40 - Reclusion in the Middle Ages

Summary

Reclusion was a very common type of religious life in the medieval West, especially in the high Middle Ages. A man or a woman was voluntarily confined within a narrow space and lived there alone, consecrating the rest of their life to prayer. If Rome outshone any of its rivals with its 230 recluses at the beginning of the fourteenth century, it seems that most cities or towns were home to at least one recluse. By the end of the Middle Ages, however, reclusion had become rarer in some regions—for instance, in Italy from the thirteenth century, in Spain from the fifteenth century—while a significant number of recluses were still established in Germany and England at the beginning of the sixteenth century. After the Reformation, reclusion was prohibited in Europe even as it was already waning everywhere. By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, historians, including Mabillon, could refer to the recluse as an extinct species.