Bruno (c.1032–1101), founder of the Carthusian Order. Bruno was educated at Reims and Cologne and became a canon at St. Cunibert's, Cologne, from which in 1056 he returned to Reims as a lecturer in grammar and theology in the cathedral school. This post he kept for 18 years and among the many gifted young clerics he taught was the future Pope Urban II. He was appointed chancellor of the diocese of Reims by its archbishop, Manasses, who turned out to be a person of notoriously scandalous life. Bruno acted with prudence and decision in a council which resulted in Manasses' deposition, followed by his plundering the houses of his accusers and selling their prebends. Manasses was eventually reinstated, but by then Bruno had left for Cologne and decided to become a monk. He lived as a hermit under the direction of Robert of Molesme, but soon moved to the diocese of Grenoble whose bishop, St. Hugh, helped Bruno and his six companions to live in solitude. In 1084 Hugh gave them by an extant charter the forest-covered, mountainous land of the Chartreuse, where they built an oratory with cells round it. Their form of monasticism was eremitical, emphasizing poverty, solitude, and austerity, and inspired by the primitive monks of Egypt and Palestine rather than by the Rule of St. Benedict. Their regime consisted of prayer (Vespers and Matins only in the church, with Mass on Sundays and feasts), reading, and manual work, which, once the agricultural work was deputed to lay brothers, consisted largely in copying books. Three volumes survive of a Bible written in this first monastery, soon destroyed by an avalanche. But monastic life continued in a new monastery further down the mountain.

After only six years Pope Urban summoned him to Rome to advise him about the state of the Church. Bruno settled in a hermitage among the ruins of the baths of Diocletian. His influence cannot be explicitly proved in particular items of the Gregorian Reform but it is likely that he was influential in the papal efforts for a better clergy. Urban offered Bruno the archbishopric of Reggio (Calabria), but he refused. Instead, with some new disciples from Rome, he founded another hermitage at La Torre (Calabria) on land given by Roger, brother of Robert Guiscard, who became Bruno's close friend. From Calabria he wrote to his Carthusians at Grenoble; with their prior Landuin, who visited him, he helped to organize more fully their way of life, a process completed by the Consuetudines of Guigo I in the early 12th century.

Bruno died at La Torre on 6 October 1101. The mortuary roll sent out from there survives with 178 notices. Although the Holy See never formally canonized Bruno, it did so equivalently by approving his cult for the Carthusians in 1514 and extending it to the Universal Church in 1623. Carthusian monks came to England in 1173 (see Hugh of Lincoln) and remained, as elsewhere in Europe, a spiritual force out of all proportion with their small numbers; there were nine houses in late medieval England. Some of their monks, especially from London, provided the papacy with some of its most impressive witnesses (see Forty Martyrs of England and Wales). A Charterhouse, founded in the 19th century, survives in Sussex. Feast: 6 October.

Bibliography
Click here for a list of abbreviations used in this bibliography.

• Bruno's writings (Scriptural treatises and letters) in P.L., clii–cliii; contemporary testimonies and a 13th-century Life in AA.SS. Oct. III (1700), 491–777; B. Bligny, Saint Bruno (1984); La Grande Chartreuse par un Chartreux (1984)