THE FOLIO SOCIETY

From the evocative ruins of Fountains Abbey in Yorkshire, to Monte Cassino in southern Italy, where monks have lived for 1,500 years, monastic history is dramatically etched onto the landscape of Western Europe. These beautiful buildings tell a remarkable story - of isolated pioneers struggling to keep the light of scholarship alive in a barbarian world; of missionaries venturing across pirate-infested seas; of scribes labouring painstakingly on illuminated manuscripts, in the margins of which we can still see the secret messages they passed to one another.

The first Christian monks were hermits who dwelt alone in the Egyptian desert, seeking refuge from the temptations of the world. Gradually communities formed across the lands of the crumbling Roman Empire, and rules were established for monastic life. The way to God, as prescribed in around AD 530 by an Italian monk, Benedict of Nursia, was through a daily routine of communal worship, individual prayer and manual labour ('idleness is the enemy of the soul') that was as hard on the body as rewarding to the spirit. Perhaps because of its severity, the Benedictine Rule became the template for monastic observance throughout Christendom. At their height in the 11th and 12th centuries, monasteries grew rich on secular endowments, pilgrimages and the economic fruits of their estates; new Orders, such as the Augustinians and the Cistercians, recruited vigorously; visionaries like St Bernard of Clairvaux and St Francis of Assisi preached the cause of reform. But ultimately many houses were ravaged by the Black Death and others fell victim to the purges of the Reformation.