IMC 2024: Sessions
Session 130: Confinement and Crisis in Medieval Eremitical Monasticism
Monday 1 July 2024, 11:15-12:45
| Sponsor: | Cartusiana |
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| Organisers: | Tom Gaens, Ruusbroecgenootschap, Universiteit Antwerpen Stephen J. Molvarec, School of Theology & Ministry, Boston College, Massachusetts |
| Moderator/Chair: | John Arblaster, Ruusbroecgenootschap, Universiteit Antwerpen |
| Paper 130-a | An Order Divided: Mid-12th-Century Conflict between Carthusian Monasteries and the General Chapter (Language: English) Index terms: Law, Monasticism and Religious Life |
| Paper 130-b | Women in the Wilderness: Hermitism and Female Mobility (Language: English) Index terms: Monasticism, Religious Life and Women's Studies |
| Paper 130-c | Regretful Recluses in the Medieval Spiritual Cell (Language: English) Index terms: Monasticism and Religious Life |
| Abstract | Medieval eremitical monasticism often represents a set of dichotomies and tensions: between the communal and the solitary, between the local monastery and centralizing authority, between the stable and the mobile. Twelfth-century orders such as the Carthusians and the Camaldolese embodied their experiments with various forms of monastic life, seeking to institutionalize and regulate the hermit, bringing them into communal, eventually non-local structures, sometimes resulting in moments of crisis. The papers in this session will treat individual crises as found in the difficulty of monks with confinement in their cells, the difficulty of women hermits and tensions over stability/mobility, and a crisis that erupted in the fledgling Carthusian order in the 1140s over the authority of prior and new general chapter over local monasteries. Each of these papers will treat the difficulty of remaining in one place, one cell even. Crises might be individual and existential, or communal and institutional. |