The figure of the monk was a familiar one in the Byzantine world. But what he represented and his place in society changed in response to the tensions and challenges, the fears and aspirations, the doubts and certainties of Byzantines through the centuries. The lack of any comprehensive modern study of Byzantine monasticism should therefore come as no surprise; such a task is well nigh impossible given the variety of monastic forms within the medieval Greek church. But this study aims to examine one of the most important aspects of Byzantine monasticism, the way in which it interacted with the lay world, and to focus on the ways in which these worlds impinged upon one another.

Monasticism in the abstract was something that Byzantines of all social classes admired and respected. It is no accident that most of the saints of the church in the period after Christianity had become the official religion of the Roman empire were monks. For monks had taken the place of martyrs as those willing to undertake a death in the world, to renounce human ties and associations and to replace them by a new life in the spirit, a life ‘in the world but not of it’, which in its most devout practitioners could lead to the ‘life of the angels’, where the flesh was of so little importance as to be almost subsumed into the spirit. But monks did not constitute a separate caste within Byzantine society.