Life Of Herluin Analysis

Life of Herluin Abbot of Bec: Gobbet –

“He observed the same austerity in food and drink in old as he had in his youth except that, under pressure from the whole congregation of brethren, except on obligatory fast days he ate twice a day. He acquiesced in this not through a concern for reviving his exhausted body, but because when taking food he could be in the company of those eating, for whose benefit he presided over the house. He preserved with his work until nightfall, and often into the night; rest and leisure were banished from his life. Neither his age, now exceeding the number of years of which it is said in the Psalm: “And beyond them labour and sorrow,” nor the violent illness by which his body was often racked kept him from his necessary duties. He treated his monks in every respect with paternal affection, ruling them with firm discipline but loving them with utmost devotion. If he found any of the brethren slothful or forgetful of his observance or his studies, or dozing in church, he held him to be utterly detestable; he always used to say: “What use is a man
Crispin successfully allows the modern-day historian to delve into the medieval era and identify, firstly the detailed inner workings of an 11th century monastery. In addition to emphasising the continuity between what ‘St. Benedict’ rules and the way the monks lived. It is very difficult to fault Herluin on any of the ‘St. Benedictian rules’, but this maybe where the success of the text wavers, as for the modern reader it would be hard to support a man so perfect, claiming it to be fabricated. But irrevocably Herluin’s character would have inspired many in the medieval era, and overall I profusely expect that this objective would have been the main aim of Crispin, when writing this text to display to the Christian church that Herluin was someone they should all be enthused to