Sleeping in Church: Preaching, Boredom, and the Struggle for Attention in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

The word “boredom” was not used in English before the eighteenth century. Does this mean that pre-eighteenth-century people did not experience boredom? Or did their experience of boredom differ from ours? This article approaches these questions by exploring the history of people falling asleep in church, and asking whether boredom played a role in their slumber. Across the confessional spectrum in premodern Europe, religious somnolence was depicted as a common and grave problem. The preoccupation with this problem went hand in hand with longstanding ecclesiastic concerns about deficient attention among the flock. Probing medieval and early modern controversies about somnolence and boredom offers insight on two levels: First, it helps to correct the problematic presentism that identifies boredom as a quintessentially modern condition. Second, exploring the long history of boredom adds nuance to our understanding of premodern culture and mentalities, revealing—in the case of religious audiences—a struggle for attention that we would not expect to find in a world in which religion reigned supreme. The article also touches on other social and institutional contexts (such as court life) in which boredom was both endogenous and endemic.