Two versions of the Life of the St. Frideswide (650-727) of Oxford exist, in rather different Latin styles though both written in the twelfth century, one more simple, the other more literary (probably the work of Robert of Cricklade, prior of St. Frideswide’s in the twelfth century. It is on this site that the present Christ Church cathedral was built. Parallel passages are given from these two versions to allow comparisons between the content and the language and style.

Egypt has an abundance of well-preserved monastic settlements. The mudbrick structures provide ample evidence for examining domestic spaces associated with the daily household activities of food preparation through the acts of cooking, frying, and baking. While monastic literature presents a portrait of food scarcity in monastic communities, the archaeological evidence of kitchens and cooking spaces creates a more dynamic story of how monks interacted with ingredients, prepared meals, and considered the economy of space in designing areas for food preparation. The monastic movement required new habitations and ones in new locations to be set apart from the traditional and biological households. The importance of consumption habits within the family setting played a role in reinforcing one’s identity in a monastery or in a non-monastic family. The numerous examples of preserved monastic kitchens offer substantial evidence for a robust analysis that combines the theoretical models of household archaeology and spatial configuration to consider how monastic builders addressed the specific needs for food production within a homosocial community. The advent of new monastic settlements in late antique Egypt provides a unique opportunity to observe the evolution of cooking within an archaeological context.

German excavations carried out between 1980 and 1995 in Tall Bi’a (Raqqa, Syria) uncovered the remains of a unique Syrian orthodox monastery on the top of the central hill above the Bronze Age city of Tuttul. The building complex is unique in that, although it is of inexpensive mudbrick, three of the rooms are decorated with carefully executed mosaic floors with figural decoration. Two of these mosaics have Syriac inscriptions that date the construction of the building (509 AD) and the renovation of parts of it (595 AD). The complex can be identified as the monastery of Mar Zakkai. This chapter focuses on the economic life of the monastery and describes it as a household unit. The starting point is the well-preserved refectory, the large kitchen, and the storerooms. The refectory is equipped with circular benches, unique in Syria, parallels of which are known only from Egypt.

This chapter considers Zen monastic memoirs that describe experiences in a Japanese monastery. Janwillem van de Wetering’s The Empty Mirror (1973) was one of the first extended autobiographical accounts of the quest for enlightenment. Van de Wetering wrote about experiences off as well as on the meditation cushion and emphasized failure, not the attainment of satori. Three later travel memoirs by Maura O’Halloran, David Chadwick, and Gesshin Claire Greenwood also depict a lengthy sojourn in a Zen monastery and a frustrating search for self-transformation. Yet all these authors experience a form of unselfing and an altered understanding of the Dharma and Buddhist practice. In each of these four narratives, the ambiguous failure of the quest for enlightenment reveals how the author’s life was nonetheless transformed by Zen monastic practice. Departure from the monastery means that selfless practice may take place anywhere and is not a matter of achievement or accomplishment.

In the aftermath of China’s traumatic Cultural Revolution, Western travelers have searched for the remnants of Chan (Zen) Buddhism. Gretel Ehrlich’s Questions of Heaven documents her unhappy tour of sacred mountains and other religious sites and practices in Sichuan and Yunnan Provinces and her search for traditional arts and music. George Crane’s Bones of the Master depicts a pilgrimage with an exiled Chan monk to find the bones of his spiritual mentor and build a stupa to honor him. Bill Porter’s Road to Heaven recounts his search for Chinese hermits who seem to have abandoned every attachment to a social self. Porter’s Zen Baggage documents a pilgrimage to sites connected to the first six patriarchs of Chan Buddhism and his attempts to discard “baggage,” that is, attachments. Because of Chan’s suspicion of talk about oneself and because these authors focus more on documenting conditions in China than on self-disclosure, they are guarded or discreet about how their journeys affected them. Yet each shows how a Chinese journey initiated a transformed sense of self.

Theravada Buddhism is the dominant tradition in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia. Thai monasteries in the “forest tradition” are the setting for Tim Ward’s What the Buddha Never Taught and Phra Peter Pannapadipo’s Phra Farang: An English Monk in Thailand. These authors describe how the rules and regulations of the monastic code challenged them and prompted insights into the self’s relentless craving. Ward and Pannapadipo (now Peter Robinson) finally affirm an enduring self with abiding values and commitments, even as they appreciate Buddhist ideas about no-self. Rudolph Wurlitzer’s Hard Travel to Sacred Places and Stephen Asma’s The Gods Drink Whiskey recount travels in the dense urban centers of Cambodia and Thailand. Wurlitzer’s weary and disillusioned memoir rejects the possibility of enlightenment and says he was unchanged by travel. Yet, by taking this stance, he renounces the desire to exploit Asia or engineer his spiritual destiny. Stephen Asma’s account of a year teaching in Cambodia explores ideas about no-self, karma, and other ideas that conflict with Western assumptions and elicit a new orientation to life that he calls “transcendental everydayness.”

Chapter 11, “Sacred Dimensions: Church Building and Ecclesiastical Practice,” examines the relationship between church building and ecclesiastical practice in Byzantine Constantinople. It outlines the ways in which architecture accommodates and responds to the exigencies of ritual both on a practical, and on a symbolic level to reveal how church buildings were understood symbolically as worship spaces, manifestations of piety, wealth, power, and prestige, and places of perpetual commemoration.

Chapter 7, “Matters of Faith: Catholic Intelligentsia and the Church,” asks how Catholics behaved in Warsaw and why. Roman Catholicism was the religion of the majority of Varsovians and had played an important role in the development of the Polish national project. In the absence of a Polish government, the Church provided a potential locus of authority for Poles. Warsaw’s priests drew particular negative attention from the Nazi occupation for their potential influence and they were viciously persecuted, imprisoned, and often sent to the concentration camp at Dachau. Nevertheless, leaders of the Church, from the pope in Rome to local bishops, were hesitant to provide guidance, support Nazi occupation, or encourage opposition to it. Despite the lack of a top-down Catholic policy, this chapter argues that individual priests and lay Catholic leaders were motivated by their religious faith to form everything from charities to a postwar clerical state. Crucial among Catholics was the question of the developing Holocaust and the role of Polish Jews in Polish Catholic society, which sharply divided them.

The Rule of Augustine, a composite formula for religious life, was one of the products of the multi-faceted religious reform movement in western Europe in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries. Part of its appeal to those wishing to live a religious life was its flexibility and adaptability to a variety of different types of community. The abbey of St Ruf Tripoli was a foundation of the long-established Augustinian community of St Ruf at Avignon, of which it functioned as a daughter-house. It is treated in a separate chapter because, uniquely among houses of canons regular in the Crusader States, it continued to be under the oversight of the mother-house in the West.

Although Roman criminal law differentiated between male and female offenders, women were not necessarily treated more leniently than men. Female sexual crime especially could be prosecuted in a visible manner and punished severely. This chapter discusses late antique families’ strategies for evading potentially humiliating public criminal process when it came to addressing the wrongdoing of female family members. Always a possibility in the accusatory criminal system of the Roman world, these strategies of evasion became increasingly formalised during late antiquity with the rise of ecclesiastical mediation. Such extrajudicial redress could result in women’s domestic seclusion. Towards the end of antiquity, female confinement was moved from the extrajudicial to the judicial sphere, with the introduction of the penalty of forced residence in a monastery. While forced residence in a monastery was seen as applicable to both male and female offenders, when applied to women it eased the pressures exerted by Roman law’s interference with intimate family affairs. In this way, the monastery became a locus of intersection between small-scale household-based and large-scale state acts of social control.

This chapter considers archaeological approaches to the study of later medieval monasticism in Scotland, providing a case study through which to explore the regional character of monasticism and the factors that influence archaeological scholarship today. It reflects on how the construction of archaeological knowledge is shaped by national identity and the contemporary social value that we place on medieval heritage. The chronological focus is on the transition to reformed monasticism in the twelfth century, when Scotland embraced reformed orders of monks, canons and nuns.

The argument of this chapter is that brotherhood can be conceptualized as a partially organized relationship, based on membership and rules. To illustrate the conceptualization, the chapter draws examples from three different arenas where there is a strong rhetorical emphasis on brotherhood, or fraternity: the military, motorcycle clubs, and monasteries. Membership determines who is a brother or not and while the brotherly relationship sometimes extends beyond the cessation of membership in a formal organization, it presupposes membership at some point. Rules clarify important components of brotherhood including homogeneous relations among all brothers (or sisters). This makes a crucial difference relative to friendship, which is a type of relationship that can even be a threat for brotherhood. In areas where collectivist ideology, homogeneity of relationships, and requests on loyalty are especially forceful, personal or friendly relations between individual members cannot compensate for failure as a “brother.” Brotherhood justifies sacrifice of individual needs to collective demands, and this may include the sacrifice of a personal relation.

The objective of this chapter is to explore the potential of the partial-organization concept as applied to the analysis of inter-firm networks as a form of economic governance that is created, reproduced or transformed with the help of network management practices. Key insights that the partial-organization perspective can provide into the process and the outcome of organizing and managing inter-firm networks are discussed. Inter-firm networks are conceived as partial organization of more or less complete formal organizations. Under specific circumstances, inter-firm networks could even be considered, at least in some aspects, as being even more organized than organizations. With regard to insights into the dynamics of this organizational form the chapter argues that the concept of partial organization helps to understand the development of this form from initial market relationships as well as from hierarchical organizations