Paul Freedman, professor of history at Yale, traces the strange path monasticism took from desert renunciation to a byword for learning. The lecture opens with the eremitic hermits of Egypt and Syria, men who fled the world and became, paradoxically, spiritual celebrities sought out for advice. Freedman follows the shift westward toward communal life, culminating in the Rule of St. Benedict, which structured monastic days around prayer and labor. He explains how labor came to include reading and eventually the copying of manuscripts, turning ascetic communities into the medieval world's main engine of textual preservation. Chapters move from the introduction of monastic ideals through renunciation, monks as patrons, the western transformation, the Benedictine Rule itself, and finally the link between monasticism and learning. Part of Yale's Early Middle Ages course, the talk gives a clear account of how a movement built on withdrawal from the world ended up preserving so much of it.