The common year names which are used in Western Europe A.D. and B.C. started as a solution to a calendar problem by a monk, and not an effort to make time world time. The monastic day, with its schedule of repetitive prayer and labor, its insistence on regularity and attention to record keeping, its tendency towards that way of thinking showed itself in the way people read, sang, counted, studied and even ate.
Mesrop Mashtots, a scholar-monk in Armenia, in the early 5th century, discussed the problem of opposition to Christian teaching using a rather unusual resource: writing. The Armenian alphabet, developed in 405 provided the translators with an unchanging system of scripture and liturgy and over the years provided a timeless identifier in terms of culture. Later traditions of manuscripts perfected the appearance of those letters into separate hands to be employed in display, in speed and in daily copying, and how a monasticism might have to create texts, may also develop a fine art of being legible.
The same desire to exercise orderly reckoning was seen in the protracted debate of the Church concerning the dating of Easter. In A.D 525, a monk called Dionysius Exiguus used to number the years in a manner that was known as “in the year of the Lord” and using the year of the Lord as the base before his tables where A.D. 1 was used as the base of his tables even though it is estimated today that Jesus was born a few years before that time. Two hundred years later, the Venerable Bede projected the scheme backwards with B.C. and the system diffused all through Europe with administrative application. One little technical matter still counts: this system had no year zero in it, since the mathematical concept had not yet been swallowed in Western Europe.
The noise of a monastery too had to go farther than the walls. Liturgical chant used to rely on either memory or indefinite marks of notation which indicated direction of the melodies without indicating pitch. In the eleventh century, the staff and clef system developed by Guido of Arezzo allowed a singer to acquire knowledge of unknown music with precision and condensed years of training into a much more trainable form. What started off as an inner requirement, the creation of choirs with the ability to worship in a unified manner, turned out to be a widespread technology of making complex music survive distance and time.
Measured time proceeded in a similar way. The monastic life demanded some predictable indicators: bells to wake up a community at scheduled times, when the sundials were covered by clouds or when the water clocks were frozen in winter. Developed by one of the scholars Gerbert of Aurillac who became Pope Sylvester II, a bell-ringing system was attributed to the scholar to indicate time between the bells a predecessor of mechanical timekeeping that ultimately became common outside of the religious homes. Nevertheless disputed single “firsts” might be in the folk retellings, but the institutional imperative is evident: a day with rules established constant need of devices capable of keeping the time.
Monasteries were also economical laboratories. In Italy, communities in the north (Benedictine and Cistercian) wanted a means of storing excess milk; this led to a hard long lasting cheese, using simple ingredients. The medieval monastic legacy has been perpetuated through the notion that time months of growing old – can be as well a determining ingredient as salt or rennet.
In business, a Franciscan friar and mathematician, Luca Pacioli, did not create double-entry bookkeeping, but endowed it with a stable language and form in 1494. His clean definition of debits and credits, and of categories like assets and liabilities, succeeded in making a practice of the merchant a repeatable practice one that was capable of maintaining larger systems of exchange and administration.
The contemporary account of heredity is to be found in a convented garden even. The controlled breeding experiments of the 19 th century by Gregor Mendel were based on patience, isolation, and counting carefully -qualities which the monastery nurtured as easily as it nurtured prayer. What is learned through all these instances is, it is not necessarily that monasteries were identical in their degree of scientificity, but rather that their austere regimens were repeatedly fruitful of instruments of precision instruments that silently proceed to arrange the common everyday life.
