Hugh FEISS, OSB and Maureen M. O’Brien (Eds.). A Benedictine Reader: 1530-1930. Collegeville, MN: Cistercian Publications/Liturgical Press, 2023. pp. 500. $49.95 pb. ISBN 9780879071691.  Reviewed by Carol  STANTON, Orlando, FL 32804.

Lovers of primary sources will relish this book, the sequel to Cistercian Publications first Benedictine Reader: 530-1530. This Cistercian project is microscopically incarnational. In a feat of collaborative research and curative editing, the project drills down into the grand sweep of Benedictine history, putting flesh, blood and personality on individual monastics— women and men, well known and not, who found diverse ways to record their experiences. This book is what it says it is, a Reader,various writings with the commonality of a Benedictine lens.

This Reader picks up where the first one left off and views the 16th to 20th centuries through the eyes of selected Benedictines. The roller coaster of suppressions, exiles, foundations, missions, and reforms of Benedictine life in these centuries is overwhelming. The editors tether readers with enough historical context to fasten each source in time while letting the individuals’ words and attitudes speak for themselves. These women and men are not meant to be fully representative of entire eras. The Reader gives us 23 chapters, each one a small window into their times.

There are the expected spiritual and theological reflections, often elaborating on the Rule of St. Benedict and the life of the monastic. There are also wonderfully quotidian writings: reports, letters, poetry and diaries of Benedictine monastics who were living daily lives in the midst of sometimes chaotic times.

Francoise de la Châtre (1574-1590), the vivacious, reforming Abbess of Faremoutier, kept a journal from which this Reader draws excerpts. The highly born Francoise lived through multiple wars and herself was held prisoner, hostage really, in a dispute between her father and a friend, an experience from which, she says, her health never recovered. Mixed in with notes of her attempts to reform and regularize the life of her community are daily mentions of visitors, miracles, relatives, deaths, small details of color, time, her observations of others and even a list of the gifts she gave her community members one Christmas, including two wax candles and a jar of quince jam. In an entry from 1628 she describes the discernment and formation necessary before young women are received into the Abbey, “…so that they will be more aware and enlightened about what they are doing. This is very important.”  An evergreen entry.

There is even a play in this Reader by a noted monastic dramatist. Maurus Lindemayr, OSB, who wrote for performance by monks and monastery pupils.  The Marriage Contract (1770) was presented for Marie Antoinette on her pre-wedding tour which stopped at Lambach Abbey, Lindemayr’s famous monastery founded in the 11th century in Upper Austria.

Sometimes the editors give us two very different eyes on one moment. An example is Chapter 16. One “eye” is on the riveting saga of the founder of New Norcia Abbey in Western Australia, Abbot Rosendo Salvado, OSB (1814-1900). An indefatigable and creative extrovert, Salvado founded New Norcia Benedictine Abbey in the Australian bush. He left a huge trail of historical breadcrumbs in his prolific letters and reports, documenting how he charmed and cajoled his way through civil and ecclesiastical powers in search of resources for the evangelization and survival of First Australians. The Reader gives us Salvado’s final report to the Vatican. The second “eye” is a letter of a mother to her son. Lady Mary Anne Stewart Broome wrote to her young son Guy on the final night of her first visit to New Norcia with her husband Frederick, the Governor General of Western Australia. She describes in enthusiastic detail her observations of the Benedictine fathers and the First Australians living at New Norcia. It is a warm letter but a teaching letter from a mother eager to share her experiences with her young son who is away at school.

For Benedictine readers the names coming into the 19th and 20th centuries will be familiar.  The preservation of the archives at Cava, the writings of Blessed Dom Columba Marmion, Abbot Boniface Wimmer (the Patriarch of American monasticism), Eichstatt, “mother of American Benedictine women’s communities, Father Virgil Michel of Saint John’s Abbey, Collegeville, MN. The Reader ends with Michel’s pre-Vatican II contribution to liturgical renewal and social justice. Dorothy Day’s moving remembrance of Virgil Michel after his death brings this Reader to a close.
Striking for today’s Benedictines may be the legacy of resilience and courage this book resurrects. From 1530-1930 men and women Benedictines, driven into exile by external events, found refuge and stability in the hospitality of sister/daughter monasteries when their own places were suppressed, their own tables destroyed. Their portability, their launching out with a willingness to let go of the familiar for the sake of their single-eyed search for God, kept the essence of their Benedictine charism alive. Their fidelity to the call of the Rule of St. Benedict to convert their ways, to live differently, intentionally and together at table, put to lie the more defeatist reckonings that the time of the Benedictines had come to an end. 

One can only hope for the Benedictine Reader to come, the one covering 1930-2030.