The Monastic Constitutions of Lanfranc, archbishop of Canterbury between 1070 and 1089, has long been recognized as one of the most important historical sources for medieval monastic life. In this major new revision of Dom David Knowles's classic editions of 1951 and 1967, C. N. L. Brooke incorporates the historical scholarship of the last generation to offer further insight into and illumination of Lanfranc and the monastic world of the eleventh century.

This is the first of a series of volumes which have become recognised as one of the great monuments of English historical scholarship. The late Dom David Knowles began work on the subject in 1929; The Monastic Order in England appeared in 1948, 1955 and 1959. This volume begins the account of a whole way of Christian life and a unique element of English civilisation, from Anglo-Saxon times to the mid-sixteenth century. It opens with a survey of monastic life and activities of the old orders to 1340; goes on to record the impact of the Friars, and concludes with a general survey of the...

This book covers a period (1336 1485) neglected by historians, when many features of the modern world were germinating under the surface of medieval institutions: the age of Chaucer, Langland, Bradwardine and Wyclif, of the new Nominalism and the Conciliar Movement. David Knowles devotes part of his book to narrative, and part to analysis. The great abbeys are at their height of outward splendour, we see the building schemes of Ely and Glouster, the impact of the Black Death, and the recovery from it; we see the monks and friars in controversy at Oxford, the attacks of Wyclif and the...

Dom David Knowles surveys the monastic life and activities in the early Tudor period.

The Monastic Order in England by Dom David Knowles was originally published in 1940 and was quickly recognised as a scholarly classic and masterpiece of historical literature. It covers the period from about 940, when St Dunstan inaugurated the monastic reform by becoming abbot of Glastonbury, to the early thirteenth century. Its core is a marvellous narrative and detailed analysis of monasticism in twelfth-century England, brilliantly set in the continental background of all the monastic movements of the day - with a vivid evocation of Anselm, Ailred, Henry of Blois and a host of other...

This collection of essays and articles by Dom David Knowles was presented to him by his colleagues, friends and pupils on his retirement from the Regius Chair of Modern History at Cambridge in the summer of 1963. The collection opens with Dom David's Inaugural Lecture as Regius Professor, 'The Historian and Character', which provides the unifying theme of the book: almost all the studies illustrate the author's interest in human problems and personalities as well as his concern with medieval monasticism and thought and with monastic historians of the modern world. In illustrating his...