Fleury Abbey

Fleury Abbey (Floriacum) in Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire, Loiret, France, founded about 640, is one of the most celebrated Benedictine monasteries of Western Europe, which possesses the relics of St. Benedict of Nursia. Its site on the banks of the Loire has always made it easily accessible from Orléans, a center of culture unbroken since Roman times. Today the abbey has over forty monks and is headed by the abbot Etienne Ricaud.

Abbo of Fleury (died 1004) a monk and abbot of Fleury was a theologian of wide-ranging intellect; his life was written by the chronicler Aimoin, also a monk of Fleury. Andrew of Fleury (writing c 1043) wrote Miracula sancti Benedicti. Hugh of Fleury (died after 1118) was a monk of Fleury known for his chronicles and other writings.

The Catholic Encyclopedia says that "from the very start the abbey boasted of two churches, one in honour of St. Peter and the other in honour of the Blessed Virgin." The church of St Peter was demolished in the eighteenth century; the existing church dedicated to the Virgin pre-existed the founding of the monastery. After the ravages of the Normans, who penetrated via the Loire and burned the monastery buildings, which suffered a catastrophic fire in 1026, this became the great late eleventh-century Romanesque basilica, which occasioned the erection of a great tower, that was intended as the west front of the abbey church, which was completed in 1218. It was here that the Fleury Playbook was compiled, perhaps in dedication to the new church. The tower of Abbot Gauzlin, resting on fifty columns, forms a unique porch. The Carolingian style church is about three hundred feet long, its transept one hundred and forty feet. The choir of the church contains the tomb of a French monarch, Philip I of France, buried there in 1108. Of the mediaeval abbey's buildings, only this basilica survives in the modern monastery.

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