Contrary to the secular disdain of religion which holds sway in many English universities, there has been an almost subversive interest in medieval religious life, a fascination doubtless fuelled by Duffy's landmark study, The Stripping of the Altars. It drew attention to the richness of the fusion between aesthetics and theology as manifested in symbols, ceremonials and aspects of visual culture, resources spectacularly harnessed to gaze on the heavenly. Increasingly, responses to the medieval world are less shaped by nostalgia and more by an appreciation of its accomplishments in realising that which postmodernity seeks to recover, lost by modernity: enchantment.
In his postscript to A Time to Keep Silence, reflecting back on his encounters with French forms of monasticism, Leigh Fermor mourned the loss of the old monasteries of England, ‘vanished worlds’, most now in ruins whose inhabitants are long gone to dust. They led strange lives of heroic virtue, fools to the world, a tribe of bureaucrats of the body, as Weber conceived them. These tribes, shaped in medieval culture yet capable of re-invention in the hostile settings of postmodernity, fascinate for their capacities to re-link the chains of memory (to use Hervieu-Leger's memorable phrase). Not surprisingly, some of the best contemporary accounts of monasticism have been written by travel writers such as Leigh Fermor, Moorhouse and North.
The monastery, as an exemplar of community, is still alluring as many will remember from the conclusion of MacIntyre's After Virtue. Its milieu is still a vital resource, as is illustrated in Bourdieu's employment of habitus, a concept that lies at the heart of his highly influential sociology of culture. What has been lacking is a study of the medieval monastery that would focus on the mentalities which shaped its distinctive institutional milieu. Julie Kerr's study rectifies this omission admirably, filling well a significant gap in research. Although a medieval historian, if it is not rude to suggest, she has written an artful piece of historical sociology that is fascinating in its detail and complete in its scope. A world lost to time is resuscitated and brought vividly and recognisably close to the expectations of this age.
The study is handsomely produced, is well sectioned and illustrated, with a useful glossary, notes and bibliography. Although some passages deal with nuns, most of the study is concerned with English monks and the benefits of her connection with the Cistercians in Yorkshire Project (University of Sheffield) are apparent. Apart from some minor quibbles (monastic offices should have been listed by times and the chapter titles are a bit pedestrian) Kerr gets behind the stereotypes surrounding the medieval monastery, of Romanticism, of Gothic fiction, or of Reformation propaganda, to produce a startling sense of its institutional milieu, where the demands of an ascetic life had to be balanced by attention to the everyday needs of the monks. This effort to contextualise the detail of their lives fills out their form of life in a closely woven exercise of the historical imagination to produce a wondrous picture of piety pursued in the precarious circumstances of medieval culture.
The prime accomplishment of her study is to ‘normalise’ their lives by attending to their survival mechanisms, the way they coped with the contradictory demands of a vocation directed to the other world yet very firmly lived in this one. It is often said that sociology is a painful expression of the obvious, but when its expectations are applied to the past, the lives of real people can be fleshed out in ways that become tangible and recognisable in the present age. As a result, the mundane which so seems beyond imagination can be brought to the fore, causing one to wonder why the obvious, however trivial, was missed. For instance, one might be struck by the notion that medieval peasants sunbathed, an incidental and memorable detail to be found in Le Roy Ladurie's Montaillou, a celebrated study of the ordinariness of their communal life in early fourteenth century France. Whereas he had the record of Fournier's inquisition to rely on, an enquiry into heresy conducted by reference to a sociological set of expectations exercised before the discipline was invented, Kerr has had no such fortune. This makes her study all the more accomplished. She has to search hard in scraps of evidence and writings to glean small amounts of material that can be put to good sociological use. The monastic picture that emerges is an ideal type, one that seems authentic and accurate.
Anybody who has strolled around a monastic ruin, Tintern or Fountains Abbey, inspecting crevices and remains might have wondered, for instance, on the uses of the calefactory, the functions of the cloister, and the sleeping arrangements of the monks. Were they allowed to drink ale? Did they venture into local taverns? All these are matters Kerr pursues in satisfying detail. The study is full of telling little points, like the young novice who panicked on hearing the razor being sharpened for his tonsure and refused it until the prior calmed him down; on money and family ties; and the occupational injuries of being a monk (strain on the eyes with night offices, back injuries owing to bell-ringing, and acedia).
The demands made on the monks, of fasting, broken sleep, of tensions within the monasteries over clashes of personalities, are well explored in ways where the monks speak through the evidence to tell their stories, what they felt and how they coped. The strictness of the life was offset in many ways, by the use of the adjoining fields and forests to walk in when the monks needed relief from ascetic pressures. She captures well a sense of the microcosm of the life and what it was like to inhabit this ‘total institution’ (to use Goffman's term). This sense emerges in the way she draws out, in chapters 4–5, the degree to which ‘the sound of silence’ was a distinct accomplishment in the medieval monastery, which, contrary to expectations was a noisy place with animals trespassing in the cloister and with servants and craftsmen milling about the place. In addition, there were tenants to be seen, petitioners to be appeased, and a never-ending stream of pilgrims and visitors. The monastery was like a mini-city with many comings and goings. Not surprisingly, the choir area was kept apart, not for reasons of power, but for the protection of the sanity of the monks where they could pray apart. With all these pressures, as Kerr indicates, occasional visits to the local taverns were understandable to escape the pressure.
Kerr is especially interesting on the way the family ties of the monks were well recognised by the monasteries. Thus, she notes that in the early fifteenth century, ‘the cellarer of Westminster Abbey set aside about 200 gallons of ale each year for the use of the monks’ parents and sisters when they visited’ (p. 67). Recruitment to the monasteries seemed to have been an oddly haphazard affair. Some monks, initially, came as oblates, others had been knights who were just passing visitors who decided to stay on, but ‘the majority were recruited through the ministry of the brethren, whether by their exhortation, prayer or example’ (p.13). Even then, wearing the religious habit was an important sign of vocation, one that signified the promise of Eternal Salvation, a link bizarrely broken after Vatican II, a severance rendering ascetic vocations almost pointless.
The trouble with the study is that it is so interesting and so well sectioned that many will dip into the parts and miss the holistic properties of the daily life so well portrayed. Three things do stand out as being of exceptional interest. The first relates to the regulation of the body in the monastery, its discipline, but also the attention given to its maintenance in terms of blood-letting, cleanliness, the use of the infirmary, and the diet of the monks. The second relates to the surveillance procedures employed to ensure virtue where the monks were highly alert to the dangers of the flesh, disputes, abuses, and vices, especially anger which could de-stabilise the community. The third area relates to the way the monks linked reading to the pursuit of holiness, so that knowledge ‘should be used as a mirror, that soul might see a reflection of its own image’ (p. 181).
The study ends with a one page epilogue that well illustrates the attractions of monastic life, the security of life offered, the communal demands that realised solidarity and friendship, and the sense of belonging together in a common quest for salvation, all rendering this an institution all too human, but proximate to the Divine, in ways that generated wonder in the medieval world and a ‘magic’ even in the present day.
