Travelling Franciscan friars used finger alphabets, possibly as memory aids for preaching, and in Benedictine monasteries, signs representing words were used for limited communication when silence was required.
Rather than the popularly imagined total "Vows of Silence", the Rule of St. Benedict merely prohibits conversation in certain areas of the monastery during certain hours of the day.
It was only much later, in the seventeenth century, that reform movements within the Cistercian and Trappist communities came to see absolute silence as a valuable penance along with other austere, yet voluntary, deprivations.
Foods, articles of clothing, particular rooms and buildings, ritual objects, and different ranks of clerical office dominate the vocabulary.
Bonaventure in the thirteenth century used a finger alphabet,[11] and the medieval Monasteriales Indicia describes 127 signs used by Anglo-Saxon Benedictine monks.