Gestural commiunication systems have been used within Benedictine communities for over a millenium; their various lexica have been documented by monks, philosophers and ethnographers.  The most comprehensive documentation was by Barakat(1975), who also recorded samples on videotape, and used his data to produce a glossary and elementary grammar of the signs used by the Cistercian (Benedictine) community.  Stokoe, using Barakat's data, published a paper refuting the (then popular) notion that there exists any relationship between monastic sign systems and sign langauges used by the Deaf. In this paper, we revisit both Barakat's data and Stokoe's arguments and demonstrate that not only is there a strong correlation between these two communication systems, but that there is a genuine historical and linguistic
relationship as well. The arguments in this paper are based on phonological, morphlogical, syntactic, and sociolinguistic examinations of Barakat's data.

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