E-book
Ecclesia in medio nationis
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 anti-social and oriented towards itself. These debates seem to have lost some of their relevance to the present-day scholar. Today monasticism is studied as a social entity which needed interactions...