ABSTRACT
New ascetical movements and new orders sprang into existence, all in one way or another expressing discontent with the traditional forms of monastic life. The response of ascetics to the economic expansion of western Europe and the growing affluence of the twelfth century was to idealise voluntary poverty, which now began to assume a critical role in the monastic tradition. The controversial appeal to the model of the primitive Church sprang from the sharpened historical consciousness of a century that was in the process of rediscovering the lost philosophy and science of the ancient world. At the Roman Council of 1059 Hildebrand, then deacon of the Roman Church, invoked the image of the primitive Church to support his argument that the secular clergy ought to forgo private property and embrace 'a communal life according to the example of the primitive Church'.
