Abstract
To present the textual sources of Western monasticism up to c. 750, it is essential to involve specialists of Eastern Christianity in order to take into account the exchanges and reciprocal influences that have shaped the monks from different regions of the Christian world. In addition to my contribution on Latin sources, Michel Kaplan was responsible for the Greek sources, Anne Boud’hors for the Coptic ones, Muriel Debié for the Syriac sources (outside Palestine), and Bénédicte Lesieur for the Palestinian ones. Nevertheless, any attempt at synthesis would be premature; if many texts have been translated—from Greek to Latin and vice versa, but also into Syriac, Coptic, Arabic, Georgian, Armenian, and Ethiopian—no existing repertory lists them. The current state of our knowledge is still lacunary, for it relies on an outmoded vision of history that separated and even opposed East and West.