The Order Whose Reform Was Never Needed

Carthusian tradition sums up its own history in a single, often repeated claim, that the order was never reformed because it was never deformed, meaning that unlike almost every other medieval monastic family the Carthusians never drifted far enough from Bruno of Cologne's original austerity at the Grande Chartreuse in 1084 to require the kind of corrective movement that produced the Cistercians, the Trappists or the Capuchins. Whatever the claim's exact accuracy, the order's practice has stayed close to its founding pattern of largely solitary life within a shared enclosure for an unusually long time, surviving even the suppression of religious houses during the French Revolution, when the Grande Chartreuse itself was seized and the community dispersed, only to be reoccupied by returning Carthusians once conditions allowed.

The monastery is also the source of one of the order's better known points of contact with the outside world: the herbal liqueur Chartreuse, produced from a recipe the monks have kept since the seventeenth century, remains a rare instance of an enclosed contemplative order maintaining a continuously operating commercial product across several centuries, a practical link to the wider economy that sits oddly beside an order otherwise defined by withdrawal from it.