Gone Medieval - How To Live Like A Monk

Episode Date: November 27, 2021

Monks. We know that they dedicated their lives to serving God, but what did it mean to be a Monk? In today's, episode Matt is joined by the Five-Minute Medievalist, Danièle Cybulskie. Author, historian, and Podcaster (to name a few), Danièle is well known to many Medieval history enthusiasts. We explore the lives of Monks, from mindfulness to identity and purpose. What can we learn from the Monks, to be happier in today's world?If you’re enjoying this podcast and looking for more fascinating Medieval content then subscribe to our Medieval Monday newsletter here.Music by: KatcamusicTitle: Spiritual Lords Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval from History Hit. I'm Matt Lewis. Danielle Sibulski needs no introduction to many of you who are interested in the medieval period. She's an author, a historian, a YouTuber and a podcaster who also goes by the name of the five-minute medievalist. Daniel's newest book is called How to Live Like a Monk and takes a look at how this significant portion of the medieval society organized their lives and spent their time.

So I'm really looking forward to finding out more. And thank you very much for joining us, Danielle. Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here on another medieval podcast. I love it. And it's strange when you host your own to be a guest on another one, isn't it? It's a little nerve-wracking, yeah, but I'm going to do my best. Busman's holiday. So first of all, to start us off with this book, what is a monk? How did they fit into the structure of the clergy? and what was the purpose of being a monk? Okay, so these are all big questions.

So I'm going to do my best here. So a monk is a member of the clergy, the clergy being pretty much anyone that's associated with the church. So we're talking about clerks, we're talking about priests, bishops, monks and friars. So monks are the ones that have agreed to live a cloistered life. So the main difference between monks and everybody else is they are living in a monastery. And I use monks in this book for shorthand because monks and nuns would be a very long title. but let's remember that nuns are part of this as well.

So they're the ones that have taken vows to live in a cloistered environment, and they've taken vows that usually involve poverty, chastity, and obedience. But there's a difference between monks and friars, and I think they get kind of conflated a lot of the time. Friars are people that have taken these vows, usually poverty, chastity, and obedience, but they live out in the world. So someone who's wandering around a Franciscan, a Dominican, an Augustinian, and these are friars. They sometimes live in a monastery, but they don't necessarily have to,

whereas monks are mostly Benedictine's Sistercians, Cluniacs, and they are the ones that are meant to live within the walls of a cloister. So that's the main difference. There are all sorts of shades of being as a monk, but that's the main difference. And their purpose in life is to serve God as best they can. So they do that by mostly praying, but also doing work, like work that will support the monastery itself, work that will support the community outside of the walls, whether that's working in a hospital, whether that's writing things, writing chronicles, for example, or copying books, or just ministering as best they can. But most of the time, the way that they're serving God best is by praying in a monastery. So I think we're guilty sometimes, aren't we

are thinking monks, priests, bishops, all of these kind of thing, they're pretty much the same thing, but they actually lived quite different lives and lived their lives in very different ways that we don't normally take account of sometimes. We blur the lines sometimes and use the words interchangeably when we shouldn't. Yeah, yeah. It's not always necessary to have strict divisions when you're talking about because people like monks and friars, they do have a lot of the same vows. But when we're trying to define what is a monk for a book that's about monks and nuns, the main differences that they are cloistered. And was the life of a monk something that would appeal to a medieval person, were people keen to make the choice to go into,

to that cloistered life? Did it have something about it that appealed? Or was it ever sort of not a choice? Was it something you had to do? Well, it was meant to be a choice. And in fact, this was something that theologians argued about quite a lot because, especially in the earlier part of the Middle Ages, you could give a child to the monastery. These are obelates. I'm never sure if I'm saying it's obelates or obelates, but these are the children that are given to the monastery to be raised. And actually, this was a point of contention for a couple of reasons. Boys can be very noisy and difficult to control. They're not necessarily the best contributors to a monastic lifestyle that's supposed to be about serenity and contemplation. And then the other part of that is that if they've been given to the church

into a monastery, they haven't had the choice. They haven't made the choice to live as a monk. They kind of are there by default. And so the fourth ladder in council, I think in 1215 that the pope says, you can't do this anymore. Oblation is not going to be something that happens. if you give a child to a monastery to be educated, then they still have to make the choice to be a monk later on, and they can leave if they want. So sometimes they didn't have a choice, mostly in the early Middle Ages, but later on they were meant to definitely have a choice because it's a vocation that you are meant to choose so that you can serve God as best you can. It was appealing to people for a whole bunch of reasons. I mean, at a very basic level, if you were impoverished, you could go to a monastery and you could get your meals every day. You could get clothing. You could have a place to stay. You could have a community. So I'm sure there were people that got in there because it was a good option for them if they had nowhere else to go. So there's that. Then there are people who might join a monastery because it's the place to get educated. They were really the ones who were in charge of education in the middle ages. So if you were a boy and your parents wanted you educated or you wanted to be educated, you could go to the monastery. And if you were a young man, you wanted to continue your education, you're educated. You

you could do it there. You could perpetually just do lifelong learning at the monastery because they had the books and they encouraged a lot of reading and study. So that would be something that was appealing as well. And these are very practical considerations. But the real reason that most people joined a monastery was because they were devout. They wanted to actually serve God with their lives. So while there are practical reasons, I think we should take them into account.

Most of the people that joined a monastery, especially voluntarily, or they did it later in life, They did it because they wanted to serve God. That was the purpose of their lives that they chose. And I think, again, we can sometimes in our more secular world forget the compulsion to live your life in a way that would get you to heaven. You know, this time on earth was incredibly brief and fleeting. And they were really concerned about what happened after that in a way that perhaps a lot of people aren't so much today. So we might think it's odd to sort of spend your entire life praying and hoping that something else nicer will come along afterwards. but that was a really serious, deeply felt and believed conviction that they held at the time.

Yeah, yeah. And when I took on this book, so this book was pitched to me by the publisher, Abbeville Press. And I really went back and forth with them quite a lot, trying to establish the fact that the book I wanted to write was to really be respectful to their faith. So even if I'm writing it from a secular perspective, I really wanted to make sure that as I went through the book, which has a lot of stuff about self-help, it's a crossover between history and positive psychos. and self-help, that we really kept the focus on the fact that whether we believe or not, the people who are living a monastic lifestyle in the Middle Ages, as the people who are living a monastic lifestyle today are doing it for devotional reasons, and we shouldn't discount that. It's a very important part of their lives, and we should never forget that when we're

considering monks. So there are practical and spiritual reasons to become a monk and things that you gain from that experience. Were there things that you lost from that? What did you have to give up to become a monk? Well, the biggest thing was you had to be chased. And this is something that both monks and nuns struggled with. So there's always people who are getting in trouble for not being chased.

So giving up your sexuality is something that you have to do if you're going to become a monk. But you also have to give up your life to obedience. And so this is something that is really at the forefront of the Rules of St. Benedict. And the rules of St. Benedict are a real foundation for Western Monash. lifestyle, especially in the Middle Ages. So in the rules of St. Benedict, he mentions that you need to obey your abbot in all things. So you basically are giving up yourself, you're giving up your free will. Whatever the abbot tells you to do, you must do. And so that can be difficult. It was difficult for people then, and I think a lot of people now would find that very difficult as well. So it was a

struggle that people had. And they had to do things like getting up in the middle of the night or eating the same food over and over and over again. So these were things that were challenges. You gave up a lot of the free will that you had as a purposeful act of serving God. So it's not something that was an easy life and that was deliberate. It was meant to be a difficult life because that was the way to serve God best. So these are like the major athletes of the spiritual world. They are the ones that are doing the hard work for everybody else. They're praying for everybody else to help everyone get into heaven as well as themselves. So it's a difficult life, but that was on purpose. What would a monk's daily life have looked like? I guess I fluctuated my

head between thinking it was this rigidly structured and incredibly monotonous thing that follows the hours of the day, for example. But does it also change with the seasons? So the farming seasons, they worked quite often in the fields or they were affected by longer days of light if they're working or writing or anything like that. Was it kind of monotonous or did it change or is it a bit of both? It's both. It's both. It's monotonous. So you do have to follow the canonical hours. So at certain hours during the day, you must stop what you're doing and you must pray. This is non-negotiable. Everybody has to do this. Well, there are some exceptions depending on whether you are a brother that maybe was taking care of visitors, for example. You might be excused from a mass. But everybody else

has to go and pray at these certain times. But as you say, they did have a huge involvement. in creating their own food, for example, or working. So those tasks would change over the course of the year. So sometimes you'd be planting, sometimes you'd be harvesting. Sometimes you would be chopping firewood or bringing firewood to the monastery. So these things changed over the course of the seasons. And they also changed a little bit over the course of the Christian religious year. So there is more of a focus on reading during Lent, for example.

So I think that would probably be my favorite time of the liturgical year where you get to spend a bit more time reading at Lent. and everybody would be given a library book, which they were supposed to take care of in return. So there were things that did change over the course of the year, but it was a very monotonous life. And again, this was on purpose. This was to make sure that no prayers were missed and that nobody was living such a free life that they would get distracted from their duties. So it is both monotonous and it did change seasonally. As long as no one was happy, it was okay.

Yeah, yeah. Well, we know that monks did a whole bunch of things to get around rules. I mean, St. Benedict says, like, no frivolity. So one of the things I think is funny, and I put in the book, was that when the bells ring for the canonical hours, you're supposed to drop what you're doing and you're supposed to go and go to the church and you're supposed to pray. But St. Benedict specifically says, you should do this in a way that does not spark frivolity. So, like, no racing your brothers to church and seeing, like, who could get there faster while still looking like they're not rushing. Like, you're not allowed to do that stuff. So St. Benedict, he tries to really tamp down on fun in lots of ways.

And to me, I think when you're looking at historical records like this, so many of us historians will look at law codes, for example, or guidelines, and realize that these are in place in part because people are being too silly in the monastery. And they were doing things like sneaking in pets or, you know, spending money they weren't supposed to. So they weren't always as serious as they were supposed to be, but they were supposed to be quite serious all the time. And I think if there's elements of the monk's life that we can't identify with that we struggle to get to grips with or relate to, those elements are being naughty and being told off for breaking the rules and finding ways to be naughty within the rules is probably something that most of us can still identify with today. Oh, absolutely.

Absolutely. So these are human beings and they're asked to do things that are very difficult. I mean, you have to get up in the middle of the night to pray, for example. That would be very difficult for me. And it was very difficult for lots of monks. So they're getting in trouble for oversleeping. And if they oversleep and they show up late, they're supposed to basically just stand there in the corner

and be visible for everybody. So they're breaking rules all the time because it is hard. It is challenging. And I think that the more we try to see a human face to these monks, the more we realize that the thing that they're asking of themselves, this lifestyle is very difficult. And so, like, we don't have to pick up those things

as ways to live like a monk. Like you don't have to wake up at midnight and pray if you don't want to. That's not what's in this book. But we do need to recognize that. It was a difficult life for them. And they had the same human failings that we do, especially when it comes to meeting these challenges. And writing has always been a central part to what some monks at least did.

So did you feel any kind of symmetry with that as you were writing this? Or did you feel this was a very different kind of thing that you were doing for a very different purpose? Well, we had different purposes for sure in that I come at it from a secular point of view, and they're obviously coming at it from a point of view of faith, like great amounts of faith and everything they are doing is related back to that. But we are doing the same thing, monks and me, in that we are trying to share the things that we have learned with a future audience or a greater audience so that they can learn from this and maybe live in a better way, or live in a way that is more satisfying to them.

A monk might be writing something in the hopes that the people who are reading that are going to become more spiritual or going to have a firmer footing on the path to salvation. And my hope is that people will read my book and find little ways that we can really relate to monks. And these are ways that maybe we can change our lives in small ways to make our lives healthier or make ourselves happier. So we have two distinct purposes, but we are trying to share knowledge with people in order to help them out. So yeah, you have monks that are not only recording things that have been written before, so they'll be making copies of books that exist and hoping that more people will read these books, but they'll also be doing things like chronicling as a way to reach out to the community, not only in their day, but in posterity for posterity as well.

So they are showing you what happened in their lives, and then they will put an overlay of faith on top of that and say, you can see how God works through these actions that happen. in our lives. So yeah, we have totally different purposes, but we are both trying to do good in the world, I think, by the way that we are writing and copying. Yeah, I think any medieval historian has to be grateful for all those monk chroniclers who were recording all of this information for us, whilst also reading it, understanding that in their heads everything had to have this moral tale to it, had to be a demonstration of God at work, either God is

unhappy, so this has happened or God is now appeased, so everything's gone back to being great. But that seems to, you know, the amount of times a freak weather event accompanies something terrible that happens in the year and all that kind of thing. There is always a moral tale to it. But without them, we wouldn't know so much of what went on. Yeah, exactly. And you can read between the lines. So you do have an example from Bury St. Edmonds. There is an example I put in the book where Jocelyn of Brackel and says there was a fire at Bury St. Edmonds and it really damaged the shrine.

And the abbot says it's because we all complained too much about the food. But I think it was God's way of making the shrine more visible or putting in Edelman. different spot. So it does have moral overtones to these stories. And it's funny how they actually diverge, right? So the abbot has a different spin on what God's thinking. Sounds a bit more like a parent's view as well, doesn't it? You know, there's a moral tale in here to make you behave. That's right. Yeah. God's not happy that you're all complaining to me. So shut up and get him with your job and God will be happy. Yeah, exactly. And it's funny that, you know, you have Jocelyn sort of on the slice saying, I don't think that's what's going on. And this book, you mentioned,

a little bit earlier, does have an element of a kind of self-help guide looking at things that I think we might call mindfulness. Do you think that's a reasonable assessment of the way the book addresses being a monk? Yes. So again, we have different purposes to our writing, but it is very much a book that's meant to teach us how to live like monks. So what can we learn from monastic lifestyle? I'm not trying to convince anyone to be a monk. I wouldn't be the best person for that job. But it does talk about small ways that we can make ourselves. healthy. And one of those ways is to be mindful of what we are doing. So there's mindfulness is something that is thrown around a lot these days, but it's basically just being aware of what you're doing. So whether that's,

you're being aware of the food you're putting in your mouth, you're being aware of how much exercise that you're getting, you're being aware of the thoughts and the information that you're taking in every day, just being aware of these things. So a monk being mindful is one that is thinking of every situation and how this is tied back to God. So we are looking at the food on the table and we're thinking about how God has provided this for us. Isn't it amazing how he's made these plants and animals? So mindfulness for a monk is always coming back to God and his place in the world and his place in their own lives. Mindfulness today in a secular way of thinking is just thinking about being aware of this present moment because we're usually so distracted, right? There's always

notifications or things going on in the background. So it's a way of reconnecting to who you are at this moment, what's your experiencing at this moment and kind of quieting everything down and really helping you to focus on the things that are important to you. So we have a different purpose to mindfulness, but it is one of the ways that I think we should emulate monks is to be mindful of everything that we are taking in or experiencing through the day. And it was striking how much of a monk's daily routine did focus on what we would call mindfulness. So even that's stopping for the canonical hours, you have to stop, stop everything that you're doing and be mindful of what time of day it is, what prayers you should be saying at that point, your

relationship with God at that moment. As you say, you sit down for food, maybe you say grace before a meal, it makes you mindful of the fact that you're about to eat this food that has come from somewhere, someone's provided it for you, you're sitting now, having a meal and doing all of this. It's almost like they punctuated the day with deliberate stops to take stock of what they were doing and why they were doing it, which is what we've lost and what I think mindfulness tries to encourage us to recover. Yeah, that's exactly right. That's exactly right because everything that monks did was ritualized in order to bring

their thoughts back to what they're doing. So every time they get up in the morning, they're supposed to cross themselves three times, you know, and then they get dressed, they're supposed to cross themselves three times. Or they go into the church, they see a crucifix, they genuflect, all of these things. It's constant touchstones, as you say, throughout the day to remind them why they're there, and what they're doing. And so people have tried to bring this back. I do mention this in the book. Gratitude is something that monks are practicing all the time. Like we are thankful for the food and we are thankful we are here that we can say these prayers. Gratitude is something that's actually really

healthy for us today. And I mentioned some studies about this in the book, but the more we are thankful, the more we are happy. And so some of the ways that people try and bring that mindfulness back to our secular lives now is by finding little ways to remind ourselves. Some people put little rocks in their pocket and every time they reach into their pocket, they'll be reminded, this is a moment I should take for gratitude. And so monks have built this into their days. And if we want to be healthy or we want to be more mindful, it's useful to find ways to remind ourselves of these things over the course of the day, whether that's every day I'm going to write three things I'm grateful for in the morning or every evening I'm going to do this or I'm

going to put a rock at my pocket, all of these things to center us back to who we are as people, what's important to us as people, whether that's our faith, whether that's, you know, personal goals. We want to have more success in a career. We want to have more success as a family person. All of these things are goals that we have, values that we have. And if we have little touchstones throughout our lives, that's something we can learn from monks that might help keep us centered and might help keep us more successful and happier too. Hi, I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb. And in my podcast, not just the Tudors, we talk about everything, from sex to spying, wardrobes to witch trials. Not in other words, just the Tudors,

but most definitely also the Tudors. Subscribe from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. And I think one of the key features of being a monk is this idea that you lose yourself. You don't have this focus on your own identity and that's perhaps something that we struggle with today and that can be bad for our mental health, the amount of time we spend on social media, worrying about what we think of ourselves, what people think of us, how we see ourselves. Do you think that contributes to our struggles and that perhaps we can learn something from monks in that sense of not being so concerned with the self? Well, this is a question that I was really glad you sent to me beforehand because I really

thought about this one quite a lot. So yes, if you are an actual monk, you're meant to suppress yourself in a lot of ways, give up yourself and really just become a vehicle. So this is the reason that we have a lot of anonymous chronicles. The self is not important enough for you to sign your name to your work. You're supposed to just be a vehicle for God. And we today are very concerned with our individuality and trying to figure out who we are as people. At the same time, we're not spending a lot of time actually doing that figuring out. We know that we want to be individuals. We know that we have some goals, perhaps, that we want to reach. But we're not spending that time in contemplation and actually thinking that through. What is important to me?

What do I want? So I think that in our search for our individuality, what perhaps a lot of us are missing is purpose. And that doesn't mean that we are aimless necessarily. It means we haven't taken the time to figure out what our purpose is. What are we living for? What is important to us? What do we want to achieve over the course of this life, which is very short. And that's one thing that monks had already figured out.

If you are in the monastery, you know what your purpose is. Your purpose is salvation. and you're trying to get there as best you can through, you know, all sorts of ways, whether that's service, whether that's prayer, all of these things. And for us today, I think we struggle with ourselves and perhaps we're not sure what our purpose is. And so I think it's worth taking the time to sit down with yourself in the quiet and just figure out what's important to me, what do I want from this life. And that might actually help us feel a bit more solid, a bit more secure, but happier.

And maybe that's something we can learn from monks. And how would a monk's daily life have differed from ours? Was it radically different? Would we recognize any elements of it? Were there things that might be familiar to us? Or was it a completely alien world? Well, as humans can never be completely alien because we need all the same things. We need community.

We need to eat. We need some time outside. So it is very alien to us in that most of us wouldn't choose to live such a strict life. So it's very institutionalized in ways that we don't usually experience unless we are in school or we're maybe in jail. We do have institutionalized ways of being in our work. Like we show up at a certain time and we are expected to eat at a certain time or whatever. But in terms of every part of the day having a function, we're not really that strict in our life. So that's something that's not really recognizable to us.

I think we're not really comfortable to us, definitely. But we do see, again, that human element. So we see times where monks are begrudgingly allowed to speak, even though they've taken a vow of silence. There's like a part during the day where you're allowed to speak, but you should be speaking about religious stuff, but you can also speak. Or there are things like St. Benedict begrudges the fact that everyone should have a bath every once in a while. It's important, but not too many. And then you should have your bloodlet so that you're healthier. and when you have your bloodlet, you should have a little bit of time to talk with your friends

and just kind of take the day off so that you can come back and have a more productive life as a monk. So taking time off is important too. So we do recognize these human things. There's certain things that monks experience that we experience. So again, wanting to go outside, wanting to eat, wanting to have a bit of time off to talk with your friends. All of these things we recognize. But I think most of us don't want to live such a rigid, structured life as they did. I'm struck by the idea there that there was a recognition of the need for, it wasn't quite a work-life balance, I guess,

but there's an element of that in that, you know, if you have to have your blood let or whatever else goes on, take the day off, take some time because you'll recover and you'll come back, more ready to do work and do better work because you've had that time off. So we struggle with a work-life balance today, and it sounds like monks had an idea of how to address that at least. Yes, and so you mentioned mental health earlier, and monks recognize that this life is so difficult that sometimes, you would get depressed and they had a specific name for this depression that comes from being a mug and they called it acidi and that if a mug experienced this they were meant to take some time off to go sit in the infirmary spend some time with friends and just chill out a little bit so that they can come back to it because they knew that if you went flat out doing your best to be a mug

like overachieving you were going to burn out and this could cause all sorts of problems so there's examples that I do have in the book where monks, they burn themselves out and they were advised not to do this, but they did it anyway, and they might have health problems or they might attempt suicide. So they recognize the fact that you can't go full out as a monk. It's just not possible. And sometimes there are some examples I have in the book too where even St. Benedict says, as monks, we're not really supposed to be drinking wine or beer, but since I can't convince anyone of that these days, we'll fine, have it, just have it in moderation. You know, so there's There's always a recognition of human frailty in this, that they recognize that this is difficult, you're going to struggle, and that's okay.

You can tell someone, you should tell someone, and then we will help you to get through this so that you can achieve your goal to be the best monk you possibly can be. And that's to recognize the fact that it is hard and you are going to struggle. I think that might be a surprise to a lot of people. It probably is to me because you tend to think of monks living this slavishly devoted life and, you know, being whipped and whatever. ever when they misbehaved and everything was about a punishment for the slightest sign of frailty. But it sounds like frailty, bit of mindfulness, some care for your mental health and your physical well-being was actually built into the routine of being a monk. There was a recognition that they were just human. And even the punishments that you say there were punishments.

That is true. But there were recognitions to like if you screwed up, you should just confess. And if you are the one to confess, you're going to have a more lenient punishment. If you try to hide it and someone else outs you at chapter, then you're going to be in more trouble. So again, the recognition, you're going to screw up. And if you do that, try to make reparation as best you can and then just try again tomorrow. But there's all sorts of little sort of clauses in monastic text that say something like if you can't do that, try doing this. And even St. Benedict says everyone each according to their ability. So you shouldn't be given something that's too hard for you. And that's because they don't want people quitting. It is a very important vocation

to them all. And they want to support each other. That's why they built a monastery in the first place instead of everyone just being a hermit out in the wilderness. They wanted to do this together so that they can help each other. So yeah, there is a certain amount of leniency. And also the fact that we know from, you know, admonitions that they're getting from the Pope or from heads of orders saying stop bringing pets into the monastery. We know that people are They're not always following the rules. And sometimes their habits are turning a blind eye to that. So there is a lot of flexibility and change in how people are being monks.

It's meant to be very strict. But then people are trying to make it a way of life that they can live with that's going to be something that's tolerable, even within the rules, as much as possible. And it sounds like pets are probably one of the oldest human frailties, aren't they? I was just thinking then that sounds like the medieval equivalent of spending all your time at work watching cat memes. on the internet. We can't help it. We can't help it. Well, there's a whole poem about a monk and his white cat. I think it's an Irish poem and it's even been turned into a kid's book. And even that was an example and an excuse for contemplation. Like the cat does his work and I do my work and we both are serving God in our own ways. So yeah, pets are something that we're not supposed to

be there, but we're there anyway. And that speaks to the fact that you do need to be flexible in some ways and pick your battles, I think, as an abbot so that everyone can be successful overall in the end. I get more and more convinced that being an abbot was just like being a parent. I think so. Well, they call him father, right? Yeah, that's true, actually. Yeah, yeah, very good point.

Was there anything in particular that you felt like you would take away from writing this book and maybe implement in your own daily life? Well, this book is very personal in ways that I maybe didn't expect as I was writing it. but this book has a lot of the wisdom that I've learned over the years. So I do like to read books about psychology and sociology and like to learn about the human element. People have listened to my podcast or paid attention to my work before. They hear me always talking about humanity in the human element. So this is something that interests me in general.

And so I've brought that psychology and ideas of wellness and studies that we've done since then into this book. So many of the things that I talk about in terms of ways that we can live healthier, are things that I do practice myself. So I mean, I'm not great at eating healthfully because I just don't enjoy cooking. But I do live my life in a relatively minimalist way. So I don't collect a lot of possessions, which is kind of monastic in some ways. And I do practice meditation and things like that. So it reminded me of a lot of the things that I have learned are valuable from doing research in my spare time, like what spare time when I'm reading things that are not history? I might be reading about ways to be happier.

And so if you look at the bibliography of the book, you'll see lots of things in there about the psychology of wellness, the psychology of happiness. And so all of these things are things that I've learned over time. So it is a very personal book in that you do have a lot of my practices in it. So I guess it's kind of validating in that way where it's like, oh, these are actually good ways to live. But these are things that, you know, I've learned over time and have been borne out by psychologists, which I think is super interesting.

Were you surprised by how modern sounding some of those approaches were, given that we think of monks living this primitive life back in the dark ages. I shouldn't say dark ages, should I, but I'm going to say dark ages. It seems to me surprising how much of what they did and what they thought about and how they behaved are things that we are just realizing now are actually good things. We need to work on our work life balance. We need to work on our mental health and our mindfulness and all of those kinds of things. And monks seemed to have some of that down.

I mean, it was at the expense of some of their freedoms and their ability to be themselves and be an individual. But do we need to maybe find a balance between those things? We surprised how close to the concerns that we have today they lived or how well they had dealt with some of those things that we struggle with today. Well, I'm always interested in the ways that we are similar to people from the past. So it's always nice and surprising and also not surprising when you see that we are so similar, right? people haven't changed all that much over hundreds of years. But I think that what maybe gets in our way of continuing to practice this wisdom, right? Like I look at Christian monks in Western Europe and Middle Ages, but these are practices that are part of Buddhism or, you know,

they're part of Tibetan monasticism or they're part of people's practices who are Stoics, perhaps. And I think that what perhaps gets in our way of bringing these things together is the idea that we think that they're separate. Like we talk about them in terms of separation. Like these are Christian monks and therefore what they're doing is irrelevant to us. And I think when we put up those walls, it's harder to see how we have this common ground of the things that we need, a community, time outside, good food, all of these things. And I think when we think of it as being a separate entity that maybe has the rules,

and we only look at the rules, then maybe we miss out on the fact that there is common humanity and things that we need as people, because the things that we need as people are very consistent over time throughout history. So I think that hopefully this book bridges that gap by just explaining how they have these rules in place. They are informed by their culture. They're informed by their religious goals. But there are also things that are common to us as human beings.

Hopefully I've been able to bridge that gap. And I think that the more we kind of zoom out of culture, well, recognizing the importance of culture, the more we zoom out from culture, the more we zoom out from culture, the more we can see commonalities, and then maybe bring those commonalities to the way we look at culture kind of zooming back in. So I don't know if that answers your question, but that's how I think about it anyway. It's a good answer, though, and lots to think about. And so when and where can people get their hands on this book? So this book comes out, and I'm pretty sure it's worldwide on November 23rd.

It was supposed to come out in October, but it was sitting on a boat for a couple months, as so many things were. So it is late, but it is coming to you. So November 23rd, you should be able to get this in hardcover and e-book. And you should be able to get Waterstones, Farms and Nobles, Indigo and Canada, of course, Amazon. And then I'm also actively recording an audiobook version of this, and I will let people know when that comes out. So November 23rd is the day. I'm super excited about it. And then I will let people know when the audiobook version is ready.

And hopefully that will be ready before Christmas. And where else can people find you if they want to catch up with the video? what you're doing. I'm doing stuff everywhere all the time. So a central place is my website, which is daniel sabolsky.com. But you can also find me all over different social media at five M-mini-N medievalist, which is five-minute medievalist, which is how I started this whole crazy career. So you can find me across social media there. And you can listen to the podcast, my podcast. I was thinking the other day, Matt, that it's great. We're not radio, so we're not in direct competition. They can listen to you. They can listen to me. My podcast is just,

the medieval podcast. Absolutely. And everyone should listen to as much medieval goodness as they can do so. Oh, for sure. No problem here with you plugging your podcast. It's a team effort, I think it's a team effort. Absolutely. Thank you so much for joining us today, Danielle. It's been really fascinating, I think, to explore an area of medieval life that we perhaps

haven't fully understood all of the aspects of and to consider what we might be able to learn from that particular life for our modern day world. You can join Cat Jarman on Tuesday for another brand new episode of Gone Medieval and don't forget to tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval. While you're here, there's an episode of the ancients also from History Hit, which I thought you might enjoy. The rise of the Praetorian Guard is Tristan's Chat with Lindsay Powell, in which they look at this most iconic of ancient bodyguards.

Anyway, I'd better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval with history hits.