Big Fiction Needs New Trend
As a deluge of fiction drawing on religious societies and centuries old secrets looms ever closer, Publishers Marketplace quotes Doubleday’s Mark Tavani as saying the DaVinci moment has passed. I know, you’re groaning. But, remember, in pre-Renaaissance Europe, monks were a serious nuisance. Here’s why: monks had nowhere to live. They roamed from town to town. As religious folk monks could demand food and shelter from stressed out peasants. Sometimes they killed nuns who tried to boss them around. Monks carried daggers under their robes. You see a monk coming, man, you better run.
This was straightened out by St. Benedict. He wrote a book. The Rule of St. Benedict is over two thousand pages long and was completed around AD 650. His book governed the lives of cenobitic monks, monks who gave up life on the road to live in monasteries. Among other things St. Benedict ordered men not to kill women, abbesses, who gave them instructions. He detailed monastic life. Monks were permitted a pillow and a blanket, ending six hundred years of controversy about that. Everyone breathed easier.
The Rule spelled out work, meals, methods of sleeping, the Grand Silence, imposing a heirachy of authority previously lacking. The Rule of St. Benedict was never a bestseller. But, for fourteen hundred years it served as a blueprint for communal living in religious order. That beats two hundred weeks on the NYT’s list, doesn’t it?