The world-renowned “elixir of life” has been around for centuries, but its secret recipe — which has nearly disappeared several times — has never been revealed by the monks who made it famous.

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Behind the gray stone walls of the 900-year-old Grande Chartreuse monastery, high in the French Alps, two monks dry, crush, and sort 130 herbs and spices into burlap bags. The "plants room" where they ...

TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers. About the Archive This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online ...

One might not expect a book about Carthusians, “the Western world’s most austere monastic order,” to be a page turner, but this sensitively written volume is just that. The author reconstructs the pre ...

For four months in the spring of 2014, an American priest lived with and embraced the austere lifestyle of the Carthusian monks at Serra San Bruno in Italy’s Calabria region. While there, he wrote a ...