Hermit: Did you mean...?

Corn (maize) was central to the lives of Native Americans across North, Central, and South America. Maize was introduced to North America from Mesoamerica c. 700/900 CE and transformed the lives of the indigenous peoples. Every tribal nation...

Kalighat painting based on Bengali folklore where a cat poses as a monk on an island full of mice. The cat later proves them wrong for their initial lack of belief through saintly behavior. He then consumes the offspring of several mice after...

The monastic orders of the Middle Ages developed from the desire to live a spiritual life without the distractions of the world. Men and women who took religious vows were seeking a purity of experience they found lacking as lay people. Their...

A belief in an afterlife was central to every major civilization of the ancient world and this encouraged the recognition of the reality of ghosts as the spirits of the departed who, for one reason or another, either returned from the realm...

Guthlac of Crowland (c. 674 - 11 April 714 CE) was an Anglo-Saxon saint from the Kingdom of Mercia. He is best known for his years spent as a hermit in the Fens region of the East Midlands. Guthlac was born into a noble Mercian family and...

The First Crusade (1095-1102) was a military campaign by western European forces to recapture the city of Jerusalem and the Holy Land from Muslim control. Conceived by Pope Urban II following an appeal from the Byzantine emperor Alexios I...

Mount Athos, located on the Chalkidike peninsula near Thessalonica, Greece, is a holy site which first saw hermit monks living there in the 9th century CE. Regarded as one of the most important monastic sites in the Byzantine Empire, there...

In 313 CE, Constantine the Great (272 – 337 CE) ended the sporadic-yet-terrifying Christian persecutions under the Roman Empire with his “Edict of Milan,” and brought the Christian church under imperial protection. Not surprisingly, public...

A stupa is a reliquary containing the remains (relics) of an individual associated with great spiritual power and insight, most often (since the 3rd century BCE) with the Buddha (l. c. 563 - c. 483 BCE). The form, a hemisphere topped by a...

Between the 9th and the 10th century CE, in an unknown European abbey, an anonymous author told the story of an Irish monk and his 14 companions who embarked on a dangerous journey in the 5th century CE. The monk's name was Brendan, and his...