Monks, Nuns, and Hermits

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

This seminar will deal with the origins of Christian monasticism in the third century and trace its development down to the advent of the friars in the thirteenth. The course will concentrate on the relationship between monasticism and Christian society as a whole. What did the men and women who withdrew into the eastern deserts hope to accomplish by rejecting society? What was their role in the wider church? In other words, what were the implications for ordinary believers of having an alternative form of Christian practice develop alongside the Christian hierarchy? How was the monastic impulse transformed by its encounter with new political and social circumstances in western Europe? To explore these questions, we will read some modern historians, but we will rely heavily on primary sources, especially saints' lives and monastic rules, in an effort to understand how monasticism influenced, and was influenced by, the major historical currents of this crucial millennium in European history. Spring.