The core subjects of the treatise are monastic communities and their related societies in the Slovene territory from about 1500 to the radical reforms in the eighties of the 18th century. They are dealt with as a whole, as a segment of the Catholicism, which was in the first decades of the Early Modern Times characterised by the Protestant Reformation, and was in the last decades of the period limited and endangered by the Enlightenment policy of Vienna, and to some degree Venice. In the interim – on average a century and a half long – period of heyday, monastic institutions with their manifold activities supplemented, and in many places also surpassed the role of the secular clergy. All this time, the highest ecclesiastical and secular, princely authority attempted to frame monasticism in line with their own respective views; the former, in particular, by implementing the decrees of the Council of Trent, and the latter as the patron and eventually the user of its material goods.