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The medieval paradox which occupies this chapter concerns the monastic system of the Latin West in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. It begins with the scholarly bursts of activity associated with Saint Jerome, who produced Biblical translations of great learning and Saint Augustine, the great theologian, in the fourth and fifth century. The monastic movement, however, was to come under the Rule of Benedict, beginning in the sixth century, which brought great discipline, humility, and reverence to the monasteries, with little attention to learning, apart from what was needed to learn and recite scripture. The Rule reinforced the sharing of property and the time devoted to reading. While it made little provision for learned activities, the Rule set up the necessary and productive conditions for the creation of such properties through the setting aside of time and sharing of texts. Cassiodorus managed to construct much more of a monastic academy model about the same time as Benedict but with far less influence among the monasteries of Europe, while Radegund of Poitiers demonstrated through her poetry and leadership in the sixth century how the learning of women had a place within monasticism.

This chapter focuses on The “New Monasticism” of Lotharingia, which propagated a dichotomous vision of the monastic world. It consists of a large group of ordinary monks, whose service to society was executed within the cloister's wall, as well as a small group of charismatic individuals capable of engaging in different ways with the outside world without compromising their Benedictine identity. This reform movement centered not on monastic discipline or institutional management but on how a transformation of monastic leadership could impact both on the individual and collective well-being of monastic communities and on the way in which monasticism could provide a service to society.

This chapter covers the spread of Christian monasticism in the Sinai and the growth of pilgrimage to the region. By the later half of the fourth century, several churches and numerous monastic sites had been founded in the Sinai, as attested by the pilgrim Egeria. Growth continued in the fifth and sixth centuries, and two fortresses were constructed during the reign of the Emperor Justinian (527-565) to defend the monks at Mount Sinai and the coastal site of Rhaithou. Innumerable pilgrims visited the Sinai from all corners of the Mediterranean world. Several pilgrims left accounts of their travels. Without the influx of pilgrims the monastic communities of the Sinai could not have sustained themselves.

The history of monastic exemption in France gives witness to a rich and lively institutional story of freedom and protection. This opening chapter frames the subject, its historiographical traditions, and methodological challenges, advancing the argument for a Roman tradition whose origins and development date firmly to the early Middle Ages.

It’s one thing to wake up in the middle of the night to an imagined terror. It’s another thing to be wide awake and feel the hand of fear creeping up your spine. Camping alone one winter night above Ghost Ranch in New Mexico, I heard (or did I dream I heard?) scratching on the wall of the tent and the heavy breathing of an animal outside in the snow. I was so frightened I couldn’t voice the scream stifled in my throat. Or was it in my dream that I wasn’t able to make any sound? On waking I wasn’t sure what had or hadn’t happened—or whether it was all in my mind. An even more uncanny experience came on another moonlit night in the depths of the Maze in Canyonlands National Park in southeast Utah. A friend and I had walked a mile down the canyon from our campsite, under the shadow of the towering walls within that vast winding labyrinth. Hiking in the light of a full moon without flashlights, we felt a sense of wild, animal abandonment. With reckless exuberance we’d been howling like wolves at the moon. But then we found ourselves standing before a canyon wall covered with ancient figures painted by archaic artists some two thousand years ago. These were spirit beings standing vigil—long, ethereal shadows hovering on the surface of the rock. Whether they were guarding, witnessing, or offering protection, I didn’t know. But in the hollowed-out world of moonlight and shadow that formed the Maze, I sensed the presence of something I couldn’t name. It’s a place about as far away from other people as you can get in the lower forty-eight, yet for an instant I had an uncanny awareness of a finger lightly touching me on the back of the neck. I’d been taken into a profoundly deeper meaning of fear. Three days earlier we had driven seven hours from the Hite Marina on Lake Powell along a tortuous dirt road, part of the old Flint Trail. It was a belly-scraping, wheel-spinning, bronco-twisting ride, with hairpin turns around huge boulders and narrow rocky ledges.

The trip didn’t make sense at the time. Most backpacking trips don’t. There are always more pressing things to do. We didn’t have the time or the money, but we went anyway. Sometimes you just gotta drive to the end of a long dirt road in the middle of the desert and keep walking. When Aravaipa Canyon lies at the end of that road, you know you won’t be disappointed. Mike and I had come to southeastern Arizona to hike the twelve-mile length of the Aravaipa Canyon Wilderness Area. “Laughing Waters” is the name the Apaches gave to the site. The Aravaipa band of the Western Apache lived here in the nineteenth century. They did well at first—hunting deer in the side canyons; gathering saguaro fruit, mesquite beans, and pinyon nuts; catching native fish that thrived in the creek. But by the 1870s, drought drove them out. When they sought relief at Camp Grant a few miles away a Tucson mob organized a massacre that left them decimated. The government relocated the remainder of the tribe in the White Mountain Reservation to the north. These canyon walls, reaching a thousand feet high in places, hold memories of children playing under reddish-brown hoodoos and dark stories etched in the desert varnish of the rock. Today the Bureau of Land Management regulates entry into the canyon, limiting permits to thirty hikers a day at the western entrance. For much of the way you slog through ankle- to knee-deep water, stopping at every bend to marvel at what rises before you. Towering red cliffs, stands of green willows and cottonwoods, jimson weed and desert marigolds, cactuses of every sort. This is a place where humans are outnumbered by bighorn sheep, where poisonous centipedes hide in thick grass, and serpentine side canyons darken ominously in the late afternoon sun. I’ve loved it since I first set eyes on it. At the start of this book I mentioned a night I’d spent alone in the desert near here a few years earlier. What I experienced that night would finally make sense on this subsequent trip into the canyon proper.

This chapter offers an introduction to the study of the funerary archaeology of Byzantine Anatolia from ca. AD 400 to 1100. After introducing the sources and taking account of the history of research, theoretical approaches and dating criteria are considered. This is followed by a chronological overview drawing upon key sites and publications that seeks to trace major developments in cemetery and tomb typologies, as well as the social and religious dimensions of tomb locations, burial styles, and objects. The chapter concludes with some general observations on the development of burial practices between the sixth and eleventh centuries and argues that funerary archaeology is an essential source for the study of Byzantine Anatolia.

Spiritual reading can be dangerous. I’m not talking about the devotional pabulum you find in most religious bookstores, but the truly risky stuff—from H?fez and Eckhart to Toni Morrison and Oscar Romero. This is especially true of the spiritual “classics,” says theologian David Tracy. They confront us with the disturbing notion that “something else might be the case.” They haunt us with fundamental questions, overthrowing our previous ways of viewing the world. Reading a potentially dangerous book in a landscape perceived to be dangerous can be doubly hazardous. The place heightens the vulnerability occasioned by the text. Challenging books lose their bite when they’re read comfortably at home in a favorite armchair. Their riskiness increases, however, when read by firelight in a forest glade, ten miles from the nearest road. The place where you encounter a book indelibly affects the way you receive it. Claus Westermann read the Psalms in a Russian prison camp, discovering patterns that changed his life as well as his approach to biblical scholarship. Eldridge Cleaver read Thomas Merton in Folsom Prison. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn read Dostoyevsky in a Soviet cancer ward. Karl Marx read the history of capitalism in the elegance of the British Museum. Potentially revolutionary changes occur when people read explosive texts in unsettling places. The stories of the saints are filled with instances of this. Isaac of Nineveh’s world was turned upside down as he read the Scriptures in the desert solitude of the Zagros Mountains in sixth-century Persia. He allegedly made himself blind through his constant pondering of the tear-stained pages. Near the end of his life, Francis of Assisi read the story of Christ’s passion not simply from the pages of the Gospels, but from the huge, split rocks atop Mt. La Verna. He said these cracks had appeared on Good Friday when the stones on Calvary were also rent. He experienced their truth in the opening of wounds in his body through the gift of the stigmata. The mountainous terrain and his body’s interaction with it became active participants in his reading of the text.