the Cluniac system spearheaded a more general monastic explosion, which altered the relations between Church and state, and recharged and reshaped cultural life in the Christian world, transforming not only religious observance but also literacy, architecture, fine art, and music. All this was exemplified at Cluny itself. Although a visitor there today will find depressingly little to see, save a small set of buildings that escaped dynamiting by anticlerical philistines during the French Revolution of the eighteenth century, in its day Cluny was the site of arguably the grandest church in the
...more
