Parallel Spheres

Abstract This chapter explores shifting medieval western European understandings of Orthodox monasticism—a sometimes uneasy combination of curiosity, respect, and distrust—against changing events in the wider church. In the eleventh century, Orthodox monks remained an occasional presence in some western monasteries. Latin pilgrims were exposed to Orthodox monasticism on pilgrimages to the Holy Land, and Norman settlement of southern Italy and Sicily, together with Latin rulership in the eastern Mediterranean after the Crusades, intensified this. Indeed, Norman rulers patronized Greek as well as Latin monasteries in their territories, and both contemporary and historic eastern practices inspired the founders of some new western monasteries. By the thirteenth century, however, an increasingly centralized papacy sought submission to its authority: in southern Italy and Cyprus, Greek monasteries yielded to Latin and numbers dwindled. Yet from the fourteenth century onwards, the Orthodox became idealized as the ‘real monasticism’ in western eyes.