When Odo, a cleric at Tours, read The Rule of St. Benedict, he was stunned. Judging that his Christian life did not measure up to Benedict’s standard, he determined to become a monk. In 909, Odo went to Beaume, a reformed monastery where the rule was strictly observed, and Abbot Berno received him into the community. That same year Berno started a new monastery at Cluny in Burgundy. He...