090076 SE Lateinisches Seminar: Aus der monastischen Kultur der Spätantike und des Mittelalters (2020W)

We are still in the middle of a pandemic and many of us have been either isolated alone or locked in with others (wanted or unwanted). Communication in the flesh has been radically reduced. We have all lost communities: our universities are now no longer the institutions they were prior to March 2020. They have moved online.

This seems to me to be a perfect time to turn our attention to Christian monasticism and to monastic texts in many genres (e.g. hagiography, rules, dialogues, apothegms, sermons, history) and over a broader time-period from Late Antiquity to the Central Middle Ages. For monasticism is a phenomenon that had proved extraordinarily stable over many centuries (3rd C. CE to 21st C. CE), but also flexible and able to be both a still center and to move with the times. There was common ground: all medieval ascetics practiced poverty and chastity. Some mortified their flesh. All worshipped with prayer and liturgy. Some self-isolated as anchorites, some wandered and begged, but the majority formed residential coenobitic communities, where obedience to norms and rules was expected. These started as communities that crystallized around a founder, became houses, and eventually turned into full-blown orders with rules and some centralization of administration. Charismatic leaders were both founders and agents of change. Cycles of decadence and institutional reform led to clean-ups of old structures as well as to the break-off of new orders.

We owe the preservation of classical culture to Christian monks; monks travelled to convert the heathen; monasteries became wide-ranging businesses and powerful and enormously rich land-owners. They were also places to deposit the younger sons and unmarriageable daughters of nobles and kings. They could house great minds or become backwaters. Monks could go bad or die as martyrs. But their lives were (mostly) chosen, a vocation, and intensely structured and thought-out.

We will explore a variety of topics, texts, people and orders ranging from the VAntonii and the VPauli (3rd to 4th C.) through the 6th C. (Cassiodorus and Benedict, Radegundis and Poitiers) down to (deo volente) Bernard of Clairvaux and the Crusades, Dominic (1170-1221), Francis (1182-1226), and perhaps even the Maurists (1618-1818).