Yet paradoxically, it was also a bad time to be a scholar. For although scholarship in the west was encouraged, respected, patronized, and protected during the Carolingian age, during the early Middle Ages the Latin Christian world was also becoming increasingly inward looking: suspicious of other faiths, other modes of thinking, and other authorities. Because scholars were overwhelmingly to be found in monasteries and cathedrals, scholarship as a whole took on an increasingly concentrated Christian flavor, in which the writings of non- and pre-Christians were viewed with mounting suspicion.
