Thursday, March 07, 2024
Monastic Squabbles
Ernst Robert Curtius (1886-1956), European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, tr. Willard E. Trask (1953; rpt. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), p. 124:
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In the squabbles of the twelfth century, breeches played a painful part.38 St. Benedict had declared this article of clothing superfluous and had permitted it only for travel. At Cluny, it appears, this rule was departed from in the second half of the tenth century. As early as the beginning of the eleventh, the fact affords material for monastery jokes. In the twelfth century the matter crops up in the polemic between the Cistercians and the Cluniacs. The latter reproach the former with wearing no breeches in order to be all the readier for lechery—for example, in a versified debate between two carousing monks, who finally come to blows.39Walther = H. Walther, Das Streitgedicht in der lateinischen Literatur des Mittelalters (Munich: Beck, 1920).
38 F. Lecoy in Romania, LXVII (1943), 13 f.
39 Walther, 164.
