A thoughtful and deeply appreciative study of an important center of religion and learning that has been in meaningful dialogue with the secular world for almost 1, 500 years.,- Charles Hilken, American Benedictine Review, Vol. 73, No. 4, ''Rennie's book provides a compelling history of a unique place on earth, which has been and still is invested with a variety of meanings.'',- Sven Meeder, Radboud University Nijmegen, Early Medieval Europe, 2023, Vol. 31, No. 2, ''Kriston R. Rennie has written a fascinating and important book... The author [...] takes the reader through a riveting intellectual history of an iconic place. Rennie examines a place of cenobitic monasticism and uses it to tell a story of how an architecture of enclosure induced expansive and eventually international ideas''.,- Charles R. Gallagher, Church History, March, 2024, Vol. 92, No. 4