Writing in 1954, Trappist monk Thomas Merton, for example, called the text "a practical and concise treatise of Cistercian asceticism." Nevertheless, Alice of Schaerbeek was not particularly well known. Chyrsogone Waddell, reflecting on his entry into the Cistercian life in the 1950s, remarked on her obscurity, with Alice being mostly unknown even in devout Cistercian communities of the time. In recent years, Alice has become more well known in medieval scholarship as a member of the so-called "Holy Women of Liège" corpus of thirteenth-century Latin biographies. This situates Alice, and her spirituality, in terms of the beguine movement, an innovation in medieval women's piety that saw women taking up an active religious life outside of monastic enclosure. Margot H. King and Ludo Jongen detail 5 extant manuscripts of Alice's biography (4 in Latin; 1 in Middle Dutch) These are: