Consider: Anything written before the invention of printing has come down to us in the form of a manuscript. What about the manuscripts the European and American explorers and collectors never found? Or the cultures they were not interested in plundering? What We Learn From ManuscriptsĮven though manuscripts-handwritten books- are at least several technological stages behind the ways we access information today, we still rely on them for access to the past. The introduction of movable type and mechanical printing came as a great relief: The second book printed on Gutenberg’s equipment was a Benedictine psalter. Clocks were developed in the Middle Ages to wake up monks for early prayers. Benedictines have always been inventors or early adopters of technology. Alongside the theological tomes would be texts of philosophy, grammar and mathematics, astronomy and history, medicine and law.

At its best, that monastic stability frees the mind to roam widely and to make unexpected applications of what is found. We monks put down deep roots and try to cultivate through communal monastic practices the grounded humanity that Greek philosophers and their Christian heirs characterized as learning “to dwell with the self” ( habitare secum). That shared experience made intellectual engagement-and debate-possible. Abbot Peter could see that the same was true of the followers of Islam. Their labor of copying was for the sake of learning, learning for the sake of understanding, understanding for the sake of worship and thanksgiving. That is the truth behind the familiar trope of a monk hunched over a copy desk, quill in hand, writing texts on reams of parchment: a belief in the power of words. To understand people of another culture, with different beliefs, we must listen to them in their own voice, learning their language, reading and understanding their texts.Īs a Benedictine monk, Abbot Peter belonged to a community of readers engaged in the study of Christian sacred texts and related literature. Nonetheless, he embraced the humanistic principle that to understand people of another culture, with different beliefs, we must listen to them in their own voice, learning their language, reading and understanding their texts.

He was a medieval abbot, facing a powerful and highly literate religious tradition he considered to be fundamentally incompatible with his own. What was this abbot thinking? He was not a scholar of comparative religion, as you might find in a modern university. Pre-eminent among them was the Quran itself, entrusted to an English cleric who had learned Arabic to gain access to scientific literature in that language, including Arabic translations of otherwise lost classical Greek texts.

He summoned Christian scholars of Arabic and set them to work translating Islamic texts into Latin. Abbot Peter’s visit to Toledo, which had been reconquered a few decades earlier after almost four centuries of Muslim rule, led him to a surprising decision. The journey across the Pyrenees was long, and his agenda was packed with kings, bishops, abbots and complex negotiations. Known as Peter the Venerable for his wisdom, he ruled a federation of 600 monasteries from his base at the Abbey of Cluny in Burgundy. In 1142, a powerful Benedictine abbot traveled to Spain.

Room with old manuscript