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E-book (Trans)missions : Monasteries as Sites of Cultural Transfers
From the Early Middle Ages onwards, both university and monastic theologians were occupied and concerned with the spiritual struggle against sin. The idea was based on the notion that in this world, people are surrounded by the power of the Devil and are left at the mercy of the Devil’s temptations. The enclosed monastery on the other hand represented a paradise on earth, a secure refuge that the Devil could not enter.2 The personal struggle against imperfections and vices was regarded as necessary due to Adam and Eve’s original sin, and represented an inevitable part of everyday life in a medieval monastery, including both a proactive denial of bodily desires and contemplation of one’s own weaknesses and sins as part of the spiritual journey toward perfection and unity with the Godhead. Starting in the twelfth century, the theme of struggle against sin also appears in didactic-spiritual compendiums, often lavishly illustrated, that served for the religious education of monks and nuns as well as outside the monastery as part of the pastoral practice and education of laity.3The Bohemian codex called Liber depictus represents a particularly fine example of such a spiritual compendium. The manuscript was commissioned around 1350, probably by the Prague Canon, Peter II of Rosenberg,for the double monastery of the Friars Minor and the Poor Clares in the Rosenberg residence town of Český Krumlov.
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