In this paper I intend to present some results that emerged from the application of a new approach to the study of education in a specific historical setting, the monastic communities of  11^th and 12^th century Western Europe.
By relying on the theory of the “communities of practice”, I will address the role of transition in the learning processes which took place within the above-mentioned environments, as they are attested by the monastic letters of the high Middle Ages. My approach will be twofold: on the one hand I intend to argue that education can be seen as a process of transition which gradually brings a newcomer to the full membership of a community. On the other hand I will focus on the actors' perceptions of the identity shift involved in the process of learning.
The study doesn’t focus on a single case-study or geographical area, but rather analyzes in a comparative way twenty monastic communities scattered around Western Europe (Eastern Europe has been excluded from the analysis because of its different language and peculiar cultural tradition). A comparative approach to Western-European monastic sources shows that the authors felt that they all belonged to a transnational élite which shared the same culture while communicating in a lingua franca, medieval Latin: this was the product of their education, which was largely similar regardless of the place where they had received it.

Bearing this in mind, parallels with modern-day and, maybe even more so, a possible future Europe, are striking. Indeed, investigating the processes of identity-making involved in learning in these environments can contribute to a better understanding of the complex interplay between individual, national, religious and European identity, then as now.

The fact that medieval culture cannot be approached if not within a European perspective has been widely acknowledged by the international debate on medieval education, in which the present study aims to place itself. While traditional approaches were strongly centered on institutional structures or on the individual role of the master, recent studies (Vaughn, Rubenstein 2006) have shown that monastic schools should not be considered separate entities within the monasteries, since the whole monastic life functioned, in many ways, as a school, through all its spiritual, intellectual, social and manual activities. This idea of an “educational way of life” calls strongly in question the importance of the social and communal context in which earning took place.

Although the importance of the community in monastic social and cultural life had long been acknowledged (McGuire 1988, Stock 1983) and the notion of “community of learning” itself has been put forth in medieval studies (Mews, Crossley 2011), much remains to be done to examine how learning processes worked concretely within monastic communities. The concept of “community of practice”, developed by cognitive anthropologists Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, is very useful for this purpose, because it  allows to investigate social interactions as an important means of learning and to re-evaluate the link between learning and construction of identity by placing it in its social context. In this sense, learning means becoming a different person primarily with respect to the possibility of taking on new roles within the community, getting involved in new activities, performing new tasks and functions and mastering new understandings.

The combination of the use of the notion of “communities of practice” with the most recent research approaches to monastic education focusing on the importance of the social framework and on the existence of various ways of learning, written and non written, offers a promising opportunity for innovative research, especially because the role of transition in medieval monastic learning has never been specifically explored.

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