The High Medieval Era · 1084 onward · Chartreuse, then Europe
Carthusian Life
Not yet available
There's no built conversation for this tradition here yet.
About This Movement
In 1084 Bruno of Cologne, who had been a leading master of the schools at Reims, gave up his career, took six companions into a high, hard valley in the Alps above Grenoble, and built a life with almost nothing in it: each man in his own cell with a small garden, meeting the others only for the night office, part of the Mass, and a weekly walk. Guigo I, the fifth prior, wrote the customs down around 1127 — cell, silence, and a strict cap on how many could live in any one house — and Guigo II's Ladder of Monks, a short account of reading, meditating, praying and resting in God, became one of the most widely used descriptions of prayer in the Western church. Deliberately, the order produced almost no public figures. The one great exception was Hugh, prior of the English charterhouse at Witham and then bishop of Lincoln, whose chaplain wrote him up in unusual detail. The Grande Chartreuse is still a working monastery, and the order has kept substantially the same shape ever since. A traditional saying has it that the Carthusians were never reformed because they were never deformed.
Sources
- Guigo II, The Ladder of Monks and Twelve Meditations (trans. Colledge & Walsh, 1978; Cistercian Studies 48) (primary) — The lectio divina ladder - the tradition's most influential formation text.
- Guigo I, Meditations (trans. A. Gordon Mursell, Cistercian Studies 155, 1995) (primary) — Founder-generation interior voice: aphoristic self-scrutiny, no system.
- Guigo I, Consuetudines Cartusiae (Customs, c. 1127) (primary) — The order's foundational legislation: cell, silence, and capped community size. Available only in Latin and French (Sources Chretiennes 313); no complete English translation exists.
- Adam of Eynsham, Magna Vita Sancti Hugonis (Life of Hugh of Lincoln) (trans. Douie & Farmer, Oxford Medieval Texts, 2 vols) (primary) — Lived Carthusian texture through the order's one very public member, written by his own chaplain.
- Gordon Mursell, The Theology of the Carthusian Life in the Writings of St. Bruno and Guigo I (Analecta Cartusiana 127, 1988) (secondary) — The thinness of English scholarship mirrors the order's deliberate silence.
- Cambridge History of Christianity vol. 4, ch. 4 'Monastic and religious orders, c.1100-c.1350' (B. P. McGuire) (reference)