When we talk about “monasticism” in the Middle Ages, we are giving a single name to what was really a whole galaxy of diverse ways of life that developed differently all around the Mediterranean Sea. Nevertheless, these many different “monasticisms” tended to have two things in common: 1) intentional withdrawal from the broader world and 2) strict religious regulation. Christian monasticism is often—but certainly not always—lived in community and under the guidance of a rule (see Activity #1). It can be performed by men or women, both of whom we can call monks, though Christian monastic women are often also called nuns.

The story of Christian monasticism begins in scattered houses and villages all around the Mediterranean, in the first few centuries CE. There, some Christian men and women began withdrawing from their communities, often secluding themselves within their own homes amongst their friends and families or pushing to the outskirts of town to separate from the hustle and bustle of daily affairs. These secluded Christians learned to tightly manage their minds and bodies through practices of asceticism, the act of paying very close attention to habits of eating, sleeping, prayer, reading, leisure etc. and regulating these habits in an effort to bring themselves nearer to God.

Our best evidence for very early forms of monasticism comes from around the year 300 CE and from the deserts of Egypt, just outside the Nile River Delta. Here and in these years, a small number of Christian men and women secluded themselves even further, leaving their jobs, their hobbies, their friends, and usually even their families behind them and moving to the deserts that sat just outside the city limits. The most famous stories about these early isolated monks (called hermits from the Greek word for “lonely” or “desert”) come from the Life of Saint Antony and collected Sayings of the Desert Elders, as well as several other primary accounts from the fourth and fifth centuries. These sources paint a picture of heroic hermits, men and women standing all night in the desert cold, refusing to speak for decades on end, or sometimes even fighting off demons with their bare fists (and usually getting themselves beaten up in the process!). Their stories were hugely popular all over the Mediterranean throughout the next century, from Constantinople and Syria in the east all the way to modern-day France and Spain in the west, and they inspired many others to follow their lead. One famous example of these stories’ influence comes from around the year 386 CE. A young man named Augustine (future bishop, scholar, and saint) welcomes a visitor to his home in Milan who tells him about the Egyptian hermit Antony and the book of his Life. Augustine is so shaken by the story, by the wild man fighting demons in the desert, that he breaks down in tears and cries out to his friend, “What is the matter with us? What is the meaning of this story? These men [i.e., people like Antony] have not had our schooling, yet they stand up and storm the gates of heaven while we, for all our learning, lie here groveling in this world of flesh and blood!” Antony had left Augustine awestruck. And he was not alone. Antony’s Life would become something like an ancient “best-seller” and was the most important model for Christian monks and hermits for centuries afterward.

Around this same time, some monks, both in Egypt and elsewhere, instead of practicing their monasticism alone like the hermits, opted to live together in organized communities called monasteries. Some of these monasteries developed a hierarchy, arranging the common monks under a group of seniores (“elders”), including, most of all, the abbot (see Activity #3). Abbots sat at the head of the monastic community and often had complete authority in their monasteries, controlling and patrolling all parts of the monks’ daily lives. By the eighth century, these monasteries also tended to operate under a “rule,” the name medieval authors gave to the community’s written guidelines (see Activity #1). Some of the more complex rules outlined every detail of the monastic day, including the regular Psalm readings and the roughly eight daily “hours” of prayer set aside for prayer. This collective kind of monasticism, lived in a monastery and under both a rule and an abbot, would become the definitive expression of monasticism only after the Carolingian reforms of the ninth century, which attempted to standardize the wide variety of rules and monastic living arrangements that had cropped up over the four centuries prior (see Activity #2).

“Why would someone want to leave the world and join a monastery in the first place?” you may be asking. Medieval people must have asked this question, too. Practically speaking, monasteries could offer people safety and seclusion. They could nurse the sick, feed the hungry, and get the poor back on their feet. They might also become the happy recipients of noble patronage, money from royals and aristocrats meant to support the monastery’s efforts and gain their favor, which could in turn lend the monastery some serious cultural and political power. In a well-supported monastery, a monk could expect to learn to tend all sorts of crops and livestock, or perhaps to make cheese and wine (see Activity #2). They might learn the skilled work of a craftsman, or they might operate and manage the local gristmill, housed inside the monastery’s walls. And, crucially, nearly all the monks would learn to read Latin—a skill most people in the Middle Ages never had the chance to acquire. But medieval people seem to have been drawn most of all to the monastery as a means of pursuing their own salvation (see Activities #1 and #4) and, what’s more, the salvation of their king and country. They, like Augustine, wanted to “storm the gates of heaven” through their prayer and monastic devotion. The medieval monastery became something like a “factory of prayer” where the community performed the crucial role of praying on behalf of their ruler and, if they prayed with enough sustained effort and focus, absolving her or him of their many sins. This prayerful affiliation with the crown became a model by which some monasteries (like St. Gall and Cluny, in Activities #3 and #4) accrued lasting political prestige in the Middle Ages. In short, the Benedictine monastery was grounded in the principal of ora et labora (“pray and work”).

Though monasteries still operate today all over the world, they no longer enjoy the same cultural importance they once did in the Middle Ages (see Activity #5). Surveys released by the Catholic Church in Rome have counted fewer than 16,000 members of the monastic orders in the year 2022, and the average age of those monks is somewhere north of sixty. Monasticism, as people of the Middle Ages came to know it, has faded into the cultural backdrop. Nevertheless, some elements of the medieval monastic world still survive in our cultural memory. Medieval monks are perhaps best remembered today for their work in preserving knowledge by copying manuscripts. If we picture the medieval monk at all, we tend to imagine him bent over a text, engaged in the silent work of transferring a passage of Latin from one old parchment to another. And as we will see (Activity #5), something like this remains an important function for monasticism even in the twenty-first century.

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