The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction
By Jamie Kreiner
Liveright, 2023

The monks in University of Georgia history professor Jamie Kreiner’s book are forever dealing with a mental phenomenon known as acedia, “that toxic combination of restlessness and dissatisfaction that could make it difficult to do or think anything.” And the fact that this Middle Ages description of acedia is instantly recognizable to readers in the 21st century is the heart of The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction. Kreiner sets her story of medieval monks firmly in the context of our hyper-distracted current moment. 

She spares her readers most of the dolorous statistics about that 21st-century distraction and its dimensions. Surely we’re all familiar with such statistics, not only from reading Chicken Little articles about them but also from experiencing them directly, with endless scrolling on Twitter and Instagram and TikTok, sites deliberately designed to provide endless distraction. When experiencing the gravitational pull of such things, readers might be tempted to think the forces of distraction have never been stronger. 

But as Kreiner elaborates in this smartly readable book, people who engage in exertions of concentration have likely been dealing with distraction forever. Kreiner concentrates on monks and various other clerical types, men who largely separated themselves from the world and devoted themselves to prayer, contemplation, and copying manuscripts, all of which put them squarely in the path of distraction. Anyone who’s ever seen the testy marginalia many of these men left on the texts they were copying – complaints about clotted ink, cold fingers, dull pens (and dull brethren) – will know that the long hours of the night or the forbidden lazy summer afternoons must have seemed to stretch on forever. 

The monks developed many tactics for concentrating the mind, and given their profession, they tended to liturgize their efforts, seeing distraction as the work of Satan and themselves as poor ink-stained foot soldiers for God. For them, the refined effort of attention was, as Kreiner winningly puts it, “a paradox of states and scales,” seeking a broader vista by narrowing focus. “Distraction was not just a personal problem, they knew; it was part of the warp of the world,” Kreiner writes. “Confronting distraction meant confronting the competing demands of family, work, government, and public – which is why so many monks abandoned that world …”

Even after abandoning the wiles of the world, this struggle was never easy. And the monks themselves could often be their own harshest critics (as one eighth-century monk complained, “all I do is eat, sleep, drink, and be negligent”). This is ultimately an intensely inner struggle, and it’s a testament to Kreiner’s narrative skills that she manages to keep things so interesting. 

Maybe it’s predictable that the chapter on books feels the most compelling, since books were often viewed as chief facilitators of distraction, especially as changing book-manufacturing technologies allowed books themselves to get longer and longer, including pandects, which were “complete Bibles, calligraphed upon the highly processed skins of hundreds of sheep, enfolded within a single volume.” These books slowly began to proliferate, although the numbers involved will strike 2023 readers as endearingly small. At Wearmouth-Jarrow in the eighth century, the Venerable Bede had access to 200 books, for instance, but even the most bustling and manuscript-hungry monasteries and private collectors seldom amassed more than 500 titles – an amount that today can fit easily on an electronic device the size of a playing card. If books offer distractions – and who can deny they do? – then distraction has never been readier to hand.

Hence the book’s conceit, which might have become trite in less skilled hands: since distraction is everywhere in the present moment, the need for miracle medieval mental methods has never been greater. The monks in the focus here were grimly aware that “nobody could hold God in their sight continuously”; they were always “tottering, falling, slipping, collapsing, and being led away.” Surely their efforts grappling with sin can teach us something about grappling with the Sims? 

Only, it turns out, the virtue of persistence in the face of temptation and sleepiness. The Wandering Mind is an oddly cheering reminder that this persistence can yield results. 

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News.