Sound, Silence, Picture, and Place in the Medieval Cloister

Medieval monks and nuns of the Benedictine order followed a rigorous cycle of worship that demanded knowledge of an elaborate repertoire of melodies, which were paired to a vast body of text in order to form a song of praise directed at the divine.  While the study of chant has been almost exclusively the province of musicologists, the tools that facilitated this observance (the books, furnishings and architecture that surrounded and supported the liturgy) have largely been studied by art historians.  Little material evidence survives of sound in the pre-modern era, yet the physical remains of medieval church life contain clues to the value placed on a chronological transit that was experienced aurally and in strong juxtaposition to a habitual silence: the room in which the rule of life was read aloud received the most elaborate architecture; the manuscripts from which they read were littered with shouting, eating and listening heads.  These visual traces of sound provide the keys to charting the place of song and word in the medieval institutional world.