Photography
Photography is the art and practice of creating durable images by recording light or other electromagnetic radiation, either electronically by means of an image sensor, or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film. It is employed in many fields of science and business, as well as its more direct uses for art and video production, recreational purposes and mass communication. A lens is used to focus the light reflected or emitted from objects into a real image on the light-sensitive surface inside a camera during a timed exposure. With an electronic image sensor, this produces an electrical charge at each pixel, electronically processed and stored in a digital image file for subsequent display or processing; the result with photographic emulsion is an invisible latent image, chemically "developed" into a visible image, either negative or positive depending on the purpose of the photographic material and the method of processing. A negative image on film is traditionally used to photographically create a positive image on a paper base, known as a print, either by using an enlarger or by contact printing.
The word "photography" was created from the Greek roots φωτός, genitive of φῶς, "light" and γραφή "representation by means of lines" or "drawing", together meaning "drawing with light". Several people may have coined the same new term from these roots independently. Hercules Florence, a French painter and inventor living in Campinas, used the French form of the word, photographie, in private notes which a Brazilian historian believes were written in 1834; this claim is reported but has never been independently confirmed as beyond reasonable doubt. The German newspaper Vossische Zeitung of 25 February 1839 contained an article entitled Photographie, discussing several priority claims – Henry Fox Talbot's – regarding Daguerre's claim of invention; the article is the earliest known occurrence of the word in public print. It was signed "J. M.", believed to have been Berlin astronomer Johann von Maedler. The inventors Nicéphore Niépce, Henry Fox Talbot and Louis Daguerre seem not to have known or used the word "photography", but referred to their processes as "Heliography", "Photogenic Drawing"/"Talbotype"/"Calotype" and "Daguerreotype".
Photography is the result of combining several technical discoveries, relating to seeing an image and capturing the image. The discovery of the camera obscura that provides an image of a scene dates back to ancient China. Greek mathematicians Aristotle and Euclid independently described a pinhole camera in the 5th and 4th centuries BCE. In the 6th century CE, Byzantine mathematician Anthemius of Tralles used a type of camera obscura in his experiments; the Arab physicist Ibn al-Haytham invented a camera obscura and pinhole camera. Leonardo da Vinci mentions natural camera obscura that are formed by dark caves on the edge of a sunlit valley. A hole in the cave wall will act as a pinhole camera and project a laterally reversed, upside down image on a piece of paper. Renaissance painters used the camera obscura which, in fact, gives the optical rendering in color that dominates Western Art, it is a box with a hole in it which allows light to go through and create an image onto the piece of paper.
The birth of photography was concerned with inventing means to capture and keep the image produced by the camera obscura. Albertus Magnus discovered silver nitrate, Georg Fabricius discovered silver chloride, the techniques described in Ibn al-Haytham's Book of Optics are capable of producing primitive photographs using medieval materials. Daniele Barbaro described a diaphragm in 1566. Wilhelm Homberg described how light darkened some chemicals in 1694; the fiction book Giphantie, published in 1760, by French author Tiphaigne de la Roche, described what can be interpreted as photography. Around the year 1800, British inventor Thomas Wedgwood made the first known attempt to capture the image in a camera obscura by means of a light-sensitive substance, he used paper or white leather treated with silver nitrate. Although he succeeded in capturing the shadows of objects placed on the surface in direct sunlight, made shadow copies of paintings on glass, it was reported in 1802 that "the images formed by means of a camera obscura have been found too faint to produce, in any moderate time, an effect upon the nitrate of silver."
The shadow images darkened all over. The first permanent photoetching was an image produced in 1822 by the French inventor Nicéphore Niépce, but it was destroyed in a attempt to make prints from it. Niépce was successful again in 1825. In 1826 or 1827, he made the View from the Window at Le Gras, the earliest surviving photograph from nature; because Niépce's camera photographs required an long exposure, he sought to improve his bitumen process or replace it with one, more practical. In partnership with Louis Daguerre, he worked out post-exposure processing methods that produced visually superior results and replaced the bitumen with a more light-sensitive resin, but hours of exposure in the camera were still required. With an eye to eventual commercial exploitation, the partners opted for total secrecy. Niépce died in 1833 and Daguerre redirected the experiments toward the light-sensitive silver halides, which Niépce had abandoned many years earlier because of his inability to make the images he captured with them light-fast and permanent.
Da
Lacock Abbey (monastery)
Lacock Abbey was a monastery founded at Lacock, in the county of Wiltshire in England, in the early 13th century by Ela, Countess of Salisbury, as a house of Augustinian Canonesses regular. It was seized by the crown in 1539 during the Dissolution of the Monasteries under Henry VIII, it became a country house, Lacock Abbey, notable as the site of Fox Talbot's early experiments in photography. It seems that the monastery’s foundation was resolved upon by Ela, Countess of Salisbury in 1226. Ela was the only child and the heir of William FitzPatrick, 2nd Earl of Salisbury, at his death when she was still a child, became Countess of Salisbury in her own right; when still a child of nine she had been married to William Longespée, an illegitimate son of King Henry II. It was shortly after her husband's death, her eldest son, the heir William being a minor, the plan was delayed until he could give his consent. However, in 1229, the foundress made her move by giving her manor of Lacock, together with the moiety of the advowson of the church, to God and the Blessed Mary and St Bernard, toward the building there of an abbey of nuns to be called "locus beate Marie", with the consent of her son, this was subsequently confirmed by charters of King Henry III, on 31 January 1230 and 26 February following.
Countess Ela laid the abbey's first stone on 16 April 1232, in the reign of King Henry III at a site on Snail's Meadow lying between the village and the River Avon. The first of the nuns were veiled that same year 1232, the first being Alicia Garinges, previously a nun of the English Augustinian house Goring Priory, in Oxfordshire, a house, established before 1181; when Burnham Abbey was established in 1265/6 by Richard, Earl of Cornwall, an entire community of nuns was brought from Goring. From the dedication it is clear that the founder’s intention at first had been to found a nunnery that would belong to the Cistercian Order. However, this was preempted by a decision of the 1228 Cistercian general chapter to confirm its opposition to accepting responsibility for any more convents of women. Moreover, when Robert Bingham, Bishop of Salisbury gave his formal approval to the foundation on 20 April 1230, he enjoined upon the nuns the following of the Rule of St Augustine; this made of the house one of the few Augustinian nunneries in England.
It is most that Ela intended from the first to become abbess of her own foundation, a sign of this being the fact that the house was ruled in the initial period by a prioress, Wymarca. Advised by Saint Edmund Rich, Archbishop of Canterbury, she took the habit as a nun in late 1237 or early 1238 and was elected at the latest by the feast of the Assumption of 1239, receiving the bishop’s blessing as abbess for some reason at Sherston, she remained abbess until 31 December 1257. She died on the feast of St. Bartholomew, 24 August 1261, was buried in the choir of the abbey church. To the initial endowment of the manor and village of Lacock, were added by Ela and her son, among other properties, the manors of Hatherop, Chitterne, Upham in Aldbourne and Woodmancote. Throughout the thirteenth century Lady Ela’s descendents remained close to the abbey, both in bestowing material support and by choosing it as a preferred burial place. Of Ela’s eight or nine children, two sons ‒ Richard, a canon of Salisbury and Stephen, Justiciar of Ireland ‒ were buried in the abbey church, as was the heart of a third son, Bishop of Salisbury.
Ela’s granddaughter Margaret, Countess of Lincoln, took a close interest in the abbey and in 1309 was buried in the abbey church. Other granddaughters, the sisters Katherine and Lorica FitzWalter, became nuns at Lacock; the building of the Abbey took some time, since [Henry III contributed 4 oaks from the forest of Chippenham in 1246 and a further 15 from the royal forests, in 1264 and in 1247 donated 50 marks, while in 1285 Edward I again gave 10 oaks from Melksham Forest. In 1242 Henry III granted a fair at Lacock on the vigil, the feast, the morrow of the Translation of St. Thomas of Canterbury and a Tuesday market, in 1257 at Chitterne a fair on the vigil and feast of St. Peter and St. Paul and the six days following and a Monday market, in 1260 a Friday market at Lacock. Along with various wood-gathering rights, the Abbey received in 1260 from the king 40 acres of Melksham Forest. Various members of the nobility made various grants of lands and of rents in the latter part of the century after Ela’s death, though no important land was acquired after 1300.
Other privileges were countered by obligations and exactions in the mesh of feudal obligations, though the nuns sometimes managed to contest these at law or to obtain remittance or exemption from the crown. Developments in the 14th century included a lady-chapel, a separate lodging for the abbess, major alterations to the dorter and frater, with work on remodelling the cloister continuing into the next century. In the time of the second abbess, Beatrice of Kent, a water conduit was constructed bringing supplies from Bowden Hill, along with a corn mill within the Abbey close; as elsewhere, the early presence of noblewomen among the nuns soon gave way to the daughters of modestly prosperous landowners and burgesses. It is interesting to see a note of the expenses for the clothing in 1395-1396 of Joan, the daughter of Nicholas Samborne. Joan’s habit consisted of a tunic of white woollen cloth, a mantle lined with white cloth for summer and another lined with fur for winter, a fur pilch, a veil, wimp
Parapet
A parapet is a barrier, an extension of the wall at the edge of a roof, balcony, walkway or other structure. The word comes from the Italian parapetto; the German equivalent Brüstung has the same meaning. Where extending above a roof, a parapet may be the portion of an exterior wall that continues above the edge line of the roof surface, or may be a continuation of a vertical feature beneath the roof such as a fire wall or party wall. Parapets were used to defend buildings from military attack, but today they are used as guard rails and to prevent the spread of fires. Parapets may be plain, perforated or panelled, which are not mutually exclusive terms. Plain parapets are upward extensions of the wall, sometimes with a coping at the top and corbel below. Embattled parapets may be panelled, but are pierced, if not purely as stylistic device, for the discharge of defensive projectiles. Perforated parapets are pierced in various designs such as trefoils, or quatrefoils. Panelled parapets are ornamented by a series of panels, either oblong or square, more or less enriched, but not perforated.
These are common in the Perpendicular periods. The teachings of Moses prescribed parapets on roof edges for newly constructed houses as a safety measure; the Mirror Wall at Sigiriya, Sri Lanka built between 477 and 495 AD is one of the few surviving protective parapet walls from antiquity. Built onto the side of Sigiriya Rock it ran for a distance of 250 meters and provided protection from inclement weather. Only about one hundred meters of this wall exists today, but brick debris and grooves on the rock face along the western side of the rock show where the rest of this wall once stood. Parapets surrounding roofs are common in London; this dates from the Building Act of 1707 which banned projecting wooden eaves in the cities of Westminster and London as a fire risk. Instead an 18-inch brick parapet was required, with the roof set behind; this was continued in many Georgian houses, as it gave the appearance of a flat roof which accorded with the desire for classical proportions. Many firewalls are required to have a portion of the wall extending above the roof.
The parapet is required to be as fire resistant as the lower wall, extend a distance prescribed by building code. Parapets on bridges and other highway structures prevent users from falling off where there is a drop, they may be meant to restrict views, to prevent rubbish passing below, to act as noise barriers. Bridge parapets may be made from any material, but structural steel, aluminium and reinforced concrete are common, they may be of framed construction. In European standards, parapets are defined as a sub-category of "vehicle restraint systems" or "pedestrian restraint systems". In terms of fortification, a parapet is a wall of stone, wood or earth on the outer edge of a defensive wall or trench, which shelters the defenders. In medieval castles, they were crenellated. In artillery forts, parapets tend to be higher and thicker, they could be provided with embrasures for the fort's guns to fire through, a banquette or fire-step so that defending infantry could shoot over the top. The top of the parapet slopes towards the enemy to enable the defenders to shoot downwards.
In śilpaśāstra, the ancient Indian science of sculpture, a parapet is known as hāra. It is optionally added while constructing a temple; the hāra can be decorated according to the Kāmikāgama. Attic style Breastwork Merlon Redoubt Senani Ponnamperuma; the Story of Sigiriya, Panique Pty Ltd, 2013 pp 124–127, 179. ISBN 978-0987345141. Victorian Forts glossary Parapet What is a Parapet
Augustinians
The term Augustinians, named after Augustine of Hippo, applies to two distinct types of Catholic religious orders, dating back to the first millennium but formally created in the 13th century, some Anglican religious orders, created in the 19th century, though technically there is no "Order of St. Augustine" in Anglicanism. Within Anglicanism the Rule of St. Augustine is followed only by women, who form several different communities of Augustinian nuns in the Anglican Communion. Within Roman Catholicism, Augustinians may be members of either one of two separate and distinct types of Order: Several mendicant Orders of friars, who lived a mixed religious life of contemplation and apostolic ministry and follow the Rule of St. Augustine, a brief document providing guidelines for living in a religious community; the largest and most familiar known as the Hermits of St. Augustine and known as the Austin friars in England, is now referred to as the Order of St. Augustine. Two other Orders, the Order of Augustinian Recollects and the Discalced Augustinians, were once part of the Augustinian Order under a single Prior General.
The Recollect friars, founded in 1588 as a reform movement of the Augustinian friars in Spain, became autonomous in 1612 with their first Prior General, Enrique de la Sagrada. The Discalced friars became an independent congregation with their own Prior General in 1592, were raised to the status of a separate mendicant order in 1610. Various congregations of clerics known as Canons Regular who follow the Rule of St. Augustine, embrace the evangelical counsels and lead a semi-monastic life, while remaining committed to pastoral care appropriate to their primary vocation as priests, they form one large community which might serve parishes in the vicinity, are organized into autonomous congregations, which are distinct by region. In a religious community, "charism" is the particular contribution that each religious order, congregation or family and its individual members embody; the teaching and writing of Augustine, the Augustinian Rule, the lives and experiences of Augustinians over sixteen centuries help define the ethos and special charism of the order.
As well as telling his disciples to be "of one mind and heart on the way towards God", Augustine of Hippo taught that "Nothing conquers except truth and the victory of truth is love", the pursuit of truth through learning is key to the Augustinian ethos, balanced by the injunction to behave with love towards one another. It does not unduly single out the exceptional favour the gifted, nor exclude the poor or marginalised. Love is not earned through human merit, but received and given by God's free gift of grace undeserved yet generously given; these same imperatives of affection and fairness have driven the order in its international missionary outreach. This balanced pursuit of love and learning has energised the various branches of the order into building communities founded on mutual affection and intellectual advancement; the Augustinian ideal is inclusive. Augustine spoke passionately of God's "beauty so ancient and so new", his fascination with beauty extended to music, he taught that "whoever sings prays twice" and music is a key part of the Augustinian ethos.
Contemporary Augustinian musical foundations include the famous Augustinerkirche in Vienna, where orchestral masses by Mozart and Schubert are performed every week, as well as the boys' choir at Sankt Florian in Austria, a school conducted by Augustinian canons, a choir now over 1,000 years old. Augustinians have produced a formidable body of scholarly works; the Canons Regular follow the more ancient form of religious life which developed toward the end of the first millennium and thus predates the founding of the friars. They represent a clerical adaptation of monastic life, as it grew out of an attempt to organize communities of clerics to a more dedicated way of life, as St. Augustine himself had done, it paralleled the lay movement of monasticism or the eremetical life from which the friars were to develop. In their tradition, the canons added the commitment of religious vows to their primary vocation of pastoral care; as the canons became independent of the diocesan structures, they came to form their own monastic communities.
The official name of the Order is the Canons Regular of St. Augustine. Like the Order of St. Benedict, it is not one legal body, but a union of various independent congregations. Though they follow the Rule of St. Augustine, they differ from the friars in not committing themselves to corporate poverty, a defining element of the mendicant orders. Unlike the friars and like monks, the canons are organized as one large community to which they are attached for life with a vow of stability, their houses are given the title of an abbey, from which the canons tend to various surrounding towns and villages for spiritual services. The religious superior of their major houses is titled an abbot. Smaller communities are headed by provost; the distinctive habit of canon regulars is the rochet, worn over a cassock or tunic, indicative of their clerical origins. This has evolved in various ways among different congregations, from wearing the full rochet to the wearing of a white tunic and scapular; the Austrian congregation, as an example, wears a sarozium, a narrow band of white cloth—a vestige of the scapular—which hangs down both front and back over a cassock for their weekday wear.
For more solemn occasions, they wear the rochet under a violet mozzetta. Communities of canons served the poor and the sick throughout Europe, through both nur
Henry Fox Talbot
William Henry Fox Talbot FRS FRSE FRAS was an English scientist and photography pioneer who invented the salted paper and calotype processes, precursors to photographic processes of the 19th and 20th centuries. His work, in the 1840s on photomechanical reproduction, led to the creation of the photoglyphic engraving process, the precursor to photogravure, he was the holder of a controversial patent which affected the early development of commercial photography in Britain. He was a noted photographer who contributed to the development of photography as an artistic medium, he published The Pencil of Nature, illustrated with original salted paper prints from his calotype negatives, made some important early photographs of Oxford, Paris and York. A polymath, Talbot was elected to the Royal Society in 1831 for his work on the integral calculus, researched in optics, chemistry and other subjects such as etymology and ancient history. Talbot was the only child of William Davenport Talbot, of Lacock Abbey, near Chippenham, of Lady Elisabeth Fox Strangways, daughter of the 2nd Earl of Ilchester.
His governess was Agnes Porter who had educated his mother. Talbot was educated at Rottingdean, Harrow School and at Trinity College, where he was awarded the Porson Prize in Classics in 1820, graduated as twelfth wrangler in 1821. From 1822 to 1872, he communicated papers to the Royal Society, many of them on mathematical subjects. At an early period, he began optical researches, which bore fruit in connection with photography. To the Edinburgh Philosophical Journal in 1826 he contributed a paper on "Some Experiments on Coloured Flame". Talbot invented a process for creating reasonably light-fast and permanent photographs, the first made available to the public. Shortly after Louis Daguerre's invention of the daguerreotype was announced in early January 1839, without details, Talbot asserted priority of invention based on experiments he had begun in early 1834. At a meeting of the Royal Institution on 25 January 1839, Talbot exhibited several paper photographs he had made in 1835. Within a fortnight, he communicated the general nature of his process to the Royal Society, followed by more complete details a few weeks later.
Daguerre did not publicly reveal any useful details until mid-August, although by the spring it had become clear that his process and Talbot's were different. Talbot's early "salted paper" or "photogenic drawing" process used writing paper bathed in a weak solution of ordinary table salt, dried brushed on one side with a strong solution of silver nitrate, which created a tenacious coating of light-sensitive silver chloride that darkened where it was exposed to light. Whether used to create shadow image photograms by placing objects on it and setting it out in the sunlight, or to capture the dim images formed by a lens in a camera, it was a "printing out" process, meaning that the exposure had to continue until the desired degree of darkening had been produced. In the case of camera images, that could require an exposure of an hour or two if something more than a silhouette of objects against a bright sky was wanted. Earlier experimenters such as Thomas Wedgwood and Nicéphore Niépce had captured shadows and camera images with silver salts years before, but they could find no way to prevent their photographs from fatally darkening all over when exposed to daylight.
Talbot devised several ways of chemically stabilizing his results, making them sufficiently insensitive to further exposure that direct sunlight could be used to print the negative image produced in the camera onto another sheet of salted paper, creating a positive. The "calotype", or "talbotype", was a "developing out" process, Talbot's improvement of his earlier photogenic drawing process by the use of a different silver salt and a developing agent to bring out an invisibly slight "latent" image on the exposed paper; this reduced the required exposure time in the camera to only a minute or two for subjects in bright sunlight. The translucent calotype negative made it possible to produce as many positive prints as desired by simple contact printing, whereas the daguerreotype was an opaque direct positive that could only be reproduced by copying it with a camera. On the other hand, the calotype, despite waxing of the negative to make the image clearer, still was not pin-sharp like the metallic daguerreotype, because the paper fibres blurred the printed image.
The simpler salted paper process was used when making prints from calotype negatives. Talbot announced his calotype process in 1841, in August he licensed Henry Collen, the miniature painter, as the first professional calotypist; the most celebrated practitioners of the process were Adamson. Another notable calotypist was Levett Landon Boscawen Ibbetson. In 1842, Talbot received the Rumford Medal of the Royal Society for his photographic discoveries. In 1852, Talbot discovered that gelatine treated with potassium dichromate, a sensitiser introduced by Mungo Ponton in 1839, is made less soluble by exposure to light; this provided the basis for the important carbon printing process and related technologies. Dichromated gelatine is still used for some laser holography. Talbot's photographic work was concentrated on photomechanical reproduction methods. In addition to making the mass reproduction of phot
Cavalier
Cavalier was first used by Roundheads as a term of abuse for the wealthier Royalist supporters of King Charles I and his son Charles II of England during the English Civil War, the Interregnum, the Restoration. It was adopted by the Royalists themselves. Although it referred to political and social attitudes and behaviour, of which clothing was a small part, it has subsequently become identified with the fashionable clothing of the court at the time. Prince Rupert, commander of much of Charles I's cavalry, is considered to be an archetypal Cavalier. Cavalier derives from the same Latin root as the French word chevalier, the Vulgar Latin word caballarius, meaning "horseman". Shakespeare used the word cavaleros to describe an overbearing swashbuckler or swaggering gallant in Henry IV, Part 2, in which Shallow says "I'll drink to Master Bardolph, to all the cavaleros about London". "Cavalier" is chiefly associated with the Royalist supporters of King Charles I in his struggle with Parliament in the English Civil War.
It first appears as a term of reproach and contempt, applied to the followers of King Charles I in June 1642: 1642 Propositions of Parlt. in Clarendon v. I. 504 Several sorts of malignant Men, who were about the King. 1642 Petition Lords & Com. 17 June in Rushw. Coll. III. I. 631 That your Majesty..would please to dismiss your extraordinary Guards, the Cavaliers and others of that Quality, who seem to have little Interest or Affection to the publick Good, their Language and Behaviour speaking nothing but Division and War. Charles, in the Answer to the Petition 13 June 1642 speaks of Cavaliers as a "word by what mistake soever it seemes much in disfavour", it was soon reappropriated by the king's party, who in return applied Roundhead to their opponents, at the Restoration the court party preserved the name, which survived until the rise of the term Tory. Cavalier was not understood at the time as a term describing a style of dress, but a whole political and social attitude. However, in modern times the word has become more associated with the court fashions of the period, which included long flowing hair in ringlets, brightly coloured clothing with elaborate trimmings and lace collars and cuffs, plumed hats.
This contrasted with the dress of at least the most extreme Roundhead supporters of Parliament, with their preference for shorter hair and plainer dress, although neither side conformed to the stereotypical images entirely. Most Parliamentarian generals wore their hair at much the same length as their Royalist counterparts, though Cromwell was something of an exception; the best patrons in the nobility of Charles I's court painter Sir Anthony van Dyck, the archetypal recorder of the Cavalier image, all took the Parliamentary side in the Civil War. The most famous image identified as of a "cavalier", Frans Hals' Laughing Cavalier, shows a gentleman from the Calvinist Dutch town of Haarlem, is dated 1624; these derogatory terms showed what the typical Parliamentarian thought of the Royalist side – capricious men who cared more for vanity than the nation at large. The chaplain to King Charles I, Edward Simmons described a Cavalier as "a Child of Honour, a Gentleman well borne and bred, that loves his king for conscience sake, of a clearer countenance, bolder look than other men, because of a more loyal Heart".
There were many men in the Royalist armies who fit this description since most of the Royalist field officers were in their early thirties, married with rural estates which had to be managed. Although they did not share the same outlook on how to worship God as the English Independents of the New Model Army, God was central to their lives; this type of Cavalier was personified by Jacob Astley, 1st Baron Astley of Reading, whose prayer at the start of the Battle of Edgehill has become famous "O Lord, Thou knowest how busy I must be this day. If I forget Thee, do not forget me". At the end of the First Civil War Astley gave his word that he would not take up arms again against Parliament and having given his word he felt duty bound to refuse to help the Royalist cause in the Second Civil War. However, the word was coined by the Roundheads as a pejorative propaganda image of a licentious, hard drinking and frivolous man, who if thought of God, it is this image which has survived and many Royalists, for example Henry Wilmot, 1st Earl of Rochester, fitted this description to a tee.
Of another Cavalier, George Goring, Lord Goring, a general in the Royalist army, the principal advisor to Charles II, Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon, said: would, without hesitation, have broken any trust, or done any act of treachery to have satisfied an ordinary passion or appetite. Of all his qualifications dissimulation was his masterpiece; this sense has developed into the modern English use of "cavalier" to describe a recklessly nonchalant attitude, although still with a suggestion of stylishness. Cavalier remained in use as a description for members of the party that supported the monarchy up until the Exclusion Crisis of 1678–1681 w
Refectory
A refectory is a dining room in monasteries, boarding schools, academic institutions. One of the places the term is most used today is in graduate seminaries, it derives from the Latin reficere "to remake or restore," via Late Latin refectorium, which means "a place one goes to be restored". Communal meals are the times. Diet and eating habits differ somewhat by monastic order, more by schedule; the Benedictine rule is illustrative. The Rule of St Benedict orders two meals. Dinner is provided year-round; the diet consisted of simple fare: two dishes, with fruit as a third course if available. The food was simple, with the meat of mammals forbidden to all but the sick. Moderation in all aspects of diet is the spirit of Benedict's law. Meals are eaten in silence, facilitated sometimes by hand signals. A single monk might read aloud from the writings of the saints during the meals. Refectories vary in size and dimension, based on wealth and size of the monastery, as well as when the room was built, they share certain design features.
Monks eat at long benches. A lavabo, or large basin for hand-washing stands outside the refectory. Tradition fixes other factors. In England, the refectory is built on an undercroft on the side of the cloister opposite the church. Benedictine models are traditionally laid out on an east–west axis, while Cistercian models lie north–south. Norman refectories could be as large as 160 feet long by 35 feet wide. Early refectories might have windows, but these became larger and more elaborate in the high medieval period; the refectory at Cluny Abbey was lit through thirty-six large glazed windows. The twelfth-century abbey at Mont Saint-Michel had six windows, five feet wide by twenty feet high. In Eastern Orthodox monasteries, the trapeza is considered a sacred place, in some cases is constructed as a full church with an altar and iconostasis; some services are intended to be performed in the trapeza. There is always at least one icon with a lampada kept burning in front of it; the service of the Lifting of the Panagia is performed at the end of meals.
During Bright Week, this service is replaced with the Lifting of the Artos. In some monasteries, the Ceremony of Forgiveness at the beginning of Great Lent is performed in the trapeza. All food served in the trapeza should be blessed, for that purpose, holy water is kept in the kitchen; as well as continued use of the historic monastic meaning, the word refectory is used in a modern context to refer to a café or cafeteria, open to the public—including non-worshipers such as tourists—attached to a cathedral or abbey. This usage is prevalent in Church of England buildings, which use the takings to supplement their income. Many universities in the UK call their student cafeteria or dining facilities the refectory; the term is rare at American colleges, although Brown University calls its main dining hall the Sharpe Refectory and the main dining hall at Rhodes College is known as the Catherine Burrow Refectory. Refectory table Adams, Mont Saint-Michel and Chartres. New York: Penguin, 1986. Fernie, E. C.
The Architecture of Norman England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Harvey, Barbara. Living and Dying in England, 1100-1450. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. Singman, Jeffrey. Daily Life in Medieval Europe. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999. Webb, Geoffrey. Architecture in Britain: the Middle Ages. Baltimore: Penguin, 1956. Refectory in Russian Orthodox Convent, Jerusalem
