Maurist, member of a former congregation of French Benedictine monks founded in 1618 and devoted to strict observance of the Benedictine Rule and especially to historical and ecclesiastical scholarship. The Maurists excelled both as editors and as historians, and many of their texts remain the best available. They were pioneers in critical medieval history, and their work has attached the adjective “learned” to the Benedictines.
Dom Gregory Tarrisse (1575–1648), the first president, desired to make scholarship the congregation’s distinguishing feature; he organized schools of training and set up their headquarters at Saint-Germain-des-Prés in Paris, which soon became a rendezvous for many scholars. Each Maurist monk made his religious profession not for his own monastery but for the congregation, so that promising students could be selected and work at studies apportioned by the superiors. Tarrisse found in Jean-Luc d’Achéry an excellent organizer of his designs. The golden age of the Maurists lay between the arrival of Jean Mabillon in 1664 and the death of Bernard de Montfaucon in 1741. The congregation numbered 180 monasteries in 1700 but was suppressed during the French Revolution in 1789. It formally ceased to exist in 1817.