THE Diadema monachorum is the first of Smaragdus’s two extant works directed specifically to monks. He intended it as a daily resource for monastic communities. In the prologue to the Diadema, Smaragdus writes that it was already customary in monasteries observing the Rule of Benedict to have a morning community gathering (chapter) at which the Rule was read. And it was also customary to have an evening chapter, as laid down in the Rule, for the time between the evening meal and Compline, or on fast days between Vespers and Compline. Smaragdus suggests that his book, conveniently divided into one hundred chapters, be read at this evening chapter as meeting the requirements spelled out by Benedict for reading at this time (see RB 42). The prologue also clearly states Smaragdus’s aim and method. He sought to provide reading material for well-established monks such that will arouse them “to a keener and loftier yearning for the heavenly country,” and for weak monks, “to strengthen and instill fear . . . leading them to amendment and a life more in keeping with the Rule” (of Saint Benedict). His method is to cull that material (he speaks of it poetically as gathering flowers from their garden) from the conferences and lives of the (Desert) Fathers and from the writings of various doctors. Each of these sources draws heavily on the Scriptures.

    The practice of gathering selected excerpts from one or more writers relating to one or more topics had become, by Smaragdus’s time, its own literary genre known as florilegium. It seems to be almost as ancient as writing itself, with the collections being called anything from an alphabetum to a viridarium.5 Writers on the subject of florilegia distinguish three main types: profane, religious, and mixed. Of the religious type in Christian literature, there are florilegia that are Biblical, patristic, and Biblical-patristic, and one of the subtypes is the monastic florilegium, the Crown of Monks being one of the best examples in the Latin series. […]  

     Smaragdus’s two main individual authorities are Saint Gregory the Great (540–604) and Saint Isidore of Seville (ca. 560–636). He draws on each of them more often than any other source. He quotes most often from Gregory’s Moralia in Job and his Regula pastoralis and also refers frequently to the Homilies on Ezechiel, Homilies on the Gospels, and Dialogues II.

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