Directions: Respond to the following questions in your notebooks.
Throughout the Middle Ages, the Church remained the most important organization or institution in Western Europe. There was only one Church, and all Christians belonged to it. The Church gave form, direction, and unity to the new civilization rising in Europe. Its teaching and worship were much the same everywhere. From birth to death, from Baptism to Last Rites, a person’s life was watched over by the Church.
To carry on its affairs effectively, the Church organized Western Europe into dioceses headed by bishops. In the first 500 years of the Middle Ages, much power remained in their hands. The Church had its own law system—Canon Law—and a separate system of Church courts. In many ways the Church was like a state. The Church was certainly richer than any kingdom in Europe—with the pope’s income estimated to be greater than the combined incomes of all the European countries. Historians estimate that the Church owned about one quarter of the land of Europe. After the collapse of Rome, the Church was the only institution bringing law and order in a violent, chaotic age.
The founding monasteries played a vital role in the life of the early Church. Monasteries were places of prayer, work, and seclusion from the world . Monasteries had been formed in the declining years of the Roman Empire, and the man who revived monastic living in the sixth century AD was St. Benedict. At his model monastery at Monte Cassino in Italy, St. Benedict established an organization for monastic living that came to be called the Rule of St. Benedict. The Rule demanded that monks and nuns live by three basic vows—poverty, chastity, and obedience. The day was divided into roughly equal divisions of work, prayer, and rest. Benedict’s rule became the model for most convents and monasteries in Western Europe in the Early Middle Ages. The monasteries organized by these religious contributed to European society in many other ways. As large farming estates, they sometimes pioneered more efficient farming techniques. Their infirmaries provided medical care to local people. Monastery schools educated young boys and girls for a religious life, and were nearly the only institutions of formal learning that existed in Europe in the Early Middle Ages.
Monasteries played a key role in the preservation of knowledge. There, in a special room called a scriptorium, monks would laboriously copy and re-copy books in the monastic library. Without these busy monastic scribes, much of the literature of the ancient world would have been lost. Irish monks in monasteries at the edge of the Western world played an especially key role in the preservation of knowledge. The hand-decorated or "illuminated manuscripts" they produced are among Ireland's greatest national treasures Most famous is the decorated or "illuminated" copy of the Gospels called the Book of Kells . At the center of any learned activity stood the Bible, and all secular learning became regarded as mere preparation for understanding the holy text.
Monastic "chroniclers," who recorded the only histories of their times, played a vital role in the handing down of knowledge. A good example of this would be St. Bede, whose History of the English Church and People is the most significant written account of life in England between the 5th and 8th centuries.
For many centuries, the Church was the bond that held medieval Europe together. In the later Middle Ages, however, new forces will arise to challenge the authority of the Church. Much of the story of the Middle Ages—the Age of Faith—is the extraordinary story of the power of the medieval Church and its weakening at the end of the medieval period.
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