The island monastery of Iona, for example, may seem exotically remote to many moderns, but it was fully immersed in the international theological culture of its age. By the early eighth century, the Iona library contained works by Basil and John Cassian, Jerome, Augustine, Philip the Presbyter, Sulpicius Severus, Athanasius, Gregory the Great, and many others. Of course, there was also a great deal of what we might now call “folk Christianity”—the faith of a largely peasant population—as well as