monastic girl autumn
retvrning to merrie england
You might have seen the Christian Girl Autumn trend –floppy felt hats, blanket scarves, skinny jeans, riding boots, and pumpkin spice lattes. I joke on Twitter that I am having another kind of Christian Girl Autumn – heavily medieval monasticism inflected. The light in the scriptorium is fading faster now. It is cold at Mattins. Wear your funeral cloak like a character in a PD James novel. Celebrate Michaelmas and All Souls with folk tradition. I’m not the only one leaning into a medieval Christian Girl Autumn. The monkcore aesthetic on tumblr,
on on Instagram and Substack, and a nebulous Twitter culture are all attempting, in various ways, to place themselves in the aesthetics and practice of pre-Reformation England. Grimdark medieval is out. Merrie England is back.
“Why am I inexplicably drawn to having a ‘Christian Girl Autumn?’” the posts ask. “I want what they had” over a manuscript illustration of beguines, medieval vowed religious lay women. “Hysterical girls who can’t function in society love to fantasize about running away and becoming a nun.” (
via @simoneweilfooddiary) Why are we so drawn to reenacting the medieval? One idea is that there is something about the vowed stability of monastic life that is appealing when our lives are precarious. I’m closer than most people to actually running off to a monastery – I am applying to seminaries this fall, with a particular eye for places that appreciate spiritual formation through regular collective prayer.On her Substack, Rose Lyddon writes about first person experience as a research methodology. This is the opposite of what we do in academic history, where we decenter ourselves from the very different emotional worlds of medieval people. In the history of emotion, we debate how much of what we feel is universal with different words and how much truly depends on our context. Can the personal experience of praying while tired be a route into the emotional experiences of medieval monastics? Are those experiences replicable, or did they conjure up such separate feelings that it would be a catastrophic misreading to assume ours are similar? We want to take part in the continuity of feeling, to engage in the same practices with the same outcome. The continuity – stability of emotion as well as of life - is important.
Online, monasticism signifies fulfillment as well as stability. An Instagram trend has people filming their daily lives in the style of a Wes Anderson trailer. Embracing the aesthetic of monasticism does something similar, romanticizing the early autumn – a return to study, nostalgia about back to school, or at least the return of darker, more rigorously scheduled days. Think of the ideal of the scriptorium – a place devoted to prayer via study. One tumblr user documents their bread baking. Another jokes about playing Gregorian chant. Another takes up calligraphy.
Hibernis hiberniores ipsis, my friend jokes, an immigrant to Ireland more Irish than the Irish themselves. In the Anglo Catholic arm of the Anglican Church, the line is ‘more catholic than the catholics themselves. Some of the people imagining this life are religious. Some are merely fed up with their current unfulfilling, badly compensated work and wish for more time with friends and loved ones, a way of life more attentive to the earth, and spirituality. But what would this idealized life involve?
Pop culture tends to depict the Middle Ages as dark, stinky, and barbaric. In contrast, this internet subculture focuses on the simplicity, comfort, community and groundedness internet users imagine medieval monastics experienced. This imagined monastic life also – crucially – provides leisure time for creative, material pursuits such as illustration or fiber arts. It is anti-capitalist, decoupling work from the demand for production and focusing on its creative and fulfilling aspects – reading, singing, gardening. This, sometimes accidentally and sometimes intentionally, elides the physical labour of the premodern subsistence farming and system of rents required to support a monastery.
Monastic devotion is attractive because it implies putting off the burden of ourselves and being consumed. In reality, medieval religious life was often deeply, joyfully profane. If you are looking to the Middle Ages for purity, you aren’t going to get it. Current online medievalisms get tied up with discourses of femininity, delicacy, and rawness. Anecdotally, people who enjoy the return-to-monasticism aesthetic tend to be young women. Adjacent are trad e-girls, members of online subcultures who look for purity in eating raw beef, raw milk, and avoiding seed oils such as canola (olive oil gets a pass, though I think olives count as a seed). They half-joke about being alienated from vegetables, even though globally, monastic diets have often been mostly vegetarian.
Some online medieval nostalgia attributes real discontent with the conditions of our lives to a ‘fallen’ society; the medieval becomes a utopian time of faith, beauty, and community. Cradle Catholics jokingly call this drive towards ancientness, intensity, and purity ‘convert syndrome’. We are still ourselves after conversion. Medieval people made cuckolding jokes about St Joseph, and monks drew nuns harvesting dicks from a tree. Were medieval people like us? Are people fundamentally the same across time or too subjective to compare?
I think my sense of closeness with medieval women and the general fascination with monastic alternatives to late capitalist life are intricately connected. We want to feel that we are part of something – two thousand years of Christian history, the medieval intellectual tradition, feminist thought – that matters, and we do that by reenacting it. We know we need other ways of living, and we scour our predecessors for options. And these surface because time in the Church is circular.
We feel it more strongly in the autumn, when some of the great medieval feasts cluster. Holy Cross Day, Michaelmas, and Martinmas carry weights of folk practice and agricultural timing. All Saints and All Souls remember the dead, but more specifically they unite us to them, praying for the souls in purgatory and begging the prayers of the saints for us.
The birth and death of Christ come around every year; at every Mass, we move through time back to the crucifixion or it moves forward to us. Pious people say that everyone who has served at the altar has served together. In historiography, the past is another country. In academic work, we put up careful firewalls to avoid imposing ourselves on the historical other, but online, we call down the cloud of witnesses to kneel with us.