Making and Breaking Bread in the Medieval Monastery

Abstract As both substance and symbol, bread played a foundational role in the domestic and spiritual culture of Latin monasticism. Early medieval monks and nuns were expected to bake for themselves as part of their commitment to humility and self-sufficiency, and monastic rules and hagiography demonstrate that this daily bread was, like sacramental bread, a conduit for divine intercession. Monks’ participation in the eucharistic debates of the ninth to eleventh centuries reflected their spiritual formation in a Benedictine tradition that valued baking as spiritual labor and understood all bread to be potentially mutable and miraculous. From the eleventh century on, as the number of ordained monks grew and private masses proliferated in monastic churches, monastic customaries devoted considerable attention to the Eucharist’s evolving materiality and emphasized the monk-priest’s privileged status as a producer of holy matter. Regulatory texts also demonstrate that the rise of exacting new processes for confecting the host further eroded the fragile boundary between consecrated and unconsecrated bread in monasteries, with the latter becoming a focal point for concerns about purity, waste, and abuse that mirrored contemporary anxieties about the Eucharist.