The religious life, in its many various forms, is deeply woven into the texture of Catholicism. The state of the orders is usually a reliable indication of the health of the Catholic church as a whole, and from early times the great formative periods of Catholicism have been marked not only by reforms in the existing orders but also by the creation of new ones, responsive in the first instance to the needs or the mood of a new epoch, though generally concealing surprising powers of survival and adaptability. The Counter-Reformation Catholic revival of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was no exception to this rule. The period was one which witnessed far-reaching changes in European society, and these set crucial and perplexing problems before a Catholicism resurgent, indeed, but no longer in enjoyment of a religious monopoly, faced with curtailed and shrinking frontiers in Europe, and in many places fighting for very existence. The history of the religious orders in this age shows the working out of the customary formula of restoration and new creation, but in a setting far more complicated and unfavourable than monasticism had ever faced before.

A comprehensive judgment on the state of the religious orders at the outbreak of the Reformation is extremely difficult to arrive at. The currents of reform of the previous 150 years, which had divided all the orders of friars into Observant and Conventual groups and had produced the various Observant Benedictine congregations in Italy, Spain, Germany, Austria and France, had long been dying down, though they were by no means everywhere quite dead.