In an era when the sounds of monasticism's interior life speak to a new generation, Eleanor Shipley Duckett offers an illuminated description of its development under such figures as Columban, "the saint afire with Irish enthusiam"; St. Benedict, greatest of the monks, who established a pattern of the religious life still vibrant to this day; and St. Gregory, Benedict's pupil and greatest of the popes, who more than any other prepared the See of Rome for its triumphant emergence in the Middle Ages.