medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
This discussion has been marred by an attempt to apply a dictionary definition to a situation of great complexity and fluidity. Almost no hermits lived entirely alone, which, as has been pointed out, is almost impossible. They lived in small or large communities, more or less institutionalised, or they were solitaries supported by a community (diverse forms of life from Wendy Beckett in a caravan in a convent's grounds to a medieval anchorite attached to a parish church). Even quite extreme forms of eremitical life--Simon Stylites on his pillar, for example--were necessarily enabled by support networks, sometimes of considerable social extent and significance. Many of the 12th-c. apostolic life groups considered themselves as preaching hermits. The OED sheds very little light on these complex phenomena and the medieval categorisations of them.
It is often forgotten that all the 13th-c. mendicant orders were transformations of eremitical groups, with the single exception of the Dominicans, who sprang from a canonical background. The early Franciscans had a strong eremitical element in their spirituality, part of the reason Francis did not originally want the brothers to spend the night in cities: before the gates closed they were to leave for the countryside. Francis also wrote a rule for hermitages. The Augustinian friars were a union of Italian hermit groups created by papal decree and encouraged to take up urban ministry. They continued to call themselves "hermits" in their official name until the 1960s, and argued that solitude was an inner state rather than an outer one. The Carmelites were also originally hermits and only founded urban houses after 1247; they continued to speak of living in the desert even when their houses were in cities. The Servites, too, had a strong eremitical streak and still have an important "hermitage" on Monte Senario outside Florence.
De diversis ordinibus in ecclesia, which Giles Constable edited some time back, makes it clear that 12th-c. categories for classifying forms of religious life correspond very little to those developed by later canonists, never mind the OED.
In the Life of Guthlac, when Guthlac finds the ideal spot for a hermitage in Crowland, the first thing he does is return to his monastery to find some brother monks to live with him "in solitude". It is not necessary to invoke the Red Queen. It is simply that words like hermit, solitude, desert and the like did not have have simple definitions, no matter what the OED may say.
Jean Leclercq said somewhere that medieval eremitism was so various that it is almost impossible to explain, but that little can be explained without it. -- Paul
Paul Chandler, O.Carm.
Holy Spirit Seminary | Banyo. Qld. 4014
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On 23/12/2011, at 8:42 PM, Christopher Crockett <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
>
> From: Karl Brunner <[log in to unmask]>
>
>> Sorry, we never will hear much about a totally successful, i.e. solitary
> hermit ...
>
>
> yes, i suspect that they all just died off (the very definition of
> "unsuccessful").
>
> it was hard enough to survive in the Dark Ages with a functioning Support
> Network (vassals, fideles, extended family, village infrastructure, whatever)
> --trying to Make a Go of it off on one's own was just asking for trouble.
>
> c
>
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