Definition
The condition, system, or institution of monkhood; the state of being a monk or of living under monastic rule. In legal contexts, the term referred to the recognized status of persons who had taken religious vows and entered a monastery, a status with distinct legal consequences under canon law and, historically, under the civil law of England and Europe. Persons who had embraced monachism were generally considered civilly dead for purposes of property ownership, inheritance, and contract — incapable of holding property in their own right and withdrawn from the ordinary relations of civil society.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Monasticism.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): The system and influences of a monastic life; monasticism.
The common and legal meanings are closely aligned in subject matter but diverge in emphasis. In ordinary usage, monachism describes a religious system or way of life. In legal usage, it described a recognized civil status carrying concrete legal disabilities — principally the forfeiture of property rights and the incapacity to sue, inherit, or contract. A researcher treating the term as purely ecclesiastical will miss its operative legal consequences.
Why It Matters in Research
Monachism appears rarely in American legal sources and is essentially a dead term in modern law. Researchers encountering it should expect to find it primarily in historical English legal materials, canon law commentaries, and treatises on ecclesiastical law predating the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII.
The principal legal significance of monachism in historical sources is the doctrine of civil death. Under medieval English and canon law, a man who entered a monastery was treated as civilly dead: his property passed as if he had died, his existing contractual obligations were generally extinguished, and he could neither acquire new property nor maintain legal proceedings. This doctrine intersected with broader concepts of civil death that also applied to convicted felons and, in some jurisdictions, transported criminals. Researchers exploring civil death in English legal history will need to move between monachism, attainder, and outlawry sources to get a complete picture.
The Rapalje & Lawrence citation to Milton's History of England and Bingham's Christian Antiquities signals that even nineteenth-century legal lexicographers treated this as a historical and ecclesiastical concept rather than an active legal doctrine. By the time those dictionaries were compiled, monachism had no operative role in American law and only vestigial relevance in English law following the Reformation-era suppression of monasteries.
Corpus researchers should note that the term may appear in early colonial records, ecclesiastical court materials, and in treatises addressing the reception of English common law, particularly when those sources grapple with which pre-Reformation doctrines survived transplantation. It is also likely to surface in comparative civil law discussions, since monastic civil death had stronger continued vitality in continental European jurisdictions than in the Anglo-American tradition.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries — Black's (both editions) and Rapalje & Lawrence — give functionally identical definitions: "the state of monks." The brevity is itself informative. By the late nineteenth century, when these dictionaries were compiled, monachism was already a term of historical record rather than active legal practice, and no lexicographer felt it warranted elaboration.
Rapalje & Lawrence is the most instructive of the three because it provides authority citations — Milton's History of England and Bingham's Christian Antiquities — confirming that the term's legal relevance was understood to be historical and ecclesiastical in character. Neither citation is a law report or statute; both are works of history and religious scholarship. This distinguishes monachism from most dictionary headwords and suggests researchers should look to ecclesiastical and historical sources rather than case law.
What the historical dictionaries do not capture is the substantive legal content: the civil death consequences, the property implications, and the canon law framework that gave monachism its legal meaning. For that, researchers must go beyond these entries to Blackstone's Commentaries, Bracton, or ecclesiastical law treatises such as Burn's Ecclesiastical Law.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Civil Death; Ecclesiastical Law; Religious Corporations