From Dead of Night to End of Day: The Medieval Customs of Cluny: Du coeur de la nuit a la fin du jour: les coutumes clunisiennes au Moyen Age. This item is unavailable.From Dead of Night to End of Day: The Medieval Customs of Cluny: Du coeur de la nuit a la fin du jour: les coutumes clunisiennes au Moyen Age

At the heart of the various articles in this book are four customaries, compiled over the course of nearly a hundred years beginning at the end of the tenth century, that describe daily life and liturgy at the abbey of Cluny. Two principal objectives motivated the creation of the present volume of essays: first, to bring out the unequaled richness of these monastic customaries for scholars, primarily medievalists in all disciplines; and second, to facilitate the use of these sources, which can be challenging at first sight. Drawing upon the multiple disciplines needed to account for the full range of information presented by the customaries, the editors have brought together varied and complementary approaches to these multifaceted documents. Among the principal themes common to the studies in this volume are the genesis and transmission of the customaries, the relationship between texts and practice, and the evidence they offer for the function of monastic spaces as well as for the ritualization of communal life.

Frederick S. Paxton is Brigida Pacchiani Ardenghi Professor of History at Connecticut College, in New London, CT, USA. He is the author of Christianizing Death: The Making of a Ritual Process in Early Medieval Europe (1990), Anchoress and Abbess in Ninth-Century Saxony: the Lives of Liutbirga of Wendhausen and Hathumoda of Gandersheim (2009) and numerous articles and essays on sickness, death, dying and the dead in medieval Europe.