IF THEY HAD just taken Bernard of Clairvaux's word for it, medieval monks and nuns might have shied away from using extra-textual means to facilitate devotion. In his twelfth-century Apologia, quoted above, Bernard famously claims that art in monastic spaces was so plentiful as to be inhibitive of meditation and prayer. But were material objects, “exterior” things, the art works that surrounded monks and nuns in the monastery, really understood to be obstacles to devotion? Did these extra-textual tools for devotion really “deflect the attention…of those who pray and thus hinder their devotion”?

Actually, in practice, it seems this art did just the opposite: these images in fact were extremely helpful in orienting monastic contemplatives’ attention towards God. Monastic men and women used many different media to facilitate their struggle towards God. Despite the commandment against graven images in the Old Testament, despite Bernard's seeming distrust of images, art was seen as a key, useful external tool available to Christian monastic devotees in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

Extra-textual tools like monastic art, monastic spaces, and manuscript diagrams were especially important stimuli for monastic meditation and prayer. Some images were seen as, in the words of Hugh of St. Victor, “visible sign[s] of a deeper truth”:5 they represented the divine (i.e., God) for monastic meditators, and, thereby, they helped direct devotees towards richer meditative experience and away from the chaos of sin and meditative frustration.