Of Monks and Miracles
RUFINUS AQUILEIENSIS.
Historia monachorum in Aegypto, parts of chapters 10, 14, and 15.
Italy?, late twelfth century.
Two small vellum fragments from the same manuscript, single columns, in a romanesque hand, capitals highlighted in red; I: c. 125 x 105 mm, remains of 15 lines to recto and 15 to verso; II: c. 135 x 105 mm, remains of 19 lines to recto and 19 to verso, three-line initial ‘E’ (Erat autem supradictus vir) in red to recto; recovered from use in a binding, some losses due to worming, some light staining and offsetting, versos rubbed with some loss of text, especially the first fragment.
A remarkable mix of travelogue and hagiography, the Historia monachorum is a collection of stories and miracles relating to a pilgrimage through Egypt undertaken in 394–395 by seven monks from Rufinus’ monastery. In the original Greek and in Rufinus’ Latin translation it was one of the most popular and widely disseminated works of monastic hagiography during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages.
The monk and translator Rufinus (c. 345–411) was born near Aquileia in the northeast of Italy and studied at Rome, where he befriended St Jerome. About 373 he went to Egypt where he visited the monks of the desert and studied at Alexandria; then in 381 he was in Jerusalem, where he co-founded a monastery on the Mount of Olives. Following the outbreak of the controversy over the teaching of Origen, he returned to Italy in 397. He was especially important as a translator of Greek theological works into Latin, at a time when western knowledge of Greek was in decline.
The first fragment here, from chapter 10, narrates how some monks were miraculously carried across a river in a boat, after praying for God’s assistance, thereby accomplishing a journey of three days in a mere one hour.
The second fragment is from chapters 14 and 15; in the first the priest Eulogius denies communion to monks with evil and fornication on their minds; in the second we read firstly of a priestly blacksmith throwing a red-hot iron into the face of the devil disguised as a beautiful woman, and then of a man with bleeding feet cured by an angel, who healed his ulcers and filled him with knowledge.
