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Sat 01 Jan 2010A view into the monastic soul
VISUAL ARTS: RAYMOND GILLESPIEreviews Lumen Christi – The stained glass windows of Mount St Joseph AbbeyBy Laurence Walsh OCSO, Cistercian Press, 237pp, €50
MONASTERIES ARE, in most imaginations, places of mystery and secrecy. Within their forbidden walls are contained arcane knowledge and esoteric texts, such as the lost work of Aristotle sought by Friar William in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. The mystery surrounding monasteries was played on by Gothic novelists and Protestant polemicists in the 19th century to create a world of the bizarre, the terrible and the indecent, as in Matthew Lewis’s 1796 novel The Monk.
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