In the vibrant and colourful world of medieval Latin Christianity, asceticism takes on a role of great importance within the spectrum of religious practice and in people's devotional lives. Before the eleventh century, fully ordained monastics may have comprised less than half of one per cent of the population, and yet the monasteries became centres of stability in the unstable and conflictual politics of Christendom and central to an ideology that simultaneously gave positive value to this world and looked to the purified world to come. While the laity undertook some forms of asceticism at times of pilgrimage, penance and during the liturgical year, it is with the monastics that it becomes intensified and a defining feature of the self. Patterns of prayer and religious reading develop the inner life of the monastic along with an outer life of adherence to rules and performance of the liturgy. The general aim, as with the Eastern tradition, is the development of the monastic's vision and moral quality whose summit is the Kingdom of God or the indwelling of the kingdom in the ascetic body.