What might a sixth-century monastic rulebook have to say about how we live today? Living by the Rule: Contemporary Meets Medieval, the centrepiece of this summer’s exhibitions at the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich, takes up that question. As curators, we bring present-day habits and assumptions into dialogue with a seemingly distant counterpoint: medieval monasticism, and in particular the Rule of St Benedict, written in sixth-century Italy.
Benedict was born into a noble Roman family around 480, shortly after the fall of the Roman empire. It was a period in which the political and economic certainties that had structured society for centuries were rapidly unravelling.
