Monasteries and convents have in modern times become marginal, countercultural institutions, and the people who live in them are rarities as well as oddities. At university, some contemporaries of mine triumphed in a challenge to bring the most unusual object to a party after encountering a nun in the street and persuading her to come along with them. 

Things were once very different, as Andrew Jotischky demonstrates in this learned and judicious survey of monasticism from its origin in the fourth century to its crisis of existence in the 16th. Monasteries were ‘the engine rooms of medieval society’ and sat at the forefront of intellectual life; they played a prominent role in politics, art, social welfare, education and the development of urban and rural economies. Yet they were supposed to be places of ‘enclosure’, set apart from the contaminating world so that their inhabitants could pursue lives of angelic purity. ‘Monk’ derives from the Greek for ‘solitary’, yet most monasticism has involved an attempt to live with others in close and structured community. These paradoxes are the threads running through Jotischky’s book.

There have been general histories of monasticism before, and Jotischky generously acknowledges his debt to them, as well as to the abundance of specialist scholarship on the topic. Yet there are reasons to welcome this new overview. One is its comprehensiveness. Monasticism in the Latin (Catholic) West and monasticism in