A small six inches by nine inches, but over two hundred pages long, with odd illustrations of plants, astrological diagrams, and naked women, it is written in so indecipherable a language and contains so complicated a code that mathematicians, book collectors, linguists, and historians alike have yet to solve the mysteries contained within.

The Voynich Manuscript, a mysterious tome discovered in 1912 by the English book dealer Wilfrid Michael Voynich, has puzzled scholars for a century. (A compulsively readable account of the most mysterious ma.)Ī compulsively readable account of the most mysterious manuscript in the world, one that has stumped the world’s greatest scholars and codebreakers. The Friar and the Cipher: Roger Bacon and the Unsolved Mystery of the Most Unusual Manuscript in the World

A detailed glossary offers readers a helpful vocabulary of the subject. We are shown, for instance, the controversy between the Benedictines and the reformed monasticism of the twelfth century and the problems that confronted women in religious life. In this book many of them, together with their supporters and critics, are presented to us and speak their minds to us. For a thousand years, the great monastic houses and religious orders were a prominent feature of the social landscape of the West, and their leaders figured as much in the political as on the spiritual map of the medieval world. Hugh Lawrence explores the many sided relationship between monasteries and the secular world around them. Medieval Monasticism traces the Western Monastic tradition from its fourth century origins in the deserts of Egypt and Syria, through the many and varied forms of religious life it assumed during the Middle Ages. (Medieval Monasticism traces the Western Monastic traditio.)

Medieval Monasticism: Forms of Religious Life in Western Europe in the Middle Ages (The Medieval World)

Medieval monasticism lawrence