The Rule of Saint Benedict

The Rule of Saint Benedict is Benedict of Nursia's own sixth century monastic rule, setting out the structure of communal Christian religious life, including obedience, humility, manual labor and the daily cycle of prayer, that became the governing pattern for Western monasticism. As Benedict's own primary text it is the correct source for what the Rule itself prescribes. Its limit is that it is a rule for practice, not a theological treatise or a historical account of how monasteries actually lived it out in different periods, some of which departed considerably from the letter of the text, so a claim about the lived history of Benedictine monasticism in a specific era needs a historical source in addition to the Rule.