Real Monks Cry: Masculinity in the Monastery

Gerald of Aurillac was an unusual man, and an even more unusual saint. As a nobleman, living during the second half of the ninth century, he held the secular responsibility of governing the region of Aurillac in the splintering Frankish kingdoms. But his hagiography, written by Odo of Cluny in the tenth century, claimed that he did not take to his lordly life with gusto: he did not enjoy feasting or hunting and his famous military triumph was achieved by instructing his men to fight with the backs of their swords. Most strikingly of all, however, was Gerald’s paranoia about preserving his chastity. So much so that if he ever had the misfortune of dealing with an unwanted ‘nocturnal illusion’, he had a servant bring him a prepared change of clothes, a cloth, and a vessel of water because he ‘so fled from that staining of the body that he washed away what happened to him in sleep not only with water but with tears’.

Such a detailed and intimate scene was unusual in a religious text. While graphic descriptions of the bodies and tortures of female virgins were common in medieval hagiographies, the same cannot be said for the portrayal of saintly men. Holy men before Gerald largely became saints on account of their leadership and devotion to God as kings or monks, or through martyrdom, leaving little need to discuss bodily matters. Yet it is uncomfortably central to Gerald’s path to sainthood. Gerald was not the first man to worry about the corrupting power of any sexual act or thought, but the emphasis Odo placed on it was part of an ideology spreading across Europe in the wake of numerous monastic reforms since the tenth century. These reforms introduced a ‘monastic masculinity’, which rejected all the traditional secular acts that defined men, such as violence, sex, and marriage, and which left no room for impurity, even if accidental.

The various reforms that broke out between the tenth and 12th century, including the Benedictine, Cistercian, and Papal, had some variation, but they generally aimed to improve what were seen as failings of Church institutions, namely corruption and the lack of a celibate clergy. A particularly vocal campaigner was Peter Damian (1007-72), a Benedictine monk and member of the inner circle to Pope Leo IX. Peter wrote hundreds of letters and treaties on the issues he and others saw in the Church. One, more than most, was of concern: clergymen having sex. For Peter, sex and anything related to it, particularly women, was the devil’s way of offering temptation. In 1067 he wrote a lengthy letter praising the superiority of the ascetic lifestyle which required its followers to ‘extinguish the flames of desire’ at every turn. But even he recognised the difficulty of enforcing this, especially on young men. He likened their inner struggle with lust as a ‘war’ or a ‘hailstorm’, in which ‘the furnace of your body spews out balls of fire just like restless Vesuvius or smoking Aetna’. The only solution to this violent temptation was, he held, intense fasting.

The masculinity that Gerald represented, and that Peter was suggesting, was as far removed as possible from the secular expectations of men’s role in society. And that was the point. A nobleman was required to defend his land and name through both warfare and the stability of a legitimate heir, as exemplified in Asser’s portrayal of King Alfred, for example. Asser praised Alfred’s piety but still recognised his marriage and successes on the battlefield as part of what made him an admirable king. However, if monastic men could not demonstrate their masculinity through the creation and defence of their families, what did that make them? This question has been tackled by medievalists such as R. Swanson who, writing in 1999, argued that the extreme requirements made the clergy exist in a strange limbo as a ‘third gender’: neither entirely masculine nor feminine.

The emotional effect of the split between the religious and secular is illustrated by Guibert of Nogent in his memoir Monodiae, written in 1115 while he was abbot of Nogent-sous-Coucy, a uniquely revealing text into the inner mindset of a medieval man. Having grown up in a secular household, Guibert chose to train as a monk, largely owing to the influence of his mother and her staunch praise of the ascetic life. However, his text is filled with mentions of his struggles, especially with the restriction that a life in religious service required. Poignantly, Guibert wrote: ‘With the gradual growth of my young body, as the life of this world began to stir my itching heart with fleshly longings and lusts to suit my stature, my mind repeatedly fell to remembering and dwelling on what and how great I might have been in the world.’

Unable to perform the deeds that most men did, clerical writers needed to create new narratives to demonstrate that the monastic way of life was not only natural, but vastly superior to that of their secular counterparts. As such, monastic masculinity relied on showcasing the extreme restraint that few could achieve. The power to control one’s own body and, even further, one’s mind, was the pinnacle of devotion. But, by purposefully rejecting aspects of their masculinity, monks gained a degree of flexibility in the representation of their gender. Hence, as noted by the historian William Aird in 2010, across the 11th and 12th centuries high-ranking clerical figures such as Anselm of Canterbury were increasingly using traditionally feminine attributes to signify their fervent faith. The 12th-century hagiography of Bishop Gundulf of Rochester described Anselm as an influential teacher who used the figure of Mary to teach Gundulf who was ‘abundant in tears’. As ‘the one spoke: the other wept. The one planted; the other watered’. This weeping and nurturing was commonly associated with the role of mothers, such as Mary weeping over the body of her son, but it had begun to seep into portrayals of monastic and holy men’s devotion. For a secular nobleman, openly crying would have undermined his masculinity which depended on being seen as dominant, but, just as Gerald washed away his impure acts with tears, weeping was repurposed by monastic men to indicate inner strength and humility.

Maria Ciszkowicz is a PhD researcher at the University of Bristol.