Bruno of Cologne

Born around 1030, Bruno rose to prominence as a teacher at Reims, where his classroom became one of the intellectual centers of medieval Europe. Among his students was the future Pope Urban II, who would later seek his counsel. In middle age Bruno abandoned that celebrated career, retreating to the mountains to found the first Carthusian community — a monasticism of near-total silence and solitude, more austere than anything before it. He personally established the order's first two houses before his death on 6 October 1101. The Carthusians never reformed because, they say, they were never def…