Medieval monasteries post-medieval

 The twelfth century was a high point for monasteries.  With very few exceptions (primarily the cathedrals), all urban churches then either were monasteries or houses of canons regular, where priests shared their property in common like monks, though they devoted their days to ministering to the community rather than the reading, writing, and prayer of the monastery.  A great many new monasteries had been established in the countryside.

But what happened to these monasteries?  Although many of the churches are still there, many have been repurposed, as parish churches, as museums, as Protestant churches, as private houses, even as theatres.

 How did this happen?  Well, monasteries began going downhill (by twelfth-century standards) in the late Middle Ages.  Abbots of important monasteries were appointed by the pope, and he tended to appoint his friends (or those who came up with a suitable "donation").  Many of these abbots were the titular heads of multiple monasteries.  They lived more like lords than monks, often having a town house where they spent most of their time, rather than at the monastery.  For example, the Cluny museum in Paris is called that because the building was a town house of the abbot of the Burgundian monastery of Cluny (the museum now houses many medieval artifacts, such as the head of an Old Testament king originally on the facade of Notre Dame).

During the early modern period (sixteenth-eighteenth centuries), a lot of old monasteries stopped having a regular life, or monks at all.  Some continued, but with a much more comfortable life than the twelfth century would have considered appropriate.  The houses that continued assumed they would always continue.  The monks rebuilt, made inventories of their property, and expected their life to continue indefinitely as it was.

Thus in France the French Revolution (starting 1789) was a great shock.  The country went officially atheistic, and monks were ejected from their monasteries, many of which passed into the hands of private individuals.  The carvings on many churches were defaced, which is how the royal head seen above was knocked off.  Some monasteries were repurposed as prisons.  Although France returned to Catholicism under Napoleon, most monasteries never regained their monks.  Something similar had happened in Great Britain two centuries earlier, when Henry VIII turned Protestant, and in those parts of Germany where the local ruler adopted Lutheranism.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries some monasteries were reestablished, though far fewer than earlier.  Most are a little more relaxed than the twelfth century would have tolerated; for example, modern monks may watch TV.  A few are very strict, however, most notably the Trappists, a group formed by reforming a branch of the Cistercians, back in the seventeenth century.  But the indefinite future for which early modern monks planned clearly no longer exists.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

For more on monasticism and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other online bookstores.  Ebook or paperback.

Early modern and medieval history

I recently realized that historical fiction set in the medieval period shows ordinary life as functional, not blessed with the comforts and facilities of modern (western) civilization, but workable, the way that one can function and enjoy oneself while back packing or the like.

In contrast, historical fiction set in the early modern period (roughly 1500-1800) shows ordinary life as brutal and nasty.  People are ill, victims of violence, hungry, smelly, and surrounded by death.  So of course I started to wonder, why is this?

In part of course it's due to the Enlightenment.  This philosophical movement of the eighteenth century, which saw education and culture as the answer to humanity's problems (to a large extent I agree with them), looked at their past as full of darkness, ignorance, superstition, and misery (here they and I part company).  They saw a possible future with much better lives if only everyone could be educated, exposed to finer things, learn scientific approaches, and have at least a little tiny movement toward democratic institutions.  The Enlightenment inspired both the American Constitution and the French Revolution.

Thus we shouldn't be surprised that the French Revolution was ready to get rid of anything "old fashioned," which included what they called feudalism (see more here about why medievalists don't buy their definition), religion, and the kings and queens carved on Notre Dame, whose heads they knocked off.  (One head recently found is shown below, now in the Cluny museum in Paris.)

But then, early in the nineteenth century, indeed during the Napoleonic era, Sir Walter Scott started writing books set in a romanticized Middle Ages (Ivanhoe has a lot to answer for).  As industrialization ('good' according to the Enlightenment, full of science and machines) separated the workers from their products and filled streams with pollution, people yearned for an earlier, better era and decided it was the Middle Ages.  This golden glow never fell on the early modern period.  The historical novelists followed right along.

That's the Sir Walter Scott memorial in Edinburgh, above.

So people were inspired to see the Middle Ages as better than the early modern period.  But there's more to it.  If you compare the twelfth century with the seventeenth, the twelfth has to win.  The Protestant Reformation had given Christians a reason to kill each other, far outshadowing things like the Albigensian Crusade.  In the early modern period you had frequent outbreaks of the Black Death, which had been unknown in the twelfth century (it broke out in the sixth century but then not again until the fourteenth).  Its outbreak in London in 1666 was stopped only by the great fire that destroyed most of London.  (But hey! it worked!  It wasn't actually deliberate.)

This was also the time of the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648), which European historians characterize as Europe's worst war ever, even worse than the World Wars for destruction of property and civilian deaths.  Cannons had become very effective at killing people.  There was a great deal of urban crowding and slums, which hadn't shown up yet in the small-but-growing cities of the twelfth century.  Slavery had been revived to cultivate the land in the New World, with an accompanying disdain for non-elite people.  The New World had given Europe syphilis, unknown in the Middle Ages (though Europe got their own back, decimating the indigenous population of the Americas with smallpox and measles).  Kings were proclaiming themselves kings by divine right, which had not been possible in the Middle Ages.  There was a great deal of famine and general misery.

So was life in the twelfth century all happiness?  Of course not.  There was plenty of violence, hunger, and despair.  I'm very happy to be living in the twenty-first century.  But if I had to choose, I'd take the twelfth century over the seventeenth every time.

© C. Dale Brittain 2019

For more on medieval history, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.

Notre Dame of Paris

This is heart-breaking.  Notre Dame is burning.

The cathedral is 850 years old, having been begun in the 1160s under the direction of the bishop of Paris.  The pope laid the cornerstone.  There had been older cathedrals there since the fourth or fifth century, changed or replaced every century or two, but this one was so large and so beautiful that it was never replaced.  It's built of local limestone.  The roof, now gone, was supported by wooden beams, giant oaks dating from the twelfth century, which would have been very dry and burned very readily.

It's one of the earliest and best-known churches in the Gothic style, a new twelfth-century way of building churches that emphasized height and light.  (The monastery of St.-Denis, on the outskirts of Paris, is now considered the first Gothic church, a generation earlier.)

The church was finished within a generation, but of course it had challenges and issues over the centuries—though nothing like what it is now facing.  The first problem was that the high walls, pierced by high windows, started bowing ever so slightly but very alarmingly.  The flying buttresses were then added to help keep the walls upright at the beginning of the thirteenth century.

During the early eighteenth century, the church lost much of its medieval stained glass, knocked out by the cathedral canons as too "old fashioned."  Then in the late eighteenth century, when France went officially atheistic during the Revolution, the facade was deliberately damaged, the heads knocked off the kings and queens of the Old Testament who were ranged across the front.

It was still however the biggest, most important building in Paris, and when Napoleon was crowned emperor (crowning himself), he held the ceremony in Notre Dame.

The novelist Victor Hugo deplored the dilapidated condition of the cathedral, and in his Notre Dame de Paris (1831), usually translated as The Hunchback of Notre Dame, he inspired Parisians to look at their cathedral and save it.  Extensive renovations were carried out, headed by Viollet le Duc, who put new heads on the Old Testament kings and queens, added gargoyles, and had the whole thing topped off by a spire (flèche in French) at the crossing point of nave and the perpendicular aisles (transept), which spire collapsed today.

Recently the whole church was cleaned of the dirty patina from polluted air and was looking fresh and inviting, as seen in the picture below, taken the last time we were in Paris.  The limestone walls still stand, but it may be an awfully long time, if ever, before the church will be itself again.  (Limestone doesn't actually burn but it disintegrates in intense heat.  It is burned in kilns to form one of the components of cement.)

In the twelfth century, when Chartres cathedral caught fire, the local citizens pounded on the walls and cursed God.  One can see their point.

Added May 6:

Amazingly, much of the interior of the church survived.  There was stone arching (ceiling) below the actual roof, and it held up fairly well.  The biggest damage was at the crossing, where the nave met the transept.  The nineteenth-century spire crashed through there when it fell.

But obviously the church still needs a roof.  There are not 1300 oaks in Europe big enough to replace the 1300 wooden beams (made from oaks already several centuries old in the twelfth century).  And there is concern that, without a roof pressing down and out, the walls, which are pushed in by the flying buttresses, might start leaning toward the center.

Here's an article from the NY Times about how the fire spread--and how it could have been even worse than it is.

The French government has promised restoration within 5 years, in time for the next Olympics (to be held in Paris).  We'll see.  But cathedrals have been rebuilt before.  Reims, in northern Champagne, was blown up in WW I, leaving nothing but the walls, and was rebuilt back to its thirteenth-century glory over 20 years.

© C. Dale Brittain 2019