Department of Anthropology, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, 29208.
Am J Phys Anthropol. 2013 Nov;152(3):322-32. doi: 10.1002/ajpa.22350. Epub 2013 Sep 7.
Scholarship on life in medieval European monasteries has revealed a variety of factors that potentially affected mortality in these communities. Though there is some evidence based on age-at-death distributions from England that monastic males lived longer than members of the general public, what is missing from the literature is an explicit examination of how the risks of mortality within medieval monastic settings differed from those within contemporaneous lay populations. This study examines differences in the hazard of mortality for adult males between monastic cemeteries (n = 528) and non-monastic cemeteries (n = 368) from London, all of which date to between AD 1050 and 1540. Age-at-death data from all cemeteries are pooled to estimate the Gompertz hazard of mortality, and "monastic" (i.e., buried in a monastic cemetery) is modeled as a covariate affecting this baseline hazard. The estimated effect of the monastic covariate is negative, suggesting that individuals in the monastic communities faced reduced risks of dying compared to their peers in the lay communities. These results suggest better diets, the positive health benefits of religious behavior, better living conditions in general in monasteries, or selective recruitment of healthy or higher socioeconomic status individuals.
关于中世纪欧洲修道院生活的学术研究揭示了多种潜在因素，这些因素可能会影响这些社区的死亡率。虽然基于英格兰的死亡年龄分布有一些证据表明，僧侣男性比普通公众寿命更长，但文献中缺少对中世纪修道院环境中死亡率风险与同期世俗人群中死亡率风险有何不同的明确考察。本研究考察了伦敦的修道院墓地（n = 528）和非修道院墓地（n = 368）中成年男性死亡率风险的差异，这些墓地的年代均在公元 1050 年至 1540 年之间。从所有墓地汇总的死亡年龄数据用于估计戈珀特兹死亡率风险，将“修道”（即在修道院墓地中埋葬）建模为影响此基线风险的协变量。修道院协变量的估计效果为负，这表明与世俗社区的同龄人相比，修道社区的个体面临的死亡风险较低。这些结果表明，修道社区的人饮食更好，宗教行为对健康有积极影响，修道院内的生活条件总体上更好，或者是健康状况或社会经济地位较高的人被选择性地招募。
