No monastic practice from premodern Europe underscores the value of silence for cloistered communities as clearly and distinctly as the use of sign language among the brethren in place of speaking. It is widely known that Benedictine monks of the European Middle Ages developed systems of non-verbal communication to obviate the need for mundane speech in the cloister, the kitchens, the refectory, and the dormitory, and thereby protect themselves from the perils of errant speech. In doing so, they heeded the warnings attributed to King Solomon in the book of Proverbs - “In speaking profusely you will not escape sin” (Prov. 10.19) and “Death and life are in the power of the tongue” (Prov. 18:21). The influential sixth-century Latin handbook for monks attributed to Benedict of Nursia echoed these sentiments (Rule of Benedict 6.5-6) and made them touchstones throughout the Middle Ages for a religious practice aimed at avoiding the sins of the tongue.
In a monograph published almost twenty years ago, I set out to explain the rationales for the cultivation of silence in early medieval cloistered communities; the development of sign language at tenth-century Cluny; the vocabulary, morphology, and limitations of this form of communication based on the evidence of the eleventh-century Cluniac customaries; the spread this custom to other Benedictine communities and its regional adaptation in France, Germany, and England; and its adoption by the new monastic orders of the twelfth century, including the Cistercians, the Carthusians, and the regular canons.1 In the book under review, originally published in Hungarian and now translated into German, Radka Ranochová builds on the foundation of my research to provide an overview of this fascinating topic, but her book primarily rehearses what is already known about monastic silence and sign language rather than introducing new sources or proposing new conclusions about this practice in medieval cloisters.
Schweigend sprechen comprises six chapters. Chapter 1 (“Zeichensprache als Forschungsgegenstand der Geschichts- und Sprachwissenschaft”) surveys the modern historiography on silent communication in premodern monasticism, but the author’s ahistorical approach to this scholarship obscures rather than illuminates the development of this field of inquiry over time. Chapter 2 (“Schweigen in der monastischen Tradition”) repeats many of the rationales for the observance of silence among monks treated in previous studies on this topic, including the aspiration of the the brethren of Cluny to embody an “angelic life” (vita angelica) by avoiding harmful words. Chapter 3 (“Die Geschichte der Zeichensprache”) provides an overview of the origin and spread of the use of sign language in medieval abbeys. This chapter is useful insofar as it reaches beyond the well-studied Benedictine sources from the eleventh and twelfth centuries and introduces readers to the later medieval and early modern reception of this custom.
Chapter 4 (“Die Signa-Listen”) provides a discursive list of the major lexicons of hand-signs used in premodern religious communities. Building on the work of Bruno Griesser and Walter Jarecki, Ranochova devotes considerable attention to two sign lexicons written in verse rather than in prose: the “Siquis List” (a catalogue of 175 signs used by Cistercians and regular canons that survives in seven fifteenth-century manuscripts from Germany and eastern Europe) and the “Ars List” (241 signs of Cistercian provenance preserved in two sixteenth-century manuscripts).2 Although Ranochová focuses on the content of Cistercian sign-lists, Chapter 4 (“Was die Signa-Listen über Klöster verraten”) parrots the discussion of the contents of the Cluniac sign lexicons (food, clothing, liturgical objects, personnel, and so on) found in the third chapter of my book and repeats very closely my analysis of what the signs for fish reveal about the sourcing of food from local and regional aquatic ecosystems (pp. 147-48). Likewise, Chapter 5 (“Wie die Zeichen gebildet werden”), which treats the morphology of monastic sign-forms, offers nothing that has not already been examined by Robert A. Barakat’s 1975 monograph on Cistercian sign language.3 An appendix to the book presents a transcription of a truncated example of a “Siquis List” from a manuscript held at the Cistercian abbey of Vyšší Brod in the Czech Republic (Klášterni knihovna, rkp. 28 Pp., fols. 188r-190r) along with reproductions of the relevant folios (pp. 187-93).
In conclusion, Schweigend sprechen offers a German-language summary of previously published scholarship on the history of religious silence in medieval abbeys and the systems of hand-signs that Benedictine monks developed to communicate mundane information to each other when speaking was forbidden, but it is not a work of original research because it provides neither new evidence nor new insights about this topic and its place in medieval monastic history.