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.

The Physicality of Miracles

 As I've discussed before, miracle stories were very much part of the elite culture of the Middle Ages.  The stories were written by highly educated churchmen, and the doubters in the stories were the uneducated.  These were not superstitious imaginings by the ignorant.

Yet they seem weird to the educated today.  One of the weirdest things is often the physicality.  People are not just healed of afflictions, they are healed dramatically, abruptly, often painfully.  For example, when someone who had been deaf was healed and given hearing, blood routinely poured from their ears.  Someone whose body had been contorted, so for example their legs were bent permanently so that their feet touched their buttocks (a common element in accounts of miracles worked by the Virgin), their legs wouldn't just be straightened but yanked into position so forcefully that the person being healed would scream in pain, and blood would pour from their buttocks as the feet ripped away.

The real miracle, those writing the stories all agreed, was the moral and spiritual regeneration, but physicality got everyone's attention.  Someone quietly mending their evil ways would not inspire others to do the same, but going from so deformed that they had to be carried everywhere to leaping and bounding in delight at their healing certainly got everyone's attention.

 

The Virgin (seen above being crowned Queen of Heaven in a twelfth-century carving) could be counted on to help even the worst sinners, as long as they prayed to her and mended their ways after healing.  In one story, a monk who was supposed to keep track of the hours at night (so that the other monks could be called for the night liturgy) took advantage of being unsupervised all night to row across a little lake to his mistress's house for a quicky.

But one night (you can see where this is going) his boat sank and him with it.  But wait!  Every night before heading out on the lake he'd pray to the Virgin, and again when he got back.  So as the demons arrived to take the drowning man's soul, she fought them off, giving him one last chance.  Meanwhile, back at the monastery, the other monks realized they'd never been called for the night offices, looked for the man who'd been supposed to ring the bell, and realized both he and the boat were missing.  When his body washed up, they were sure he was dead, but surprise! he sat up and related his vision of being saved by the Virgin from the demons.  No more midnight quickies for him! you can be sure.

But suppose the Virgin didn't come through?  Of course one prayed harder, but again physicality played a role.  At one shrine noted for healings by the Virgin, pilgrims who had come to seek her aid would become irritated after a week or two if she didn't respond.  They would strip off every stitch of clothing and crawl on their bellies to her altar, asking people to whip them as they went, to show how penitent they were.  According to the stories, the Virgin always came through after such a clear demonstration.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023


For more on religion, saints, and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available as a paperback.