Where did all the monasteries go?
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No one knows how many monasteries there were in Europe in 1500, the dawn of the “Early Modern” period, about 35 years before rulers started their centuries-long campaign of suppressions. Estimates place it easily in the neighbourhood of tens of thousands, if you include hermitages, daughter houses and all the multitude of mendicant “places”. Europe, as we know, was literally built by monks, and by the end of the 15th century western Christendom was carpeted with monastic holdings.
Where did they all go?
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The Sacred Images Project looks at art history and culture through the lens of the first 1200 years of Christian sacred art.
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It’s easy to make the mistake of thinking that monastic life - as distinct from “active” religious orders - only suffered suppressions in Tudor England, and were doing fine until the collapse of everything Catholic following the world wars and the Second Vatican Council.
We just don’t hear very much in our Anglo education systems about what happened in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries. And even if we did know a bit about it, next to nothing is ever breathed about the secretive transnational organisation whose stated goals were to wipe Catholicism from the world’s map, and how incredibly successful it was in that goal.
In other words, we really have almost no idea how completely impoverished the Church had already become in her adopted homeland by the opening of Vatican II in 1963.
Several years ago I wrote a series of articles for the Remnant tracing that history from the ideologically motivated Habsburg Emperor Joseph II - “inspired” by the madman Voltaire - through the catastrophe of the French Revolution, Napoleon’s conquest of Italy and his installation of his relatives and followers in government there, whose ideological descendants are still ruling on the peninsula.
What does “Risorgimento” mean to anyone outside Italy? This is an almost forgotten history. How did the papacy fall to secularist armed aggression? How did a thousand year old monastic civilisation fall? Who did it, and why? And what happened to Europe after the monks were expelled and their lands and libraries seized?
I’ve compiled and edited the articles into a three-chapter ebook that I’m going to be making available for purchase - with all sorts of fancy professional formatting and images - very soon on my studio blog, “Hilary White; Sacred Art”.
Today I want to share that around a bit as a preview for our paid membership. I’ve turned the first chapter - about 4000 words - into a downloadable pdf document and am offering it for free as a present and a thank-you to the paid members of this site. The final book is about 10,000 words and, before photos are added in, comes to about 23 pages.
I hope you enjoy this section, and that it will help fill in some of the gaps.
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