'They Never Settle Down'

A reader has happened on an unfamiliar word while reading Dimitri Obolensky’s The Byzantine Commonwealth: Eastern Europe, 500-1453 (1971), one he finds “especially amusing”: 

“Cosmas [Indicopleustes] tells us of monks who, ignoring their vows, live unchastely, engage in trade and business, indulge in endless gossip or, like the gyrovagi of Western Europe, wander about on the excuse of some pilgrimage.”

 

The OED describes gyrovagi as “historical” and “rare,” and defines it as “one of those monks who were in the habit of wandering from monastery to monastery.” I mistook it for Russian in origin. Actually, it derives from Latin by way of the French and means “wandering” or “circling” and is an English cognate of that Yeatsian word gyre. The dictionary gives a single citation, from the Scottish historian Alexander Ranken’s nine-volume A History of France from the Time of the Conquest of Clovis to the Death of Louis XVI (1802-22):

 

“Gyrovagues, or Vagabonds, who strolled about from one monastery to another, gratifying too freely their inclinations and appetites.”

 

The gyrovagues were condemned by early Christian thinkers, including St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430) and St. Benedict of Nursia (480-547). The latter writes in The Rule of Saint Benedict (c. 530) that gyrovagues “spend their entire lives drifting from region to region, staying as guests for three or four days in different monasteries. Always on the move, they never settle down, and are slaves to their own wills and gross appetites.”

 

I can’t address the theology but I understand contempt for the socially un-aligned, even if I don’t share it. A contemporary gyrovague might be a tramp, hobo, beggar, mendicant or drifter. He may be homeless, whether by choice or involuntarily. Whether gyrovagues still exist in the monkish sense, I don’t know. The implication is that those who wander and remain rootless are dangerous. They don’t answer to conventional rules. In a more positive sense, I like to think of writers as gyrovagues – independent, unclubbable, outside the herd.

[The reader who described his encounter with gyrovagi tells me I got something wrong. The "Cosmas" mentioned above is actually Cosmas thePriest. “The quotation," my reader says, "was taken from a discussion of the Bogomils in 10th Century Bulgaria.”]