Periodic Reporting for period 1 - RITPASS (Rites of Passage and Monastic Communities in the late-antique Mediterranean)
Reporting period: 2023-09-01 to 2025-08-31
How did medieval monastic leaders assert control over their communities? This project introduced an innovative way to approach to this often-considered question: through the rites of passage into ascetic groups in Late Antiquity (fourth-seventh centuries CE). Late-antique sources emphasise five membership rituals as particularly significant: rigorous testing; social degradation; the offering of stability pledges; the renunciation of possessions; and the donning of uniform attire. These rites were meant to bind novices to their new lives, efface their prior identities, and enforce obligation to their abbots and abbesses. Although the scholarship on medieval monasticism is extensive, the relationship between ascetic authority structures and the aforementioned five ceremonies has received little recent substantial attention. This two-year project, which investigated this relationship from the first appearance of monastic groups in the fourth century to their widespread multiplication across the Mediterranean by the seventh century, was a first step towards the broader research aim of understanding how monastic rites of passage developed from and evolved alongside analogous non-monastic rituals.
The main tasks of this project were to collate, compare, and explain the relationships between the surviving (largely textual) evidence for the rituals imposed on newcomers who approached communal monastic groups between the fourth and seventh centuries CE in the Mediterranean. These sources were first compiled in a private database to facilitate later analysis of the descriptions available to us, followed in turn by analysis of the individual circumstances pertaining to each item, especially as they related to chronological, spatial, identity, and organisational differences between the described groups. These individual cirucmstances and their effects on monastic conceptualisations of entrance rituals were then woven together through broader considerations of shared issues (such as the influence of wealth, gender identifications, and non-monastic authorities on internal monastic hierarchies). This work progressed through five case studies, essentially structured around the evidence pertaining to testing, pledging, degradation, robing, and renunciation rituals. While these rituals were initially examined in turn, the shared purposes and effects of these processes were emphasised to note the cumulative impact of these public ceremonies on the relationships between monks, superiors, and the rest of late antique society. At the same time, these interlinked and overlapping effects meant that superiors did not necessarily need to use all of these rites, and thus had great flexibility in choosing what processes to impose and how to impose them on their followers. As such, this research by design paid attention to the variety of monastic expressions of service, obligation, and identity possible in these rituals, with the aim of emphasising late antique monasticism not as a uniform, cohesive whole but rather as a diverse, ever-changing landscape in which monks and their leaders sought to navigate the period's travails.
This project developed an analytical framework which combined diachronic, transregional, transcultural, and sociological methodologies to allow for consideration of varied monastic sources and experiences across the late antique Mediterranean. At its core, this comparative approach emphasised the diversity of late antique monastic experiences, beyond the thoughts of well-known monastic authorities such as Augustine and Benedict, and across traditional categorisations of ‘c[o]enobitic’ (communal) and ‘eremitic’ (solitary) groups. By foregrounding comparisons between well-known monastic items and underappreciated, in particularly documentary, sources, this research built on the increasing recognition of monastic diversity and the tendency of superiors to experiment in the lives of their followers. Beyond monastic studies, this project offers an avenue for epistemological re-evaluations of medieval structures of authority, identity, and obligation, especially in relation to interpretations of Late Antiquity as a period of ‘loosened’ social bonds by highlighting these initiation rites as an underappreciated method of enhancing social cohesion and framing monasteries as important social groupings intended at least in part to counteract social tensions. I intend to develop these results further by setting this preliminary research in dialogue with the considerable evidence for comparable rituals in non- and pre-monastic groupings, with a view to exploring how monastic authorities willingly drew on these earlier practices for their own needs. In doing so, this project and the research which will follow will offer a novel interpretation of medieval monasticism, broader late antique society, and the organisational frameworks implemented in both to enhance authority and trust in the face of heightened social pressures.