The Political Economy of Christian Monasticism

Marcus Shera

Advisor: Mark Koyama, PhD, Department of Economics

Committee Members: Noel Johnson, Peter Boettke, Jonathan Schulz

Online Location, Zoom
July 19, 2024, 01:00 PM to 03:00 PM

Abstract:

This dissertation explores the political economy of Christian monasticism in three eras: its origins in the Eastern Roman Empire, its institutional zenith in Medieval Europe, and its collapse in Reformation England. Across all of these periods, monastics are legitimating agents for a church threatened with co-optation by a secular authority.

The first chapter presents a theory of monasticism by combining the literature on the club model of religion (Iannaconne, 1992) with the literature on religious legitimacy (Greif and Rubin, 2024). I offer an analytic narrative of the religious political economy of the Eastern Roman Empire after the legalization of Christianity. Bishops became enmeshed in the rent-seeking society of Roman imperial politics and lose legitimacy as church leaders. The crisis of legitimacy threatened to break the church apart. Instead of endemic schisms, monastics developed in the midst of the larger church and credibly signaled their own independence of worldly affairs, making them impartial legitimating agents for bishops. In return, bishops grant monks the ability to influence the world through the larger church. The resulting institution is "two-tiered" where an ascetic sect of monastics legitimates the episcopal leadership. A two-tiered church is able to benefit from the wealth and power of urban Rome while maintaining legitimacy. 

The second chapter explores how monasticism adapted to Europe in the feudal era by organizing into international orders that followed standardized rules. Each monastic order also faced the threat of being co-opted by secular interests and needed to strategically place themselves such that they could maintain their independence. This paper explores (1) how patterns in monastic foundations secured monastic independence and (2) how monastics acted against kings hoping to control the church through the episcopacy. I empirically test hypotheses using a novel dataset of English monasteries and episcopal elections.

The third chapter, co-authored with Desiree Desierto and Mark Koyama, explores the consequences of Henry VIII's dissolution of the English monasteries. The sale of monastic lands created a coalition of individuals who had an interest in preventing a Catholic restoration in England. Drawing on a newly compiled dataset of 16th and 17th century MPs, we first establish that borough constituencies with a higher proportion of local monastic lands had MPs who were more likely to support Protestantism during the reign of Mary I. Furthermore, individual MPs with connections to ex-monastic land were more likely to support Protestantism and opposed Mary I. We go on to show that these attitudes persisted in the 17th century.  MPs representing boroughs with historic monastic lands were more likely to support the exclusion of the Catholic James II from the throne in 1679-1681.