The role of monastic institutions in society during the Central Middle Ages has been much debated in medieval studies. Some scholars saw monasticism as the principal motivator of economic, social, intellectual, and "spiritual" progress in human society, while others regarded monastic ideology as fundamentally antisocial and oriented toward itself.

These debates remained pertinent until the final decades of the twentieth century, but seem to have lost some of their relevance to the present-day scholar. Today monasticism is studied as a social entity that needed interactions with...