ACADEMIA Letters
Lay Use of Monastic Clothing
Alkuin Schachenmayr
Lay Use of Monastic Clothing
There is a rich theology of monastic clothing; the “habit” is perhaps the most widely recognized sign of consecrated religious life in the Christian tradition, but its practical uses (or
abuses) have seldom been researched by historians. More than the monastery buildings they
inhabit (which are not always easy to identify), monks and nuns are widely recognized by
their clothing. Among the garments worn in western society today, the religious habit is a
rare holdover from the Middle Ages. Monks wear full-length robes, and many nuns wear
veils, thereby distinguishing them from the vast majority of their lay contemporaries. The
following proposal addresses a particular phenomenon: Laypeople wearing the habit for relatively short periods of time. What are the educational, professional, and religious settings in
which laity are permitted to wear the monastic habit? Instances of laypeople “crossing” over
into appearing as monastics are common in medieval times, in the Early Modern Period, and
even into the twentieth century.
The habit provided a range of possibilities for laity: wearing the habit helped them to
participate in a life of ascetic spirituality in a vicarious way, permitting both mystic aspirations
or even penitential exercises. The habit also served to mark the members of a group, made
supervision over them easier, or dispensed them from behavior expected of others. The habit
has even been fetishized as a sort of talisman to effect cures for the living and help the dead
as they confront Christian notions of divine judgment.
Academia Letters, March 2021
©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0
Corresponding Author: Alkuin Schachenmayr, nota@schachenmayr.net
Citation: Schachenmayr, A. (2021). Lay Use of Monastic Clothing. Academia Letters, Article 840.
https://doi.org/10.20935/AL840.
1
Children
Minors were present in most Christian monasteries throughout the Middle Ages because of
schooling. Cistercians and Franciscans made official statements about not giving them the
habit, optimal evidence for a practice widespread at the time. Since schooling and liturgy were
closely aligned, choir boys wore their quasi-monastic habit during musical work, studies, and
leisure. Girls living in nunneries received garments similar to those of the nuns. The trend
continued from the Middle Ages into the twentieth century. Napoleon, for instance, wrote
in a 1804 letter that the Sisters of Mercy in the Rue de la Chaise must be closely monitored
to make sure they do not clothe their pupils in religious habits. Presumably he was worried
that the clothing would encourage some girls to enter the religious order that ran the school.
Today, adults continue to delight in seeing children dressed as monks and nuns in the context
of church festivities and pageants.
Pious Associations
Confraternities, comparable to pious clubs in medieval and post-medieval Christendom, relied
heavily on monastic clothing. They clothed themselves in processions and during retreat-like
gatherings; they clothed statues as part of their prayer life. One of the most popular devotions
that combined confraternity life with the habit was the devotion to the Brown Scapular in the
Carmelite tradition. The Virgin Mary is believed to have given the brown Carmelite scapular
to St. Simon Stock in 1251, a not unusual spiritualization of the monastic habit common
in other orders, as well. The brown version was, however, particularly attractive: Following
centuries witnessed monks and nuns wearing a wool, full-length scapular, but an abbreviated
version was made available for those unable or unwilling to enter a monastery. Laity often
sought membership in confraternities in order to gain permission to wear the habits of the
monks who supervised their religious activities – for a limited period of time. The abbreviated
version allowed members of the scapular confraternities to wear it all the time. They were
given two pieces of wool the size of a large postage stamp and affixed to strings in order to
hang on the wearer’s chest and back. This abbreviated garment offered the spiritual power
of the full garment. There are even examples of monks and nuns outside of the Carmelite
Order wearing the brown scapular underneath their own scapulars as an additional source of
blessings and protection, seeing no redundancy in the fact that they already had (other types
of) habits.
Academia Letters, March 2021
©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0
Corresponding Author: Alkuin Schachenmayr, nota@schachenmayr.net
Citation: Schachenmayr, A. (2021). Lay Use of Monastic Clothing. Academia Letters, Article 840.
https://doi.org/10.20935/AL840.
2
Pilgrims
A pilgrimage habit was worn by many during religiously motivated journeys. They were more
or less similar to the habits worn by penitent monks and denoted that the pilgrim belonged, for
a time, to a particular group within the church. The Franciscan habit was particularly popular
among pilgrims to Jerusalem, since the Franciscans served as custodians of many sanctuaries
there. The pilgrims’ habit protected them from the perils of travel and gave them a group
identity.
The crusade badge is a sign of pilgrimage comparable to the Brown Scapular in its function
as an abbreviation, but in this case bordering on military insignia. Men who embarked on a
crusade often affixed this accessory to their outer garments in order to identify themselves.
Some orders even made it part of their habit, like the Knights of Calatrava, a military order
whose habit featured the cross on the Cistercian cowl.
Hermits
Hermits are an irregular category because they were usually solitaries and had few longstanding institutional affiliations. Some hermits were on their own, but others were hired
to serve as showpieces, especially in the modern era. The garden hermit was common in aristocratic gardens, and some employers stipulated that he wear ragged clothing and a long beard.
Some were saintly, others may have been mercenaries; it is difficult to tell the difference. In
any case the hermits used quasi-religious habits to help demonstrate that they were fulfilling
religious duties; their behavior suggests that gardens were often sites of performance.
Health Care
Religiously inspired health workers could attain a habit from monastic superiors as signifiers
of the religious ideals they sought to personify, yet without being professed members of a
monastery. One Cistercian example is Yvette of Huy (1158–1228), who was called a nurse,
recluse, and Cistercian all at the same time. For her, receiving the habit from the Cistercians
was a visible sign, something she could not simply decide to put on by herself. It needed
to be given her by a religious authority like an abbot, though she did not enjoy the rights
and privileges of a solemnly professed religious. This trend continued into the nineteenth
century, when vowed nuns served as nurses as part of their vocation to serve the poor and sick.
Their religious clothing became so closely associated with their work that early “professional”
Academia Letters, March 2021
©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0
Corresponding Author: Alkuin Schachenmayr, nota@schachenmayr.net
Citation: Schachenmayr, A. (2021). Lay Use of Monastic Clothing. Academia Letters, Article 840.
https://doi.org/10.20935/AL840.
3
nursing adopted many of the exterior signs from the nuns’ clothing. Modern laywomen used
them as uniforms while working in hospitals.
The monastic habit has at times been believed to have healing function. Benedictine nuns
in Salzburg allowed parents to bring sick children to venerate the relics of their foundress St.
Erentrude († 718); after clothing their offspring in a habit purported to have belonged to the
saint, some children were healed. A votive painting from around 1700 documents as much
and portrays a child in the full nun’s habit, including the veil. In other regions, veneration of
St. Francis of Assisi († 1226) was strong; devotees venerated the habit he wore. Generations
later, Pope John XXII granted indulgences for people who kissed the habits of the mendicants
they saw in public.
Corpses
The vast majority of laypeople who wore a habit without taking vows were dead when they
wore it. In a pious practice that again spans epochs, dead bodies were washed and then dressed
for burial in a habit. In many strata of society, men and women could become monks or nuns
at the hour of their death. Bernard of Clairvaux (ca. 1090–1153), for instance, often dwelt on
the salvation assured to all who died wearing a Cistercian habit, causing many hagiographical
portrayals of good results on the Day of Judgment. The only question was: How long need
one wear it before dying?
Others saw the corpse’s dress as the fulfillment of a life-long wish to enter an order, which
had not been possible in life. The habit on the dead body can also be evidence of the high
esteem in which the deceased held the order. If a pilgrimage site was administered by a
monastic order (e.g. Franciscans), the corpse could be brought into close spiritual connection
to the holy site by dressing it in the habit of the monks working and praying there; Cardinal
Wartenberg (himself no monk) had arranged for this sort of Franciscan burial in the Marian
pilgrimage site of Altötting before he died in 1661.
Illicit use of the habit
All of the above examples are legitimate, but each case opens the danger of habits worn for
inappropriate reasons or in a manner that is illicit in some regard. Who gives whom the right
to wear a habit? The question of impersonation or assumed identity needs to be confronted,
and critics at all times will have suspected laity in the habit of being posers. Doubt was often in
order: Runaways using pilgrims’ habits were a common trope in medieval narratives. Deeper
Academia Letters, March 2021
©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0
Corresponding Author: Alkuin Schachenmayr, nota@schachenmayr.net
Citation: Schachenmayr, A. (2021). Lay Use of Monastic Clothing. Academia Letters, Article 840.
https://doi.org/10.20935/AL840.
4
analysis of such questions will help to understand monastic clothing as a form of identification,
effective without recourse to the written identity passes (the celebret), which came later.
Conclusion
Studying lay use of monastic garb helps to understand the associations people made with the
garments over the course of the centuries. The evidence suggests that moving in and out of
monastic identities may have been licit and more frequent in some periods than in others.
Furthermore, the archival evidence and literary portrayals of the phenomenon lead us more
deeply into popular piety and the religious affect experienced by laity who existed close to
the borders of vowed religious life. In some cases, the habit is seen as a latter-day connection
to a particular saint like Francis or Teresa of Avila; studying lay use of this clothing could
therefore be an enrichment of hagiographical studies and lead to a better understanding of the
reception of major monastic figures in western history.
References
Herbert Grundmann, Religious Movements in the Middle Ages (South Bend 1996), chapter
5.
Daniel Hanna, The Poetic Habit: Verse and Vestment in Spanish and French Carmel. Early
Modern Women 9.2 (2015) 39–70.
Michel Pastoureau (ed.), Le Vêtement: histoire, archéologie et symbolique vestimentaires au
Moyen Ages (Cahiers du Léopard d’Or 1, Paris 1989).
Alejandra Concha Sahli, The Meaning of the Habit: Religious Orders, Dress and Identity,
1215–1650 (Dissertation, University College London 2017).
Kirsten Schut, Death and a Clothing Swap: An Unusual Case of Death and Burial in the Religious Habit from Fourteenth-Century Naples. Viator 50.2 (2019) 185–226. 10.1484/J.VIATOR.5.123299.
Academia Letters, March 2021
©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0
Corresponding Author: Alkuin Schachenmayr, nota@schachenmayr.net
Citation: Schachenmayr, A. (2021). Lay Use of Monastic Clothing. Academia Letters, Article 840.
https://doi.org/10.20935/AL840.
5