By Lorraine Boissoneault

Historian Jamie Kreiner’s new book The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Minds Tell Us About Distraction tells a captivating story about the world of Christian monks living between 300 and 900 CE. Their struggles with distraction in all its forms–family and work, bodily necessities, and even demons–feels both strange and familiar as an inhabitant of the 21st century. Yes, we may spend more time bemoaning our lack of attention due to Twitter, TikTok, and the demands of capitalism, but it’s clear that this concern about distraction is nothing new. And what’s even more obvious, and possibly surprising, is the fact that most of the monks were in a constant battle against distraction. Am I the only one who thought monks were paragons of focus? In an equally wide-ranging talk with Dr. Kreiner, I learned even more about what it’s like to study these monks, and grapple with the mind, memory, and distraction then and now. 

I loved your book. It was so much fun to read. I didn’t know anything about the monks of Late Antiquity and I’m curious how you decided to tackle the subject. 

I taught a class here at the University of Georgia for freshmen that was not about monks specifically, it was about testing out some medieval cognitive techniques so that my students could do better in their classes. College is really new to them and they would come in and say things like, “I don’t know what studying is” or “I can’t remember things for my exam.” 

That’s so funny that the impetus originally came with having students use those techniques. It makes sense; some of them sound extremely useful. Like the one that was a visualization about constructing Noah’s Ark to help them both remember Scripture and meditate on it. 

Yeah, that’s their favorite one. They like that technique the best.

Do you use these techniques yourself? 

I use later medieval mnemonic devices. Sometimes for really silly stuff, like if I’m worried I’m gonna lose a grocery list, but also when I am learning Hebrew or Arabic terms. I have a similar visual mnemonic system to remember what their roots are, because there’s almost no cognates with English. For me, the monastic techniques that I use more often are not the memory based ones, but more the metacognitive stuff where you’re monitoring your own thought patterns. 

What I noticed in teaching students is that it can be really personal. Like, something works super well for one person and then another person’s like, “That one didn’t really resonate but I like this other thing.”

It seems like that in the book too.  You recount all these arguments about which strategies are the best, not only for memory, but for personal hygiene and fasting and everything. Did the monks find consensus on anything or was everything up for debate?

There was consensus on the basics. Values and moral principles, like humility and obedience and self-discipline. When you keep it abstract like that, there’s a lot of consensus. But then if you bore down to the individual ethical acts that model these sorts of virtues, then they’re just constantly arguing. In part because, you know, every life and situation and monastic community and place are different. So, there’s that contextual variation, and also, I think they just appreciated that there couldn’t be a fixed rule because there were always going to be situations in which it didn’t pan out.

Something that you mentioned at different points is how all of these different routines are meant to help them align their body and minds and make them conduits to understand God. Was that understanding in a philosophical sense of, oh, all of these things are connected and created by God, or was it trying to actually be in conversation with God? 

I think it’s both. I mean, for them conversation with God was constant, ideally. Prayer in some way was a conversation with God, but they also had a really different idea of truth and knowledge than a lot of us do now. Like, why are there all these different kinds of shellfish? How do wind patterns work? If you got to the truth about those things, that was also an apprehension of God because figuring something out was a way of accessing this divine logic, like this order that structured all of creation. So, in a way, it’s both a very personal kind of understanding that feels intimate, like this relationship with divinity. And then in another sense it is much more expansive—like an understanding of the cosmos. 

You write about one book, Nature of Things by Hrabanus that was something like 250,000 words. Just thinking about writing a book that long without having Wikipedia or the internet to draw on, I don’t know that I could do it. But also the way he’s bouncing around all of those different ideas is not how I normally think about the work of a monk. 

Yeah. In some ways it’s much more adventurous and wide-ranging, so they’re not really in the cloister at all. They’re roaming around the universe. And also, I think it’s a surprise too because it’s more intellectually capacious than we think. Of course a majority of their reading is focused on Scripture. But it’s not restricted to it because everything was made by God, so in some sense, everything is in play. 

For your own research on this subject, I imagine it required relying a lot on hagiographies. Given that they were specifically written to valorize the different acts of these monks, how do you parse what may be exaggerated versus what was the reality? How do you figure out what was actually going on? 

In part, you just read a lot of hagiography and start to see motifs that recur. Then you start comparing that against other kinds of evidence outside the hagiography, like these handbooks and guidelines and letter collections and things where monks are trying to offer suggestions or even regulate each other. Then it’s like, oh well, there are all of these commands about what you should and shouldn’t be doing and they’re full of examples of distraction.

Hagiography is really an effort to try to advocate different kinds of personal and social norms and new systems of values and behaviors. It has to stick pretty closely to people’s perception of reality because otherwise, they’re gonna be persuaded. 

So there has to be a certain level at which it’s still believable for it to be effective. Like the description of the strategies that different monks used to keep themselves awake, like hanging from loops on the ceiling, or being in these tiny little closets where they can’t lay down. I was like, that’s not sustainable. 

Yeah. And you see some real hand-wringing over this. Do we tell these stories? If we tell them, do we do it with a caveat that people shouldn’t really be doing it themselves? It’s so hard when you’re trying to communicate. I mean, it’s not unlike writing today, right? You both want to give a very clear message where there are takeaways but then you also have to be subtle and allow for the complexity and the ambiguity. Monks were always conflicted about what tone to strike when they were talking to each other about this stuff. 

The world that they lived in feels so different from our world and at the same time, so many of the questions feel so similar. 

I feel the same way. I think that might be my favorite part about studying this period of time.  

The structure of the book also reflects these different but shared realities. The first chapter on the outside world shows the push and pull between needing to support themselves, but also needing to break away from those distractions. And it seems like they had a really outsized role on society at large. Can you talk about why it was that these monastic communities were so important to the people who were outside of them? 

Late Antiquity in general was a really exploratory time when it came to philosophy and religious culture and this isn’t even restricted to Christianity. It’s a lot of experimentation and exploration. So monks have this appeal as these countercultural outsiders who both had an air of spiritual authority to them, but also were accessible enough that people started showing up and saying, “Can you help us out of these, like, very ordinary jams or situations?”

Part of the appeal of monasticism was that they had double identities as both not being of the world, but also knowing it well enough to help people out. They were as unbiased as someone could be and because of their strict spiritual practice and self-discipline, people took them seriously. They were willing to help villagers resolve conflicts or advocate on behalf of them to landlords, or go visit people in prison. 

I think it attests to how adaptable and responsive they were to different social needs and interests. But it led to this frustration. How do you actually concentrate within the world while maintaining as much separation as possible? 

It seems like an impossible line to walk. I need to stay alive to think about God, but there are things I need to do to stay alive that will distract me from thinking about God. 

Yeah, exactly. 

Do you have any favorite anecdotes for many of the monks that you came across in your research? 

The monastic founder Pachomias created this confederation of monasteries in Egypt. He had an extensive hagiographical tradition about him and any time he starts getting in fights with demons, those are always really great stories. 

In one, the demons were like, “Let’s try to make him laugh.” You know, basically break his concentration. So they dress up in costumes. They pretend to be women to be sexy and divert his attention. Then they try all of these other stunts and culminate with basically picking up a rope and pretending that they’re pulling a really heavy rock behind them but there are no rocks. So they’re essentially just, like, miming hard manual labor in front of him. You know, it’s notoriously hard to tell if writers were intending stuff to be funny fourteen, sixteen hundred years ago. But there’s no way that that’s not supposed to be a kind of slapstick humor. I just love that there’s this element of humor there because it’s going to help the story stick. So people are aware that demons can come in all sorts of disguises. 

Including mimes. Yeah, the stories of the demons are pretty entertaining from this perspective. There was one about how you fall asleep when you’re reading because the cold demon is touching your face and making your eyelids fall. 

In a way, it’s like they’re trying to help the monks see that the air is populated with all these sinister figures. I mean, imagine you’re just joining a monastery and you’re pretty committed and serious. I think some of them would have still had a hard time being like, all right, at every turn I’m going to see a potential demon that’s ready to entrap me. So these stories are both really funny and also, they’ve got this pretty dark undertone where nodding off during reading might seem harmless, but it’s really evil. 

I guess that’s true. It is pretty ominous if you think that potentially every bodily response that you have to the world could be the influence of a demon. I would be suspicious of my thoughts then, too.

Yeah, when I first started reading texts like this when I was an undergrad, I remember I was writing some research paper that took more work than I’d realized it would. And I was just trying to stay up to write about these monks and you know, you start judging yourself based on the morality of these 1500 year-old hagiographies. Where it’s like, is falling asleep also really bad now? I had to be like, no, don’t turn into your subjects. This is exactly the time to be sleeping, when you start blending the past and present that badly. 

What do you hope that readers will take away from the book, whether they have a background in this subject area or are completely new to it? 

First of all, I hope that they see something they can connect to in this period that’s not very well-known compared to the Roman Empire. I hope it helps them appreciate that the mind isn’t something that exists in isolation, or that it exists only in relation to our tech. It’s really connected to so many other things in our lives—the people we know, the habits and routines that we have, our bodies. 

I wouldn’t really expect people to take this as a handbook for how not to get distracted. In part, I think it’s just really impressive that monks recognized that distraction was in some way ultimately unresolvable. But they were like, well, let’s still try to make it a little bit better, and they had all this energy and inventiveness when we came to devising ways to do that. And so, rather than just sort of getting super frustrated that the few things we’re trying aren’t working, maybe we can also just approach this in a more diffuse or experimental way like they did. 

I think that’s a good way of thinking about it. That there are many options and there are also probably too many problems for us to address them all. We can’t just unplug and have a digital detox. There will be other things distracting us. 

And I think their understanding that the world had all these antagonists in it, whether neutral ones, like chores, or bad ones, like demons. But also, the world is a complex, moving, changing thing. Like anything in flux, it is going to present challenges to your concentration and your plans. And in some way, I think they had a more realistic idea that they weren’t going to create a perfect life, you know? 

A more realistic idea with their demons dancing around everywhere. 

Jamie Kreiner is Professor of History at the University of Georgia. Her work examines the politics, ethics, and scientific sensibilities of the early Middle Ages. She lives in Athens, Georgia. In addition to The Wandering Mind, she has also written a book called Legions of Pigs in the Early Medieval West that measures the impact this species had on early medieval culture; and The Social Life of Hagiography in the Merovingian Kingdom, which highlights how the cultures of Christianity and government defined each other in the early medieval society of Gaul.

Lorraine Boissoneault is a Chicago-based writer who covers science, history, and human rights in her journalism, and explores more fantastical worlds in her fiction. Previously the staff history writer for Smithsonian Magazine, she now writes for a wide number of publications. Her essays and reporting have been published by The New Yorker, The Atlantic, National Geographic, PassBlue, Great Lakes Now, and many others. Her fiction has appeared in The Massachusetts Review and Catapult Magazine. Her first book, The Last Voyageurs, was a finalist for the Chicago Book of the Year Award. She has received grants and fellowships from the Society for Environmental Journalists, the National Tropical Botanical Garden, and the Institute for Journalism and Natural Resources. She has also appeared on documentaries and radio stations like the BBC to discuss American history.