Medieval monasteries as total institutions (original) (raw)
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Wojtek Jezierski, Total St Gall. Medieval Monastery as a Disciplinary Institution, Stockholm 2010
Can we think of a Benedictine cloister around the year 1000 as reminiscent of a modern prison or a mental asylum? Was the monastery a medieval type of Erving Goffman's 'total institution' or Benthanian panopticon thoroughly structuring the thoughts and practices of its inmates? What did the power relations between the groups of monks in medieval St Gall look like? Wojtek Jezierski's thesis explores and expands the connection between the medieval forms of monastic life and modern social theories. It investigates the patterns of persecution and exclusion, the exercise of power and surveillance, as well as violent conflicts between the conventuals and their abbots. It analyzes also the social components of monastic habitus and subjectivity in the monasteries of St Gall, Fulda, Bury St Edmunds and others. Finally, the study examines the strategies monks used to cope with the demands made on them by the external lay world, i.e. the political, social, and cultural liaisons between claustrum and saeculum. Wojtek Jezierski (b. 1979) studied history and social anthropology the University of Warsaw. He conducts research at the Department of History and the centre for Medieval Studies, Stockholm University. This book is his PhD thesis.
Sacris Erudiri, 2019
This article shows the impact of clerical ordinations of monks on monastic communities of the late antique Latin West. Its first part demonstrates how the clerical hierarchy introduced by monk-presbyters and monk-deacons challenged the purely monastic power structure – based, above all, on the abbot’s supreme authority. It turns then to three organizers of monastic life active in the sixth century – Eugendus of Jura, Aurelian of Arles, and Benedict of Nursia – who, each in his own way, ensured that the appointment of monks to clerical ranks would leave the monastery’s hierarchy intact – or even reinforce it. In conclusion, it is argued that the problems provoked by monastic clergy were alleviated by the strict separation of monastic and ecclesiastical hierarchies, which is demonstrated particularly in the Benedict’s of Nursia Rule. This, in turn, contributed to the steady process of the clericalization of Western monasticism.
Total St Gall : Medieval Monastery as a Disciplinary Institution
2010
The apparatus was set up, and because it was there it had to function, and once it was functioning, it began to accelerate; once a car starts rolling in an open field, even if no one is at the wheel, it will always take a definite, even a very impressive and remarkable course of its own. Somehow or other, order, once it reaches a certain stage, calls for bloodshed.
A brief description of the content of the book In the first and second chapters, I analyse the changes of monasticism in historical and statistical terms. The first chapter, based on historical sources, covers the history of monastic life from its dawn at the beginning of our era until the 1970s; it also presents the basic theological definitions of this phenomenon. Analyses point to a number of social factors that are associated with the transformation of monasticism, and thus constitute it as an object of sociological research. The second chapter, developed on the basis of analyses of church statistics, covers the period from the 1970s until 2015, when the edition of "Annuarium Statisticum Ecclesiae" (ASE) ends – ASE is the main source of data for analyses presented in this chapter. The author's analysis nuances the widespread hypothesis about the current "crisis" of religious life, showing that (1) the quantitative decline of nuns and religious priests and brothers does not affect all continents and all European countries (an important exception for religious priests is here in Poland), (2) the current situation can be seen as the next stage in the evolution of the idea of monasticism, not the "crisis" because from the second half of the twentieth century there is the development of institutions attempting to implement the idea of monasticism in a new way (for instance secular institutes or so-called new monastic communities). The third chapter presents the analysis of the sociological state of art in relation to the indicated issue and proposes the relational approach, expanding the area of monastic study from the analysis of internal institutional transformations, including the issues of vocations, onto relations in the social environment, including the discourse on monasteries. The fourth chapter presents the discussion of the results of author's research on Cistercian monasteries in the local context, to which the relational approach was implemented, which was the author's contribution to the development of research into this phenomenon. Research shows that despite the low number of vocations, monasteries function in a series of relationships (related to economics, tourism, collective memory), which are also initiated by local social actors other than monks, and for secular purposes. Thus, the change in the cognitive perspective allows us to see that the monasteries function in changed and not only religious relationships, being important institutions in the life of local communities, also outside the religious context. A detailed discussion The first chapter is devoted to the discussion of basic concepts and history of the phenomenon from its beginning at the beginning of our era until the 1970s. The discussion of concepts is necessary because this phenomenon is usually described by theological terms. The widest concept covering various forms of religious life, whose participants declare and practice separation from the world in order to reach God, is a consecrated life, a life dedicated to God. As defined by the Code of Canon Law of 1983, it is a form of life that takes place in
‘Internal Peripheries: Infirmity in the Monasteries of the Medieval West (10th– 12th century)’
Ecclesiastical History Society Winter Meeting (13 gennaio 2024), 2024
The monastic infirmary is a space inside the abbey enclosure, but peripheral in a geographical – often, it is located apart from the heart of the cenoby, i.e. the cloister and the monastery church – and also ideal sense, so to speak, because the legislation that regulates its organization makes it something other from the normal life of the institution. However, this legislation does not aim to isolation or exclusion, but is rather an attempt to keep the sick monk and the infirmary, meeting the particular needs of illness and assistance, within the system of spaces and habits of the abbey. In my paper, I would like to study the characteristics, meanings and implications of the peripherality of the monastic infirmary and of the sick monk between the tenth and twelfth centuries, as well as the risks associated with the marginalization of these spaces and these figures and the instruments – normative, personal and, above all, liturgical – designed to prevent it. This constitutes a very interesting case, since it is an "internal" periphery, designed to include rather than marginalize, and whose borders, being it a place of suffering and - sometimes - of death, were also open to supernatural presences.