Authority and Asceticism from Augustine to Gregory the Great in Bloomington, MN

When barbarians invaded the Roman Empire in the years around 400 AD, Christian monks hid in their cloisters—or so it is often assumed. Conrad Leyser shows that monks in the early medieval West were, in fact, pioneers in the creation of a new language of moral authority. He describes the making of this tradition over two centuries from St. Augustine to St. Benedict and Gregory the Great.