In medieval Europe the Benedictines represented the archetype of a religious order, the exponents of an apparently timeless tradition from which all forms of monastic life had descended. This perception became sharply focused in the period of their political, ecclesiastical and cultural pre-eminence, but it masked the centuries in which a plural clerical and monastic culture prevailed. The Regula Benedicti (RB) was not the first monastic code of the medieval west, and, in the formative years of European Christianity, there were others, such as the Celtic customs of Columban of Bangor (c. 543–615), that played a greater role in the work of conversion. Yet while it lacked both the brevity and spiritual intensity of some regulae, it was the regime of Benedict's Montecassino that was carried furthest from the Gallo-Roman centres of the early medieval cult. In the remote, unsettled, and somewhat pagan regions to the north, east and west, the disciples of the RB were agents of religious change; here they were the principal architects of the institutional church – and its doctrinal and liturgical framework – that was raised from the ruins of Roman antiquity. Later, the rule informed a discourse of reform that reinvigorated clerical Europe. At the turn of the first millennium, regional networks of Benedictines had taken root; a century later they had eclipsed alternative customs and displaced the secular canons and laid claim to the ecclesiastical hierarchy.

Like so many medieval institutions, the Benedictines garnered a memory of their beginnings that was rich in legend. The life of the founder was dramatised in Gregory's Dialogues and never leavened with documentation. The suggestion of an apostolic succession of his disciples was encouraged by the association of regional missionaries and their churches with the advent of the monasteries: Augustine of Canterbury was remembered as an apostle of the RB in England; Maurus, one of the few named figures to feature in the Dialogues, was cast as the evangelist of France. As historical writing flowered in the Benedictine precinct, the foundation narrative was enlivened not only by the great lives of these pioneers, but also by institutional histories whose successive continuations created a continuity that seemed almost tangible.