Medieval Monks and Friars: Differing Literary Perceptions

Abstract

One of the targets of Terry Jones’s comic-satirical “history” programs for television was the medieval church. There was much fun to be got out of its corruption and hypocrisy and ridiculousness, and also that delightful whiff of scandalous outrage that these things should have gone on and been allowed and, it was hinted, should have been kept from us by stuffy academic historians. It was, with a nod to the popular press and a baseline assumption of the public’s ignorance, a kind of exposé. It was never thus, of course, neither in real-life history nor in “history,” but in satirizing the medieval church, especially the orders of monks and friars, Terry joined a long line of satirists in the estates-satire tradition, John Gower and Geoffrey Chaucer among them. In this essay I want to look again at this tradition, with an eye to another possible view of the story. Maybe medieval monks and friars were not always, or even ordinarily, fat, greedy, lecherous, and hypocritical, or at least did not yield themselves up so readily to ridicule as such. The problem is that, whatever I manage to say, it will not be nearly as much fun as the Terry Jones vision of history, for which, still, we thank him.