Meet the most frugal monks and nuns who ever lived

Andrew Jotischky’s history of cloistered life, The Monastic World, has masterful range – but risks becoming as ascetic as its subjects

4/5
In seventh-century Emesa, Syria, a man walked through town tugging a dead dog on the end of a rope. He defecated in public, strode about naked with all his clothes piled in a turban on his head and tried to force his way into the women’s section of the bath-house. Despite all appearances, this man was a monk, “Symeon the Holy Fool”. His hijinks were part of a Byzantine monastic life called salos, which intended – though critics doubted it – to achieve indifference to the human body through exposure to the world’s absurdities, not enclosure from them.
The story of Symeon the Holy Fool is one of many vignettes in Andrew Jotischky’s The Monastic World: a comprehensive study of the lives of monks and nuns from early Christianity in the 4th century AD, through to the dissolution of the monasteries in England and the decline of the cloistered religious life into the 17th and 18th centuries. It’s a subject which may seem, for the non-academic reader at least, a little oblique. With dwindling numbers of people identifying as religious, many can now go their whole lives without coming into contact with a monk or a nun.
But for people in the Middle Ages, this was simply not the case: a monastery was likely the biggest landowner in the area; an Abbott a prominent local politician; a priory an employer of scores of staff. To be a nun or monk was, as Jotischky puts it, a “normative and ever-present way of living”, one which attracted thousands upon thousands of men and women to its austere regime of prayer, work, and life in community. The many monks and nuns who took their vows did so not just for their own souls, but because they had the “power to save themselves and others”.
There’s a contradiction of sorts between the austerity monks and nuns are known for – hair shirts, fasting – and the power monasteries possessed in the Middle Ages. What Jotischky focuses on is monasticism’s frugal origins. His history starts with the first use of the term “monk” in an official document (a man called “Isaac” who rescued a villager from an attack by his neighbours), before reaching the first monk in the Western world: Martin of Tours, who lived as an ascetic on an island in the Ligurian Sea. Both in the West and in the East, the early monks and nuns drew inspiration from the lives of the “Desert Fathers”: the men and women who lived in the wilderness of the Egyptian deserts in the 3rd century AD.  
Jotischky’s history skips along. Before we know it, there are enough monks to warrant the establishment of “Rules” to guide their lives – dictating which property they could own, for example, and how they were meant to pray. We learn of the construction of grand buildings, and reams of fractious reforms (almost at every point in history is a commentator who believes that the contemporary monks are laxer than their predecessors). We’re told of fights, of disagreements and of monks who go to extraordinary lengths for their faith, as with one monk who constrained his breathing with bands around his waist. Jotischky covers the more famous monastic figures like St Francis of Assisi alongside the lesser known, such as the 12th-century anchoress Christina of Markyate, who fled from her marriage in favour of a hermit’s cell.
To write a history of monasticism is also to write a history of Christianity, and Jotischky successfully pushes this account in interesting directions. He resists a Western bias – he identifies, rightly, that the monastic tradition begins in the East – and pays welcome attention to the development of women’s religious houses, even where source material is more obscure. By the middle of the seventh century, for example, many religious houses in England were “double”: communities of monks and nuns, often ruled over by a woman, as per traditions in the East. The Abbesses who ruled over these communities were often relations of royals, powerful well beyond the confines of the cloister. 
But The Monastic World does have some problems. This is no sparkly, gilded history of culture and art. There’s not an illuminated manuscript in sight – no product of the monk and nuns’ many scriptoria – but, instead, page after page of rules, reform and subsequent reaction. This is a masterfully wide-ranging historical account, but for lay readers, it may well verge on the dry.
The Monastic World by Andrew Jotischky is published by Yale UP at £25. To order your copy, call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books