The Rule for Freedom: The Pedagogical Function of Monastic Rules Between Care and Coercion

The contribution examines, from a pedagogical, historical perspective, the relationship between discipline and freedom, coercion and care, in early medieval monasteries. By comparing patristic sources and monastic rules, we will try to identify what educational attention is proposed by these forms of life and to what extent they strike a balance between rigour and charity towards brothers and sisters and the community. We will observe how the rules, although with different gradations, contain several pedagogical suggestions that will allow us to investigate the relationship between discipline and freedom. In this context, obedience is a choice of sharing and relationship, whereby one educates themselves to freedom through the law. Particular attention will be paid to understanding how coercion is present in these rules and how physical punishments and beatings should be read. Within these institutions, which aimed to educate both children and adults, violence was, in some cases, contemplated and regulated. We will therefore try to understand the delicate relationship between freedom and coercion, particularly how the former is used and understood as an extreme tool to educate to freedom. We will then try to understand these rules in the difficult search for a balance between discipline and freedom, trying to read this tension in the literary genre of the disciplinary rules of the monasteries in their regulation of daily life in one of the most highly formalized educational environments of the Middle Ages.