Another question
27 March, 2008
Another Question
I’m all questions these days, folks. So I was teaching with penitentials, and could not answer the following question: Why and how would you want to steal a monk?
Any answers?
Also, can I say how much fun it is to be able to point out that the penitentials assume that women are agents in their own (obviously sinful) sexuality more than than do many laws in the US and UK?
3 Comments
leave one →
Blogenspiel 
Okay, a complete guess, but could we be talking about trying to get a monk from one monastery to join yours instead, because of shortage of canonical numbers or just because of his entry-gift? Or else to get a monk to leave the monastery and rejoin the world (bringing his share with him)? What’s the verb, abstrahere? Because if so I think that’s how I’d read it.
Sadly, I don’t know the verb, because the ref is from something excerpted in the Geary readings book — which has no Latin. I like both of those suggestions, though. I just don’t know how problematic those things would have been in the 7th c.
Give me a primary cite and I’ll track down the Latin, though I don’t know that it would help so very much; just that `abstrahere’ could certainly bear both my interpretation and the general sense of `steal’. But if the Latin was `educere’ or something then I’d almost certainly be right 🙂