Monks and nuns performed many practical services in the Middle Ages, for they housed travelers, nursed the sick, and assisted the poor; abbots and abbesses dispensed advice to secular rulers. But monasticism also offered society a spiritual outlet and ideal with important consequences for medieval culture as a whole. Monasteries encouraged literacy, promoted learning, and preserved the classics of ancient literature, including the works of Cicero, Virgil, Ovid, and Aristotle. To beautify the celebration of the liturgy, monastic composers enriched the scope and sophistication of choral music, and to create the best environment for devotion, monasticism developed a close and fruitful partnership with the visual arts. The need for books and buildings made religious houses active patrons of the arts, and the monastic obligation to perform manual work allowed many monks and nuns to serve God as creative artists. Exceptionally, some of them signed their works in words that seem intended not only to name the maker but also to identify the object as a prayerful offering. So the Latin inscription on an exquisite silver chalice (47.101.30) translates, “In honor of the Blessed Virgin brother Bertinus made this in the year 1222,” and the three nuns who made a fourteenth-century lace altarcloth (29.87) included their own names in the fabric along with the wish, “May our work be acceptable to you, o kindly Jesus.”
The Annunciation to the Virgin, Gualenghi-d’Este Hours, Taddeo Crivelli, circa 1470, Ferrara (The J. Paul Getty Museum, Ms. Ludwig IX 13, fols. 3v-4)
