20 - Questions of Monastic Identity in Medieval Southern Italy and Sicily (c. 500–1200)

Summary

Monasticism in medieval southern Italy and Sicily has often been described using binary terms such as Greek/Latin, East/West, Basilian/Benedictine, and anchoritic/cenobitic. As a border region between the Carolingian and Byzantine empires, and an area where both Greek and Latin were used as liturgical languages, it is all too easy to view this part of Europe as a place where “Eastern” and “Western” practices met and mixed, creating a hybrid type of monasticism that can seem strange to Carolingian and Byzantine historians alike. Yet the use of categories such as Greek and Latin, and East and West causes the region to be viewed from the point of view of other traditions. It ignores indigenous practices and customs, seeing everything as an import from somewhere else. It also masks the diversity of monastic lifestyles characteristic of the region, which included wandering ascetics, cloistered monks, household religious, solitary hermits, and cave monasticism. Finally, it paints a static view of the area’s monasticism, which instead was a dynamic phenomenon owing to the constant influx of new peoples and novel religious traditions.