As the essays in Monasticism and Manuscript Culture in Medieval Europe make clear, Cluny was a center of cultural production at once receptive and influential, embedded in a dynamic field of monastic institutions, some friendly, some competitive, but all participating in a vibrant cross-pollination of written texts studied by monks in the safety of their cloisters and carried by them throughout Europe, to the Mediterranean, and to the Holy Land.
Scott G. Bruce is Professor of History at Fordham University, editor of the journal Traditio, and the author of Cluny and the Muslims of La Garde-Freinet and Silence and Sign Language in Medieval Monasticism.