ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on one aspect of monastic spirituality, the practice of meditation as a prelude to contemplation, a practice which developed out of the ruminative reading of Scripture involved in lectio divina, and which was disseminated widely in the later Middle Ages, both within the cloister and outside it. Modern studies of the reforms in Montserrat that Garcia Jimenez de Cisneros pioneered have shown the importance he attached to meditation, and how, to this end, he introduced into the monastery methods of mental prayer that had been developed outside the Peninsula by writers associated with the devotio moderna. The teaching on fear and love on which the Exercitatorio is based shows that Cisneros was concerned to renew monastic spirituality by returning to the sources from which it sprang, St Basil the Great had affirmed: We obey God and avoid vices from the fear of punishment and in that case we take on the resemblance of slaves.
