Academic Translation and the Latin of Conrad of Eberbach - Paul Savage 17. ‘Desire for the Eternal Country’: the Laity and the Wider World of Monastic Prayer in Medieval England - Brian Golding 18. Universities: Friend or Foe? - Alexander Murray 19. Late Medieval Mysticism: visionary writing as a mode of thought - Santha Bhattacharji 20. John Wesley and William Law: the founding of two contrasting religious communities in the Eighteenth Century - Ralph Waller 21. The Beloved: the Messianic Figure in the Song of Songs - Sister Edmée S.L.G. 22. Sr Benedicta Ward in a few words: Nun, Scholar, Teacher - Dominic Mattos Select Bibliography of Works by Sr Benedicta Ward S.L.G. M.A. D. Phil Indexes

I cannot here do justice to all the essays in this book. However, all in all, this is a very fitting tribute to a gracious lady who by her work as a medievalist and a translator has done so much to further research in the early monastic tradition ... These 21 essays, each by experts in their own fields, offer the reader a rich feast of writings on various aspects of monastic learning in fields such as history, prayer, theology, spirituality, hagiography, and liturgy, and the volume deserves a place on the bookshelf of anyone seriously interested in these or in any aspect of early English monastic life.