In 2015, Germans were quick to trade in their post-Hitler hair shirts for moral superiority.
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"We have been called hair shirts and pains in various parts of the anatomy," Ms. Bockman once said.
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For example, medieval Catholic monks wore hair shirts to mortify the flesh; fasting is common in many cultures.
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Cholenec introduced whips, hair shirts and iron girdles, traditional items of Catholic mortification, to the converts at Kahnawake. He wanted them to adopt these rather than use Mohawk ritual practices. Both Chauchetière and Tekakwitha arrived in Kahnawake the same year, in 1677. He later wrote about having been very impressed by her, as he had not expected a native to be so pious.
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In its simplest form, mortification of the flesh can mean merely denying oneself certain pleasures, such as permanently or temporarily abstaining (i.e. fasting), from food, alcoholic beverages, sexual relations, or an area of life that makes the person's spiritual life more difficult or burdensome. It can also be practiced by choosing a simple or even impoverished lifestyle; this is often one reason many monks of various religions take vows of poverty. Among votarists, traditional forms of physical mortification are the cilice and hair-shirts.
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There was a very devoted woman at Ipswich named Agnes, who had a remarkable spirit of prayer and penance. The Recluses observed the rule closely, having a mostly vegetarian diet, wearing hair shirts, waking at midnight throughout the winter and at dawn in summer, fasting on Fridays and Saturdays (bread and ale only on Fridays), and devoting much time to prayers. In 1452 the Whitefriars entertained King Henry VI with his entire suite. Over the next 25 years the church was entirely rebuilt (creating the structure revealed by excavation).
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The story of his life there and up to an extreme old age has been compared by some to an ancient Fathers of the Desert. Whatever time could be spared from his active duties was given up to contemplation, to fastings, watchings, disciplines, and other austerities. The sufferings he inflicted on his body seem to have had no effect upon his health, although he continued them almost to the day of his death. Hair shirts, iron chains, and metal plates with sharp points almost covered his entire body.
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The bulk of Monstrous Regiment takes place in the small, bellicose country of Borogravia, a highly conservative nation, whose people live according to the increasingly strange (and harmful) decrees of its favored deity, Nuggan. The main feature of his religion is the Abominations; a long, often-updated list of banned things. To put this in perspective, these things include garlic, cats, the smell of beets, people with ginger hair, shirts with six buttons, anyone shorter than three feet (including children and babies), sneezing, rocks, ears, jigsaw puzzles, chocolate (which was once Borogravia's staple export, plunging the country into increasing poverty), and the colour blue. The list of "Abominations Unto Nuggan" often causes conflicts with Borogravia's neighbours, and the uncertain whereabouts of Nuggan leads the inhabitants of Borogravia to deify their Duchess, to whom they pray instead.
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Sir William de Tracy's journey east is confirmed by Romwald, Archbishop of Salerno, and Roger of Hoveden, who report that the Pope instructed the knights, once their duties were fulfilled, to visit the holy places barefoot and in hair shirts and then to live alone for the rest of their lives on the Black Mountain near Antioch, spending their time in vigil, prayer and lamentation. Romwald continues that, after their deaths, the bodies of the knights were buried at Jerusalem before the door of the temple, though this does not conform exactly to the tradition that the murderers were buried under the portico in front of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, which was the refectory of the Knights Templar.Sudeley pp. 90–91 Another tradition is that the bodies of the knights were returned to the island of Brean Down, off the coast of Weston-super-Mare, and buried there.
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