Abstract

The paper traces the historiography on the Medieval Italian monastic world (Benedictine and Carthusian) mainly produced from the beginning of the third millennium. The text presents the main trends in research which, in the author’s opinion, characterise today’s cultural orientations, within a context of profound renewal and more intense contacts between Italian and foreign scholars, and in the perspective of the future overcoming of the traditional contrast between erudite memoirs of a confessional matrix and scientific production, but also of a progressive divergence between the investigations into the history of the regular religious environment and Italian Medieval studies as a whole.