Meditation and Prayer in the Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Monastery

"[A]n admirably clear and direct introduction to a key area of medieval studies: the nature of monastic prayer. In her account of high medieval monasticism, Mancia centers the complex, evolving practices of prayer and meditation that structured and drove the lives of monks and nuns, both day to day and at the foundational level of motivation and purpose. This approach is timely and much needed: the book will be of great use as a primer on how and why medieval monks and nuns prayed, and a demonstration of the significance of that practice for our scholarship on medieval life, religious and otherwise. [...] Meditation and Prayer is overall exemplary in its accessible, urgent communication of the value and complexity of the medieval monastic life of prayer, and offers a compelling invitation to consider it more holistically as a way of reading, thinking, and living from which real inspiration and learning can be derived."

-- Alicia Smith * Cistercian Studies Quarterly 59, no. 1 (2024): 146-52 *

[Mancia] draws on the writings of monastic authors of the time like Anselm, William of Saint-Thierry. Bernard of Clairvaux, Richard of Saint-Victor and Pierre de Celle, and predecessors like Cassian and Pseudo-Dionysius, to offer a new way of thinking about medieval monastic prayer. In the recent past the study of medieval Christian prayer has centered on the great "mystics" of the later Middle Ages. The prayer of the early medieval monks has often been dismissed as ritualized and perfunctory. Mancia suggests that the prayer experience of these monks was anything but perfunctory. [...] The author directed this book at a general audience; she doesn't try to say too much, her footnotes are many but brief, her explanations are clear, her sources, in English. I have spent much of the last fifty years enjoying the study of the monks and nuns of this medieval period, and her thesis about the effort and frustration of the prayer of these monks rings true. The author knows these monks in a scholarly, but also a heartfelt way. She reveals them as human beings like us, whose struggles to reach God are not irrelevant today.

-- Hugh Feiss * American Benedictine Review 75, no. 1 (March 2024): 103