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How monasteries powered medieval Europe
00:43:09
Andrew Jotischky traces the story of monastic life over more than a thousand years – and considers why these influential institutions were the powerhouses of medieval society
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Professor Andrew Jyutiski
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Emily Briffet
Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History Magazine. Monasteries and convents were a common sight throughout medieval Europe and beyond. But who were they for? What did they do? And how did life in them change over the thousand years or so that these institutions were at their height? In today's episode, Professor Andrew Jyutiski, author of the book the Monastic World, speaks to Emily Briffet about monastic life from its early origins in the 4th century right up to the 16th century, delving into the lives of both monks and nuns who lived and worked in these religious houses.
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Host
So today we're going to be talking all about the monastic world. Now can you tell me how significant were these religious houses to the medieval way of life?
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Professor Andrew Jyutiski
Well, monasteries and convents for women, and I'll use the term monasteries really to describe both. Monasteries were everywhere as physical presences in the medieval world. They were in every town, they were in the countryside. It would have been virtually impossible for most medieval people not to have seen, been near experienced a monastery in some form or other. So as simply as physical presences, they were very familiar to people. But more than that, they also provided a great deal for society. Obviously they're places of contemplation for monks and nuns, but they also drove local economies. They provided schools to educate the young, usually not from all social classes. They provided health care, social care, sometimes places of retirement for the elderly. Monasteries were the engine rooms of intellectual advance as well, and cultural and artistic patronage. So they were extremely important everywhere across Europe for about a thousand years.
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Host
A fantastic glimpse into medieval society. You've given us a bite sized morsel of what monasteries may have been involved in. But can you tell us what exactly went on in a monastery?
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Professor Andrew Jyutiski
Well, the most important thing that goes on in a monastery is the liturgy, by which I mean the prayer and praise. What's actually going on in the monastery's church, the abbey or monastery church? If you could have a medieval monk or nun in front of you and ask them, what's your job? What do you do all day? They would say the liturgy. They might say the Opus dei, which means the work of God. And that's the term that's used in the medieval period. So the monastic day was divided up into activities at various times. But running like a spine through the day, through the 24 hour period, is the series of services that are held in the church, beginning in the middle of the night with matins, which is usually at around 2 o'clock in the morning, and ending at bedtime, which is really evening, 8 or 9 o'clock in the evening. So there are seven or eight different services that take place during that 24 hour period where the monks and nuns are all gathered together in the church and they are giving praise to God according to this formal liturgy.
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Host
So when they weren't performing the liturgy, what else would a monk or nun be doing with their day?
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Professor Andrew Jyutiski
The day is supposed to be divided. If one takes probably the dominant rule for monastic living, which is the rule of Benedict, the day is supposed to be divided into three types of activity, prayer, which means what I've been talking about the liturgy, rest, sleep and work. And now, what constituted work was contested at various times during the Middle Ages and by different orders or types of monastery. But work could encompass really anything from actual physical manual labour in the fields, to craft work, such as making and illuminating manuscripts, to study, private sort of intellectual, academic study.
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Host
You've given us a picture of what's going on inside a monastery and by whom. But I think we should probably go right back to the start here. Could you tell us a little bit about the origins of monasticism and where do their ideals and their way of life come from?
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Professor Andrew Jyutiski
Where monasticism starts again, there isn't a single sort of definite answer. It starts in the Eastern Mediterranean. Traditionally, historians have looked to Egypt as the starting place, although I think it's more complicated than that. Monasticism seems to have arisen more or less contemporaneously in Egypt, Syria and the Holy land during the 4th century. And it had a different kind of character in each of those places, really dependent on the kind of society we're talking about, late Roman society here. But monasticism in the 4th and 5th centuries could be a number of different things. We mustn't think solely of a large monastery with monks or nuns all living in community. Many monasteries were like that. But there were also what we call hermitages or small groupings of monks living in a kind of less formalized community, in cells, very often in caves, quite near each other, and joining periodically for the liturgy, but living apart from each other. So there are many different ways of being a monk or a nun in the early period. And these sort of coalesce as rules are composed and the kind of frameworks for, as it were, the right kind of monastic living come to be set down.
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Host
So what were some of these rules in the earlier years?
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Professor Andrew Jyutiski
Well, one of the earliest that we have comes from Egypt, the rule of Pachomius. Pachomius was a former Roman soldier, in fact, who decided to abandon a military life and found monasteries in his native Egypt. In Upper Egypt, along the Nile, he founded a series of monasteries which were what we call cenobitic monasteries. And that means that they are monasteries where people live in community. He founded both monasteries for men and convents for women. And they really had the function of being agricultural enterprises based on religious life. So the Pacomian rule is about gathering together large numbers of men or women to live under a set rule, to produce food, to grow and produce food, and to praise God. And that's one of the earliest rules that we have in Asia Minor, what's now Turkey. Basil of Caesarea, bishop, wrote a rule, in fact, two rules toward the end of the 4th century, which have a rather different kind of character. Basil was a bishop, but also a member of the aristocracy who had landed property. And his style of monasticism has sometimes been called sort of country house monasticism, which is perhaps a little bit unfair, but based very much on country estates. And that became very influential rule because Basil was particularly interested in how living in community developed and built up one's inner spiritual life. So his rule is really about a place of the individual monk or nun in the community and how community develops one's own kind of path to God. A chap called Caesarius of Arles in southern France wrote a very influential rule for women, for nuns, in the early 5th century. But the most famous is the Rule of Benedict, and the most influential, written at some point around the middle of the 6th century in Italy. We know very little about the historic figure of Benedict. He may have lived as a hermit before then founding a community. And his rule really draws on a number of existing rules and sets of practices. But it became by far the most influential sort of guide to monastic living in the medieval West. Not in the Eastern Mediterranean, in the Byzantine world, but in the Western medieval world. Benedict's rule came to be dominant, not immediately, but over time came to be the dominant one.
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Host
Were these rules for monastic life practical ones?
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Professor Andrew Jyutiski
Yes. One of the reasons why Benedict's rule was so influential and so successful was because it was quite short. You can read it in a couple of hours. It's intensely practical, pragmatic even, but it also combines quite deep spiritual insight. So it's divided really into both a set of guidelines for how a community works to develop individual spirituality. And then it talks about the observance of the liturgy. And then it has a number of practical guidelines really for how the community is to run itself, how it's to how disciplines to be observed, practical organization and so on. By itself, that wasn't always enough. And during the course of the Middle Ages, many monasteries and monastic orders developed a set of what are called constitutions really to supplement the rule of Benedict and to add specifics really in very granular detail, often about how things are to be done in that particular monastery. So Benedict is providing a kind of template. He expects individual communities to then to be able to build on that. But really the success of Benedict's rule is partly because it allowed that kind of space. It was a very, very flexible document.
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Host
One thing you mentioned about the origins was about monks living in hermitages. Did that continue?
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Professor Andrew Jyutiski
It continues more in the Byzantine world than it does in the West. In the west, yes, there are always individual hermits or groups of hermits. But in Greek Orthodox monasticism, in the Byzantine world there's always much more fluidity in the monastic life and much more of a relationship between a monastery as a fixed community and religious people who are living lives that are not necessarily always centered in the monastery, whom we would call hermits, they're usually just called monks. And that fluidity is expressed by often monks living periodically in monasteries and then going off and living alone in a hermitage somewhere and then maybe coming back to a monastery or founding a different monastery. There's a lot of that going on in the Byzantine world that you don't get so much of in the west and in places like southern Italy, for example, where there's a large Greek speaking population, but also in the kind of heartlands of the Byzantine world, Asia Minor, what's now Greece, and around Constantinople. And of course I suppose I should really mention Mount Athos, which is often called a monastic republic, which is a promontory in northeastern Greece which is entirely run by and for monks. And this starts to get going in the 10th century. Still going now it's about 20 or odd monasteries, but also hermitages for solitary monks or smaller groups of monks. And that is very characteristic of Byzantine monasticism in a way that you don't really find in the West.
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Host
In our story, how did monasticism spread into the west, but also how did it shift in the East?
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Professor Andrew Jyutiski
Monasticism seems to start in the Eastern Mediterranean, but it doesn't take very long before it spreads to the West. Already by the end of the 4th century, we know there are monks in Italy and southern France, and we know that people from the western half of this Late Roman Empire went from places like Italy and France to the east to learn about monasticism. And one of the most important of these is a chap called John Cassian, who, the end of the 4th century, beginning of the 5th century, spent time in Egypt and the Holy Land, really trying to learn from monks there. And then he went back to the west, settled in southern France, and was asked by his bishop to write an account of how Eastern monks lived. And he really promoted the idea of Egypt as being the kind of center of. Of monasticism. And that really ensured the spread of those kind of ideals to the West. In the east, it's really Basil's rules and Basil's kind of monastic ideas that become much more influential. The difference between monasticism in the east, in what becomes the Byzantine Empire and the west, is really that they. Although Basil's influential, there is nothing that quite parallels the rule of Benedict. And the significance of that is that if you founded a monastery in the Byzantine world, you could set your own rules. Each monastery has its own founding document called a typicon, and it's really the founder who decides how the monastery or convent is to be run. And a lot of these survive. Some of them are fairly simple, some of them go on for pages and pages. So monasticism in the east is much more autonomous in a way than it becomes in the West.
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Host
I think we hear so much, at least in the public sphere about the sort of Western monasteries, particularly in England and in France, Is this perhaps why we don't hear so much about the Eastern approach to monasticism?
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Professor Andrew Jyutiski
In many ways, actually, the way in which monks and nuns lived, whether in the east and the west are very, very similar, they would have recognized what the other was doing. There are some differences in the way that they live. You know, in the west, in the Benedictine tradition, monks and nuns sleep in dormitories, whereas in the east they occupy individual cells. But by and large, actually the way of living is really very similar. And what's also similar is the connections between a monastic community and wider society. That kind of network of relationships, of patronage that really enabled a monastic community to function. It's really very similar in east and West.
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Host
Could you tell us about some monastic orders that perhaps our listeners have heard, but perhaps they haven't, that they should know about?
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Professor Andrew Jyutiski
Okay, so when we talk about orders, we're really talking about Western monasticism. The east didn't really have orders in the same way. So let me mention first the Carthusians. The Carthusians were founded in the late 11th century, and they're interesting because they're not really a Benedictine order at all. They were founded by someone called Bruno, who was a German, who decided to get back to really what I suppose he thought was the basis of early monasticism and what was at the heart of Bruno's foundation at a place called Chartreuse. You know, we know Chartreuse as a liqueur because it was made by monks from Chartreus. But he founded La Grande Chartreuse in the Alps, and it's no coincidence that it was in the Alps. He wanted to find somewhere that was difficult to access, where his community would be as little bothered by the outside world as possible. And the principle behind Carthusian monasticism was very small communities of no more than 12 monks and living in individual cells where they would do everything. They would spend most of the day in their cell in a combination of. They would say the offices, you know, go through the liturgy privately in their cell. Food would be brought to them and they would do some craft work as well. When we say cell, actually a Carthusian cell was more of a little apartment with living space, a study, and often a workshop as well, and a patch of garden outside. They would get together for the liturgy once a day in the church together. They had a rule of silence. So it's a very stripped back kind of monastic living. It was much admired by contemporaries, but of course difficult for people to sustain. So it was founded in the late 11th century, chartreuse. But then there were other Carthusian monasteries founded in, mostly in France and England, some in Italy. And it then underwent a revival in the later Middle ages, from the 14th century onward. So that's one example of a monastic order that's different. I suppose one should mention the Cistercians and anyone who visits the kind of great monastic ruins that you still can in Britain. Places like Fountains and Rivo in North Yorkshire or Tintern in the Welsh borders. These are Cistercian monasteries. The Cistercians were Benedictines. But they also wanted to get back to what they thought were the basics of monasticism. Their solution was somewhat different from Bruno's. They thought that many contemporary monks were just not really living the rule of Benedict properly. And so they founded monasteries based on the rule, but based on a kind of what might call a literal, almost fundamentalist observance of the rule. And they're known for their austerity, personal austerity, for the austerity of their communities. They didn't want to become part of a kind of landowning nexus, if you like. And so the principle was that they would only settle on pieces of land that were not already in cultivation and not owned by anyone. And this meant that this land was often kind of unsuited for cultivation, otherwise it would already have been being used for arable cultivation. So very often they are settling in marginal land where, if you take the case of Britain, certainly the only kind of agriculture really, is raising livestock, particularly sheep. The irony is that they wanted to be poor, but it was sheep that made them wealthy. So a community like Rivo, for example, founded in the 1130s, starts out as very austere poor, by the middle of the 13th century, is already really quite wealthy.
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Host
This very much taps into a question I wanted to ask you about the series of reforms to through the 11th and 12th centuries. How would a monastery of, say, 100 AD compare to that of 1200 AD?
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Professor Andrew Jyutiski
I think what you're getting at, Emily, is that there is what historians call a movement of monastic reform in this period, and the Cistercians characterize that reform. What reformers are trying to do is to observe the rule of Benedict fully and to get back to what they thought Benedict and his precursors thought monasticism should be. There's a sort of caveat here that needs to be expressed, which is that not all monasteries were necessarily affected by this reform movement. So some of the really big monasteries, particularly royal or noble foundations, really seem to be relatively untouched by the reform movement. And some historians would say that's actually the majority of monasteries that we focus on reform, because the reformers themselves made a lot of noise, as it were. I think there's a consensus now developing that we can be a little bit misled by some of that noise and by reformers who are kind of accusing the unreformed of not living properly. According to the Royal Benedict, what's going on in this period, really, in monasteries actually reflects the outside world quite a lot. So I think the answer is most monasteries were much wealthier and more comfortable places to live by 1200 than they were in a thousand. Even monasteries that may have been founded as reforming communities. And the reason for that is really to do with the rise in the standard of living in the world outside the monastery. So, yes, there are some communities that continue to be ascetic and austere, but on the whole, most monasteries reflect the way that people in the outside world are living. And I should just say one more thing, which is going back to this point we were talking about earlier, about east and West. There's also a reform movement in the Byzantine world in the 11th century, which is not usually given much kind of consideration, but in many ways it's quite similar to what's going on in the west. And it's rooted in monks seeing the same kind of problems which are to do with the accumulation of wealth, with poverty, with reforming communal living according to the standards of original founders.
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Host
Do nuns live in the same way to monks? Is female monasticism on a similar trajectory in terms of reform?
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Professor Andrew Jyutiski
In most respects, most female monastic communities are very similar to male ones, with one really important difference, which is that women couldn't be ordained as priests and therefore couldn't dispense the sacraments. Now, not all male monks are ordained priests, but increasingly the tendency is for monks to become ordained, because that means you've got a wider group amongst the community who can say Mass, daily Mass, and hear confessions from the rest of the community and so on. In convents, in female communities, you have to have a man come in to do that, those services. So convents have to have chaplains provide the sacraments, essentially, who say Mass, who hear the nuns confessions, who anoint sick nuns and bury nuns who have died. We talked about reform and the reform movement, and one dimension of the reform movement is also actually an increase in the founding of convents between about the middle of the 11th century and, say, 1200 across Western Europe. Anyway, the number of convents for women increases Exponentially, but for reasons that are not necessarily linked to the same sort of reforming tendencies amongst men. And some of the female reformers are actually quite critical of the Rule of Benedict. One of the more prominent and certainly learned and thoughtful female reformers is Eloise, who's best known as being the lover of Peter Abelard, the Paris scholar of the early 12th century and mother of the child they had together. And she went into a convent, became abbess and wrote a series of letters to Abelard after she'd become abbess. So saying that the Rule of Benedict was really written for men and that there are parts of it that are actually quite difficult for women to follow, or that it makes assumptions that aren't necessarily true for women in the same way as they are for men, and not just the Rule, but the various commentaries on the rule and constitutions that monasteries have developed. So she is basically searching for a way to adapt the Rule of Benedict for women. So I think that there are these differences, and one has to pay attention to a slightly different trajectory of reform, a different meaning of reform in female monasticism.
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Host
What you've been speaking about, this sort of very aesthetic lifestyle, but also there's this tension of balancing that with community outreach as well. How easy was it for monks and nuns to switch between those two tensions, those two pressures?
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Professor Andrew Jyutiski
I think it's an absolutely fundamental question. How did communities of people who were supposed to be separate from the world, who are supposed to be focused on living this life of prayer and praise, how do they deal with the facts of community life, the facts of institutional life, which is that the institution itself is rooted in community? I think one fundamental point to be borne in mind is that monks and nuns do not think that what they're doing is for themselves. I mean, it's partly for themselves. They hope that this is a meritorious path to salvation, but they regard the way of life that they're leading as also leading to the salvation of others who are not able to live as monks or nuns. And this is absolutely fundamental to our understanding of what monastic life was all about. As a monk or a nun, you're leading a penitential life yourself, but it's not just for you. It's also a surrogate penance for those who are unable to do that themselves and who support you in doing that. So the monastery or convent is supported as an institution. It's kind of permitted to exist through financial subsidies, through donations of land, bequests and so on. So you're not just giving praise to God and praying on your own behalf. You're also doing it for the donors and patrons to your monastery, not just in the present, but back to the founding days of the monastery. And that creates a kind of network, both of the living and the dead, but also a network between the monasteries and institution and surrounding society, usually quite a localised society. And that goes back to the question that you started this interview with, which is to do with the significance of the monastery. Part of that significance is that the monastery is performing this kind of function for the wider community.
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Host
So if I were to ask you who were monasteries for, or we could say the wider community at whole, then they're for everyone.
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Professor Andrew Jyutiski
Monasteries are for humanity. Monasteries have been described as factories of prayer and prayer that intercedes for the wider community, for human society. Monasteries are really the only places where it's possible to lead lives that are not so tainted by sinfulness as the outside world is. Now. Monks and nuns don't think they're completely perfect. Well, perhaps some of them did, but they're not places of absolute perfection, but they're places where it should be easier, more possible to lead sinless lives. Monasteries are performing that kind of intercessory spiritual function for the whole world.
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Host
I think that certainly goes some way towards explaining why monks and nuns may have taken up this role. What about the people behind the building, the foundation and the maintenance of a monastery?
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Professor Andrew Jyutiski
When you give money to a monastery, either for its physical fabric or to found it in the first place, or leave a bequest of land to help support it, what you're doing by becoming a patron is you are allying yourself to a community of prayer. Now, many monasteries are also dedicated to a particular saint, and that's true of most of the traditional monasteries. So you're also actually linking yourself and your family to a patron saint, and you expect that the monastic community or the guardians of that saint's shrine are able to intercede with that saint for you, so you are going to be protected by that saint. It's not true of all monasteries. The Cistercians, for example, dedicated all their monasteries not to local saints, but to the Blessed Virgin. But on the whole, monasteries had this kind of rootedness in local or regional devotions to a saint. They're regarded as very powerful forces that forces of protection for you as a patron or donor.
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Host
Over here in the uk, I think there is somewhat of a little fixation, maybe from studying at school or something like that, about the Reformation and the impact obviously, that had on the communities. Do we see a similar decline in monasticism? Elsewhere. And what impact did that have on the communities they were meant to be supporting?
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Professor Andrew Jyutiski
Yes, good question. I mean, the dissolution of the monasteries in Britain is obviously a function of the Henritian Reformation, and the Reformation obviously took hold in large parts of Europe. On the whole, in areas of Europe that. That become reform, there is, you know, monasticism also ends. So Lutheran Germany, for example, there's what's often called peasants war, which is very destructive. A lot of monasteries are physically destroyed during that period. But once the dust settles, as it were, areas that have taken on the Lutheran reform basically get rid of their monasteries. And that's true in Scandinavia as well. Areas that remain Catholic don't necessarily get rid of their monasteries, but monasteries come to be prey to some of the kind of external factors, external conditions that mean that they're in decline in many areas of even Catholic Europe by the 15th century. There is a reform movement in the late 14th and into the 15th centuries in places like Italy, and many monasteries are kind of returned to former observances. But in some parts of Europe, like France, for example, although monasteries don't cease to exist, they continue really until the French Revolution. But their character does change quite a lot, and they become quite sort of comfortable places where perhaps the founding principles are not as fully observed as they had been a few centuries earlier.
- [34:45]
Host
I think we sometimes have the perception that monastic life, monasteries, nunneries, were almost fixed in time, that they're very stable, they're continuous, they're never changing. What do you think about that perception? Is that true?
- [35:02]
Professor Andrew Jyutiski
That's a difficult question. In some ways, they are timeless in the sense that if you took a monk or nun from, let's say, the time of Benedict and put them down in the later Middle Ages, in a monastery, they would understand what was going on. In a sense, they would see, I think, in its fundamentals, a very similar, the same way of life being observed. But I think all monasteries and convents are also human institutions that reflect changes in the outside world. And I alluded earlier to a kind of rise in the standards of living in the medieval West. Europe is becoming wealthier, becoming more stable. You see the emergence of centralized states, the rule of law, but also increased international trade. And that's reflected in the monasteries themselves, because monasteries are, after all, made up of people who come from that world into this world. So, yes, they are, on the one hand, the places of stability, places of a kind of perpetual rhythm of life, but they also, I think, reflect what's going on in the wider world.
- [36:36]
Emily Briffet
That was Andrew Jytiski professor of Medieval History at Royal Holloway University of London. Andrew is the author of The Monastic A 1200 Year History, published by Yale University Press. If you're curious to learn more about what daily life was like in a medieval monastery, then be sure to listen to our episode with Danielle Cybulski where she takes a closer look at the medieval monastic lifestyle and explores whether it can offer any lessons for today. The link to that episode is in the description of this one. Thanks for listening. This podcast was produced by Daniel Kramer Arden.