A section is devoted to monks’ sign language: since they lived mainly in silence, they had to develop a system for “pass the salt”-type gestures.

IN WHAT WAYS does life in a monastery resemble the machinations of the art world? This slightly esoteric question is one of the concerns of Living by the Rule: Contemporary meets Medieval (to 4 October), the latest offering in the Sainsbury Centre’s series What is the Meaning of Life? (to 15 November). The answer suggested by the curators is that both monastic life and the art world are spaces set apart from the “real” world, places where human beings can function in a different way and according to different rules. And yet, neither artists nor monks can ever be free of the need to earn money and to function in a commercial world.

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