This collection of essays and articles by Dom David Knowles was presented to him by his colleagues, friends and pupils on his retirement from the Regius Chair of Modern History at Cambridge in the summer of 1963. The collection opens with Dom David's Inaugural Lecture as Regius Professor, 'The Historian and Character', which provides the unifying theme of the book: almost all the studies illustrate the author's interest in human problems and personalities as well as his concern with medieval monasticism and thought and with monastic historians of the modern world. In illustrating his scholarship and his main field of interest, this collection shows Dom David's unique capacity for revealing human personality and his skill in writing history that appeals to the general reader as well as to the historian.
This volume opens with a survey of monastic life and activities in the early Tudor period, which throws new light on the fortunes of the Cistercian abbeys and on the influence upon the monks of the new humanist education. Chapters are devoted to Bishop Redman's visitations of the white canons, to the rural pursuits of Prior More of Worcester, to the friars ranged for and against the New Learning, and to the Carthusians; there are also a number of character sketches of notable abbots and others. There follows a review of the changing religious climate: of Wolsey's attempts at reform, of the all-perspective influence of Erasmus and of the career of Elizabeth Barton. The economic state of the monasteries is discussed as a prelude to the sombre story of the Suppression, illuminated by rare gleams of heroism. The fate and after-careers of the religious are treated in full from the record sources; there are chapters on the aftermath in Mary's reign and the linking with modern Benedictines, a
The Monastic Order in England by Dom David Knowles was originally published in 1940 and was quickly recognised as a scholarly classic and masterpiece of historical literature. It covers the period from about 940, when St Dunstan inaugurated the monastic reform by becoming abbot of Glastonbury, to the early thirteenth century. Its core is a marvellous narrative and detailed analysis of monasticism in twelfth-century England, brilliantly set in the continental background of all the monastic movements of the day - with a vivid evocation of Anselm, Ailred, Henry of Blois and a host of other central figures. Dom David himself brought this second edition up to date in 1963.
