An Enduring Habit: Lay Death and Burial in Religious Clothing

Each year, beginning in 2004, the Medieval Institute graduate students organize a lecture, inviting a scholar to speak and conduct a subsequent graduate seminar. This year’s speaker is Dr. Kirsten Schut (King’s College, Halifax), speaking on “An Enduring Habit: Lay Death and Burial in Religious Clothing.”

From the early Middle Ages into the modern era, pious lay Christians have sometimes opted to die and/or be buried wearing the habits of religious orders in the hopes of improving their chances of salvation. During the later Middle Ages, the elite practice of deathbed entrance to the monastic life evolved into a more widespread custom of simply using religious (often mendicant) habits as burial garments. Confraternities and indulgences helped to make this practice enormously popular in many Catholic regions during the early modern period, and the involvement of religious orders in European colonialism spread it around the globe. It attracted criticism from many generations of religious reformers, as well as spirited defenses from its proponents. This practice is thus an overlooked area of continuity in the history of Christianity and provides a new angle from which to investigate the interconnected histories of monasticism, clothing, and death.

Join us on Thursday, March, 5, 2026, from 5:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. ET.

Speaker:
Kirsten Schut is currently a Faculty Fellow with the Foundation Year “Great Books” Program at King’s College, Halifax. She holds a Bachelor of Humanities from Carleton University (Ottawa) and an MA and PhD from the University of Toronto’s Centre for Medieval Studies. Her doctoral dissertation was an intellectual biography of the fourteenth-century Dominican friar and theologian John of Naples. She has published several articles on aspects of John’s thought, and her first monograph, “John of Naples and Dominican Intellectual Life, ca. 1300-1350,” is forthcoming with PIMS Press. Kirsty has held postdoctoral research fellowships in History departments at the Universities of Cologne and Bristol and at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto. She recently received a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada to support her second book project about the phenomenon of lay Christians seeking to die and/or be buried wearing monastic clothing.

For more information visit the event website.