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 19th century and the Middle Ages

Okay, historians generally put the close of the Middle Ages at the end of the fifteenth century, somewhere in the decades surrounding the year 1500, when Columbus, the Protestant Reformation, and the printing press changed a whole lot of things.  Today however I suggest that in many ways the Middle Ages lasted until the "long" nineteenth century.

Historians like to use the term "long" when discussing a century.  That way we aren't locked into a strict hundred year period where the first two digits are all the same (if after 1000).  Here I discuss the period from roughly the 1770s to the outbreak of World War I (1914), arguing that the many upheavals and developments during this period changed many aspects of everyday life that had been unchanged since the Middle Ages.

Three of the big developments of the late eighteenth century in Europe and North America (where European culture predominated) were the Industrial Revolution, the beginnings of universal education, and the end of the assumption that countries would naturally be ruled by kings.

The Industrial Revolution, which appeared first in England, was based on a turn from human/animal power, plus a good amount of wind/water power, to power from fossil fuels, primarily coal. Machines powered by coal (or steam generated by coal fires) could work very fast without tiring.  Manufactured products became much more accessible and affordable, starting with cloth and steel.  Factories (and the resulting air and water pollution from burning coal) spread rapidly.

The Enlightenment, which began in France, believed in the basic rationality of humans and thought that people would make wise decisions and be able to make good lives for themselves if they just had a better education.  Although it took a while, this idea resulted in the next generation or two of schools being established for everybody, not just the well-to-do.

Small entities (like cities, or the Swiss cantons) had long been ruled by elected leaders.  But the American colonies, which after freeing themselves from England had started as a confederation of small entities/states, with elected governors (that's why the name of the country is the United States), decided in the Constitution (1789) that there would be an elected central government for the whole country.  George Washington rejected being called king, which would have been the default title, and settled on the innocuous title of president, he-who-presides.  The French, whose Revolution also began in 1789, originally wanted a limited monarchy (as England already had) rather than the absolute monarchs they'd been having, but they eventually also settled on presidents (after various adventures, including Napoleon as emperor, which I won't discuss now).

Now we get into the real nineteenth century.  Peoples' lives were radically altered by improvements in transportation and communication.  Trains, which were everywhere by the 1860s and 1870s, meant you could now travel in an hour a distance that would have taken all day on horseback.  By the first decade of the twentieth century cars were appearing, allowing individualized travel.  Telegraphs came in with the railroads (you had to let the next station down the line know a train was coming, so there wouldn't be two trains on the same tracks going opposite directions), and then by the final decades of the nineteenth century telephones appeared, allowing people to speak across town or even across the country without having to be in the same room.  Photography developed rapidly, allowing  people to see scenes (like the aftermath of Civil War battles) far away.  We now take all these things for granted (plus being able to get restaurant recommendations or play games on our phones), but they would have drastically changed how people lived.

In many ways the Napoleonic wars (wrapped up in 1812) were very similar to fifteenth-century wars, with big cannons, horses, foot soldiers dragged into the fighting.  But the soldiers had uniforms, and there were individual firearms as well as cannons.  The American Civil War of the 1860s was the first modern war, with rifles and trains playing serious roles, and it really bore little resemblance to fifteenth-century wars, except that of course a lot of people died.  By the time of WW I, medieval warfare was clearly far in the past.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, first gas and then electricity spread to private homes, replacing candles and lamps for illumination (although even in the US not all areas were electrified until the 1920s or even 1930s).  Coal replaced wood for heating at the same time.  Movies first appeared at the very end of the century.  We're looking less medieval all the time.

Curiously, just as the Industrial Revolution spread pollution and separated the worker from the work of his or her hands, and made a whole lot of manufactured goods more easily available, people became nostalgic for a golden past and decided this past was the Middle Ages, as I have discussed earlier.

My own fantasy series that begins with "A Bad Spell in Yurt" (available on Amazon and other online bookstores) is set in a version of the 19th century, where magic made the Industrial Revolution unnecessary, and where such Middle-Ages-ending events as the discovery of the New World, the Protestant Reformation, and the French Revolution never took place (though they are still Enlightened in the world of Yurt and have limited monarchies).

© C. Dale Brittain 2020

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

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.