Medieval monks wrote a great deal about silence – for example, in rules, customaries, and treatises. The documentation is vast, and after having captivated those monks, this phenomenon has fascinated historians in recent decades. Given the sheer number of documents to be mastered, it has been necessary to differentiate and classify the various forms of silence in order to grasp a reality which, by definition, is difficult to put into words. The most logical method, apparently, is to proceed from concrete life experience to the more abstract. As a priority, historians have thus been interested primarily in the daily life of monks. Regardless of the rule considered, silence was a daily obligation in the Middle Ages and formed the framework that embraced all communication within religious communities.

Silence is a discipline exercised by the absence of speech; silence is also an ideal practice for stripping back to the interior person. The monk practices spiritual exercises such as meditation in order to maintain interior silence. At the highest level, he arrives at a silent ecstasy, considered to be the preeminent response to the ineffable divine. It is thus tempting to compare these different silences to a mille-feuille or a pile of nested boxes that lead from the material silence of the tongue to the interior silence of the soul. In this historiographical reconstruction, silence is an orthopraxy – which is to say, the practice of a norm that is lived and imitated – before it becomes an orthodoxy, conforming to a law or a teaching. All of this is largely true, but this reconstruction also contains an implicit conception of the real.