Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Dan Jones

begging for their upkeep, and offering spiritual guidance to ordinary laypeople. Then there were cenobites, who formed single-sex communities, living together, usually in a fixed abode with common areas and individual cells, praying, studying, and laboring their days away. Both types of monasticism (the word stems from the Greek μονος, suggesting a oneness with God) coexisted throughout the Middle Ages, and indeed can still be found today. And both types caused some consternation for the established Church. Ascetics disrupted traditional social hierarchies. They were in most cases pious laypeople, not ordained priests. They did not fall under the jurisdiction of bishops, and could often drain authority and charitable funds from “official” representatives of the Church. At the Council of Chalcedon, held in Byzantium in 451, there was an attempt to force monks to live in monasteries and quit wandering, but this had little long-lasting effect.9 For one thing it was practically very difficult to police individual piety. And for another, global cultural networks in the early Middle Ages were already wide and strong enough to mean that men and women were living monastic lives far beyond the discipline of Constantinople: by the fifth century Christian hermits could already be found as far afield as Ireland and Persia. Wherever there was Christianity, there were monks and hermits, and for a long time there seemed to be very little way to impose any sort of order or discipline on t...