Benedictine monasticism flowered when European society was in its infancy. The order, self-sufficiency and stability of the cenobium captured the imagination of peoples for whom a settled existence, and even subsistence, remained elusive. The early Benedictine monastery was not only a refuge but also an essential building block of the medieval community, a surrogate economic and social unit and, in the absence of an institutional church or state authority, a source of spiritual and temporal governance. Yet as the order neared the apex of its influence, and a pope (Gregory VII, 1073–85) widely credited as Benedictine announced a new Christian age, Europe was already in the process of rapid change. Between the twelfth and the fifteenth centuries the economic, social and political structures of the Continent were transformed. As the incidence of invasion and internal warfare fell sharply and population levels rose, a new urban environment, economy and identity emerged. The institutional church retained, indeed reinforced, its influence in this demographic, economic and social flux, but it was the new ascetic orders and the secular clergy to which many now turned first for spiritual direction. The authority of kings, princes and republics (in later centuries at least) also grew steadily, strengthened not only by a buoyant economy but also by a battery of permanent institutions, an exchequer, judiciary and representative assembly. These were forms of authority with which lordship, whether exercised by a great magnate or a great monastery, could scarcely fail to collide. In the centuries before the Reformation the Benedictines confronted a world beyond the convent in which the place and purpose of their observant life was no longer certain.

Historians have always associated the later Middle Ages with the downfall of the monastic order. This view originated with the very first narratives of the European Reformation which necessarily regarded the failure of the monastic tradition as a principal prerequisite for religious change. It was reinforced by the first generation of modern researchers, many of whom shared the sensitivities and prejudices of their Protestant predecessors. The arch-Anglican G. G. Coulton considered ‘the pioneers of one generation became the laggards of a later age’, guilty of ‘a lamentable gulf between monastic theory and practice’. Even respected monastic authorities of this era – Jean Leclcerq, David Knowles – proved reluctant to challenge the prevailing view.