Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the architecture of a contemporary English Benedictine monastery. I look at the ways in which the buildings contain and express the social life of the monastic community, and how the architecture of the monastery makes this social life visible to the world beyond the cloister walls.

Paper long abstract:

Benedictine monks make a commitment to stability: they invest themselves in their new religious household and tie their own individual development to the life of that household. The entire religious 'life cycle' of the monk, from his clothing upon entering the monastery, to his burial in the monastic cemetery, can be contained within the accommodation of the monastery grounds. I suggest then that the monastic life should be understood as a commitment to place. In this context of commitment to place, the architecture of the monastic household becomes a question of key significance. In this paper, I will draw on the case of an English Benedictine monastery where I carried out a year's ethnographic fieldwork. I will look at how the monastery makes visible the commitment to stability by connecting the different stages of the monk's life cycle, and also the different elements of the monks' daily life, within the same complex. The buildings of the monastery contain the sleeping quarters, the place for prayer, for study, for eating, for relaxation. In such a context, the sacred and the banal are enclosed and connected within the same set of buildings. Yet these buildings are not, I would argue, a quarantine, or a means of containing the community as separate from society. Through the guest wing and through the architectural witness of the Abbey church, visitors are built into the structure of the monastery, and the monastery communicates its way of life to the wider society within which it exists.