The book explores socio-economic relations of monastic communities with the secular world of mainly rural Egypt in the 5th-8th c. Three case studies based on discrete corpora of documents (the archive of the Apions, the documentary dossier of the village of Aphrodito, the dossier of the Bawit monastery) shed light on different aspects of such relations. The questions addressed are the links of the monasteries with the topmost social and economic elites, the functioning of monasteries in a rural setting, and the internal workings of monastic organization. The case studies are followed by two chapters which discuss, respectively, the settings, actors, and values in monastic economies, and the activities related to patronage and social communication.