Description: Examinations of the culture - artistic, material, musical - of English monasteries in the six centuries between the Conquest and the Dissolution.
Brief description: David G. Bell is a graduate in history and the law from Queen's University, the University of New Brunswick and Harvard University. He has written extensively on Maritime history, with books on legal and religious history as well as the award-winning book Early Loyalist Saint John. He is professor of law at the University of New Brunswick, and lives in Jackson Falls, NB.
Review Quotes: This collection is unusual, therefore, in its tight focus on post-Conquest Benedictine life. But it is all the stronger for this, the essays building a core thesis through their very breadth of evidence. Within a clear chronological framework, the excellent introduction presents at once a cogent survey of a complex, active field and a challenge to reassess the relationship between the rule, conventual life and its cultural products. [...] This collection ties English Benedictine life firmly into wider secular and clerical trends, while illuminating its distinctive cultural expressions and its many contributions to their forms.-- "ENGLISH HISTORICAL REVIEW"