Monasteries were vital (if not always successful) protectors of art and historical documents, too, especially in times of turmoil such as warfare, Viking raids or heresies like iconoclasm in the 8th and 9th centuries CE when religious art was ruthlessly destroyed and seen as blasphemous. Due to these efforts, we can today read texts not only from medieval times but also antiquity thanks to the labour of copyist monks and the monasteries which preserved those texts.
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