Monks Invented A Sign Language To Eat In Silence

[maximus otter]

Mealtime peace is well known concept in many Norwegian homes: You should sit still at the table and enjoy the food you are served.

Monks back in the day, took this to a new level. Speaking during meals was forbidden, and so a new sign language was born.

Marianne Vedeler is a professor of Archeology at the Museum of Cultural History. She says that the silent meals took place on Hovedøya, a small island in the Oslofjord.

“A small group of monks came here in the 12th century. They had traveled from Kirkstead in England and wanted to establish a monastery here in Norway. They were Cistercian monks and had a very strict monastic order,” she says.

The rules covered all aspects of how they should live and were regulated down to how much bread they could eat per day.

The Monastic monks’ motto was "Ora et labora" - to pray and work. This was to occupy most of the day. It was generally desirable to minimise talking as much as possible. Their thoughts were to be turned towards God.

The two daily meals were also important. Everyone sat on one side of the table. By doing this, they avoided a possible conversation partner in front of them.

According to an article in the scientific journal Gastronomica, the rules of silent meals were introduced as early as the 6th century with ‘The Rule of Saint Benedict’. Saint Benedict encouraged the monks to communicate in other ways than using their voices during meals.

Kirk Ambrose, a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, has created a list of how different foods were communicated through sign language. The monks had signs for, amongst other things, honey, beans, eggs, and seven different species of fish.

To signal fish, the monks moved their hands like a fishtail in water. For squid, they would spread their fingers and wave them. If you wanted eel, your hands had to be held together as if you were holding an eel. Pike could be communicated using the same sign as for fish, but with a faster movement because the pike is a fast swimmer.

Ambrose further writes that some of the signs are used by Cistercian monks even to this day.

https://sciencenorway.no/archaeolog...-ate-so-they-invented-a-sign-language/2036858

maximus otter

 

[Yithian]

By coincidence I recently gleaned this same fact via the most affable of intermediaries: Terry Jones.

Video starts at relevant section:

 

[catseye]

Mealtime peace is well known concept in many Norwegian homes: You should sit still at the table and enjoy the food you are served.

Monks back in the day, took this to a new level. Speaking during meals was forbidden, and so a new sign language was born.

Marianne Vedeler is a professor of Archeology at the Museum of Cultural History. She says that the silent meals took place on Hovedøya, a small island in the Oslofjord.

“A small group of monks came here in the 12th century. They had traveled from Kirkstead in England and wanted to establish a monastery here in Norway. They were Cistercian monks and had a very strict monastic order,” she says.

The rules covered all aspects of how they should live and were regulated down to how much bread they could eat per day.

The Monastic monks’ motto was "Ora et labora" - to pray and work. This was to occupy most of the day. It was generally desirable to minimise talking as much as possible. Their thoughts were to be turned towards God.

The two daily meals were also important. Everyone sat on one side of the table. By doing this, they avoided a possible conversation partner in front of them.

According to an article in the scientific journal Gastronomica, the rules of silent meals were introduced as early as the 6th century with ‘The Rule of Saint Benedict’. Saint Benedict encouraged the monks to communicate in other ways than using their voices during meals.

Kirk Ambrose, a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, has created a list of how different foods were communicated through sign language. The monks had signs for, amongst other things, honey, beans, eggs, and seven different species of fish.

To signal fish, the monks moved their hands like a fishtail in water. For squid, they would spread their fingers and wave them. If you wanted eel, your hands had to be held together as if you were holding an eel. Pike could be communicated using the same sign as for fish, but with a faster movement because the pike is a fast swimmer.

Ambrose further writes that some of the signs are used by Cistercian monks even to this day.

https://sciencenorway.no/archaeolog...-ate-so-they-invented-a-sign-language/2036858

maximus otter

Surely it would go against the rule of St Benedict to have all of those foods available at one meal?

 

[Yithian]

Surely it would go against the rule of St Benedict to have all of those foods available at one meal?

It may sound indulgent, but Benedict decreed only two meals per day and no flesh from four-legged creatures (an exception was made for sick or infirm brothers); given the considerable rigors of keeping the canonical hours and their regular physical labour, they were hardly being indulged. Matins literally meant being woken in the middle of the night for a service with one monk tasked to monitor his sleepy brothers throughout and wake them with his lamp if necessary.

The English monasteries could get bitterly cold in winter, and the monks had to listen to readings during meals, too.

Monastic life was relentless.

 

[MercuryCrest]

Only tangentially related, but this reminded me of a computer game I played back in...1994. I don't remember anything about it except that you had to use the instruction manual to enter a password. On the screen were a pair of hands facing you. The manual mentioned that monks had a sign language that involved pointing at different parts of the palms and fingers with each spot representing a letter, so that's how you had to enter the code by clicking with the mouse. I thought the concept was neat as hell.