>>7379493Ehhh yes and no. This is really more of an early medieval than a late medieval thing, and even then, it's iffy. Early medieval monastic authors would call the monastery "our desert" but at the same time a lot of monasteries were really important institutions with relationships with the crown. Charlemagne and his successors would literally order prayers in bulk from monastic institutions. And then there's the fact that people from the court would be interested in monastic libraries, or monastic liturgical praxis, or what have you.
Then you look at Cistercians, these monastic reformers, and because they were so austere they couldn't spend all the money that got donated to them, which led to them ending up as proto-bankers and shit. Mendicants like Franciscans (not actually monks but close), same thing, they got nestled in urban contexts and institutionalization just sorta caught up to them.
None of this has to be bad, btw. It doesn't mean that they were bad people or bad Christians or hypocrites or anything. It's just that religious life evolves and is in a dialectic with the secular world.
