An abbot is elected by the professed monks of his own monastery, typically for a term of years or, in some congregations, for life, following procedures set out in the monastery's own constitutions within the framework of universal and monastic canon law; the election is followed by an abbatial blessing, a solemn rite conferred by a bishop, that installs the elected monk in office rather than constituting a form of ordination, since the office of abbot is a governing role layered on a monk's existing status rather than a distinct degree of Holy Orders. Benedictine monasticism's own historical development, from Benedict of Nursia's sixth-century foundation at Monte Cassino through the later medieval reform movements, Cluniac, Cistercian and Trappist among them, that each sought a return to stricter observance of the original Rule, has produced numerous distinct congregations, each governing its member abbeys somewhat differently while sharing the same foundational text.
Historically, abbots of major medieval monasteries frequently held substantial temporal power alongside their spiritual authority, controlling extensive lands, serving as feudal lords in their own right, and in some territories sitting in national assemblies or parliaments as a matter of their office's civil as well as ecclesiastical standing, a temporal dimension of the abbacy that has almost entirely disappeared in the modern era even as the office's internal monastic governance continues largely unchanged.