The Library
1780 works catalogued century by century, from the literature the Bible was written among to the present — each with a note on what it is, why it lasted, and where to read it.
601–700
7 works
c. 639–643
Latin
Jonas of Bobbio · 7th century
The life of the Irish founder of Luxeuil and Bobbio, written a generation later by a monk of his own house, including his quarrel with the Frankish court.
c. 650–680
Latin
Cogitosus · 7th century
The life of the abbess of Kildare, full of miracles of provision — butter multiplied, beer for churches — and a description of her double monastery of men and women.
c. 640–660
Latin
Fructuosus of Braga · d. c. 665
A severe Visigothic rule from a nobleman who gave away an enormous inheritance to found monasteries across the northwest, with a pact by which the monks bound themselves to the abbot by written contract — and a right of appeal to the bishop if he abused it.
c. 680–690
Syriac
Dadisho Qatraya · 7th century
A commentary on an earlier ascetic classic, written for solitaries and much concerned with the discipline of the seven weeks of enclosed retreat.
701–800
4 works
c. 716–725
Latin
The Venerable Bede · c. 673–735
The history of his own monastery through its founders, including the book-buying journeys to Rome that built the library Bede worked in.
c. 730
Latin
The Venerable Bede · c. 673 – 735
Fifty sermons for the monastic year at Jarrow, each taking the day's gospel line by line and turning it to the life the monks were actually living — short, plain, and built to be read aloud rather than studied.
c. 758–767
Latin
Ambrosius Autpertus · c. 730–784
Ten books reading Revelation as the present life of the church rather than a forecast, with long passages on the interior conflict of the soul.
c. 775–784
Latin
De Conflictu Vitiorum et Virtutum
Ambrosius Autpertus · c. 730 – 784
Each vice speaks in its own voice and the answering virtue replies with a verse of scripture: pride against humility, gluttony against abstinence, anger against patience. It is a debate script rather than a treatise, and short enough to memorise.
801–900
6 works
c. 810–820
Latin
Diadema Monachorum
Smaragdus of Saint-Mihiel · d. c. 840
A hundred short chapters on the virtues, arranged for reading aloud one each evening before the monks retire.
c. 816–821
Latin
Concordia Regularum
Benedict of Aniane · c. 747–821
Benedict's rule set clause by clause beside every other monastic rule the compiler could find, to show that it summed them all up.
c. 796–826
Greek
Theodore the Studite · 759–826
Over five hundred letters written largely from exile, organising resistance to imperial religious policy and holding a scattered monastic community together by post.
c. 800–826
Greek
Theodore the Studite · 759 – 826
Short addresses given to the Stoudios community three times a week, mostly about the ordinary difficulty of the life: the brother who resents the kitchen, the temptation to think one's own work more important, and what to do with a superior's decision you believe to be wrong.
c. 840
Syriac
Thomas of Marga · 9th century
A history of the great monastery of Beth Abhe and its abbots, full of anecdote about monks, demons, mission journeys, and quarrels over books.
c. 840
Latin
Hortulus
Walafrid Strabo · c. 808–849
A poem on twenty-three plants in a monastery garden — sage, rue, melon, lily, rose — with their uses in medicine and their meanings.
901–1000
8 works
910
Latin
William the Pious of Aquitaine · d. 918
A duke gives land for a monastery and then renounces all authority over it, placing it directly under Rome and forbidding any lord, bishop, or king to interfere.
9th–10th century; authorship disputed
Latin
Attributed to Ekkehard of Saint Gall
A Germanic heroic legend told in Virgilian hexameters by a monk: two hostages escape Attila's court, and old comrades fight each other for treasure until all are maimed.
951
Georgian
Giorgi Merchule
The life of a monastic founder who cleared forest in the mountains of Tao-Klarjeti and built a dozen houses there, told with unusual attention to landscape, building, and argument with local nobles. It contains the sentence that Georgia is wherever the liturgy is celebrated in Georgian.
c. 965–975
Old English
Æthelwold of Winchester · c. 904–984
Benedict's rule in English, made so that nuns and monks without Latin could hear their own rule and understand what they had promised.
c. 970–973
Greek
Athanasius the Athonite · c. 920–c. 1003
The founding rule of the first great monastery on Mount Athos, setting out the daily office, the common table, and the balance between community and solitary cells.
c. 973
Latin
Regularis Concordia
Æthelwold of Winchester · c. 904–984
A single customary imposed on all English monasteries, including the earliest description of the Easter sepulchre ceremony in which monks act out the visit to the tomb.
c. 978–984
Latin
John of Saint-Arnoul · 10th century
The life of a monastic reformer, including his long embassy to the caliph at Córdoba, where he was warned that repeating his message would cost him his head.
c. 994–996
Latin
Abbo of Fleury · c. 945–1004
A defence of monastic exemption from episcopal control, arguing from canon law that monasteries answer to Rome and describing the three orders of Christian society.
1001–1100
7 works
c. 1030–1050
Latin
John of Fécamp · c. 990–1078
Prayer written in the first person, woven from Augustine and Gregory into a continuous address to God on longing, compunction, and the desire to see him.
c. 1042
Latin
Peter Damian · c. 1007–1072
The founder of Camaldoli, who wandered Italy establishing hermitages and once tried to get himself martyred in Hungary without success.
c. 1063–1070
Latin
Otloh of Sankt Emmeram · c. 1010–c. 1070
A monk's record of his own doubts — whether scripture is true, whether God exists at all — and the visions and reasoning by which he worked through them.
c. 1077
Latin
Lanfranc of Bec · c. 1005–1089
Customs for Canterbury covering the whole year, including the sign language monks used during the hours of silence — signs for bread, for a book, for a psalter.
c. 1080–1088
Old Church Slavonic
Nestor the Chronicler · c. 1056–c. 1114
The founder of the Kyiv Caves monastery, who ran away from a wealthy mother to become a monk and insisted on doing the heaviest work himself.
founded 1084; customs written c. 1121
Latin
Bruno of Cologne and the early Carthusians · c. 1030–1101
The arrangements of a house where each monk lives in a separate cell with a garden, meets the others chiefly in choir, and copies manuscripts as his work.
c. 1080–1090
Greek
Nikon of the Black Mountain · c. 1025–c. 1100
A compilation on monastic discipline and canon law for houses in Syria, addressing what to do when different monasteries follow incompatible rules.
1101–1200
5 works
c. 1100–1110
Greek
Gregory the Cellarer · 11th century
A stylite near Ephesus who lived on a pillar for decades, receiving visitors, arbitrating disputes, and quarrelling with his own monks about the food.
c. 1112–1117
Latin
Rupert of Deutz · c. 1075–1129
The whole of scripture read as the successive work of Father, Son, and Spirit, in forty-two books following the Bible from Genesis to the last judgement.
c. 1121–1128
Latin
Consuetudines
Guigo I · 1083–1136
The written form of Carthusian life: the cell, the hair shirt, the weekly walk, the books each monk is lent, and the instruction to copy manuscripts as preaching with the hands.
c. 1132–1135
Latin
Heloise · c. 1100–1164
An abbess writes to the man she loved: that she would rather be his mistress than an empress, that she obeys him and not God, and then asks him for a rule for her nuns.
c. 1180
Greek
Eustathius of Thessalonica · c. 1115–c. 1195
An attack on monks who sell their monastery's books, keep private property, and despise learning as a distraction from holiness.
1201–1300
2 works
c. 1220–1230
Old Church Slavonic
Anonymous
Stories of the monks of the Caves monastery — an icon painter, a doctor, a miser, a monk tormented by demons — collected from an exchange of letters between two churchmen.
c. 1264–1265
Greek
Nikephoros Blemmydes · c. 1197–c. 1269
A scholar and monk defends his own career — including the day he barred an emperor's mistress from his chapel — and explains why he twice refused the patriarchate.
1401–1500
2 works
c. 1418
Old Church Slavonic
Epiphanius the Wise · c. 1350–c. 1420
The monk who founded the Trinity monastery north of Moscow, blessed Prince Dmitry before Kulikovo, refused the office of metropolitan, and made his own shoes.
c. 1490–1508
Old Church Slavonic
Ustav
Nil Sorsky · c. 1433–1508
A rule for small skete communities built on hesychast prayer of the heart, on the analysis of the passions, and on monasteries owning no villages or serfs.
1601–1700
1 work
1691
French
Jean Mabillon · 1632–1707
A defence of scholarship as a legitimate monastic work against a Trappist abbot who insisted monks should do manual labour and pray, not read.
1901–2000
1 work
1948
English
Thomas Merton · 1915–1968
The conversion story of a rootless, clever young writer who moved between France, England, and New York, found his way into the Catholic Church, and then vanished into a Kentucky monastery of the strictest observance.
41–80 of 80 matching · 1780 in the Library