“Sulpicius’s Vita Martini (Life of Martin) [became] one of the most influential texts in Western church history. As a result, Saint Martin would come to embody the Western asceticism of the mixed life, a combination of eremitic asceticism and pastoral work among people . . . [Martin] allowed himself to be led by the original ideals of the Desert Fathers, living on the edge of the human world rather by the principles of the ‘true’ anachoretae. Western Europe would follow him in this respect.”
—Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker, “Anchorites in the Low Countries” from Anchoritic Traditions of Medieval Europe, Liz Herbert McAvoy, ed. (Woodbridge, England: The Boydell Press, 2010) , pp 24-25
[Image: Detail from “Scene from the Martinslegende” by Gebhard Fugel (1900), located in Stadtpfarrkirche St. Martinus, Wangen, Germany]