Children and Asceticism in Late Antiquity by Vuolanto Ville.;

Author:Vuolanto, Ville.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317167853
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2015-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

Family Economy and the Profits of Asceticism

Many girls are brought forward [to the monasteries] by their parents, brothers and other relatives before the proper age, not because the girls would have an inner urge towards chastity, but in order to acquire provisions for themselves.1

Older scholarship has seen the function of asceticism in the context of families mostly as a tool in family or kin strategies aiming at the disposal of extra children, either at birth or the age of marriage. In particular, it has been claimed that poorer families would have controlled the size of the family by giving their children to ascetic vocations instead of killing or abandoning the newborn, or that better-off parents would have used asceticism as a tool for dealing with surplus children in the context of inheritance strategies. Asceticism could have also profited the ascetics themselves with more or less direct privileges in society. The aim of the present chapter is to examine critically these claims in the context of wider considerations about family economy and inheritance, looking at the factors that motivated the choice of asceticism by the individuals themselves or their family members. In other words, this chapter deals with both continuity strategies for welfare during the lifetime of individuals and with manipulations of patrimony to secure continuity after death in a more abstract sense.2

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