David Brakke's book focuses on a feature of Egyptian monastic literature that is often perplexing, if not repellent, to the modern reader: the demons who play such a prominent role in so many famous episodes and anecdotes. Brakke approaches the subject as a historian of religion, with an interest in the religious meaning attributed to these demons and their functions. He describes his ‘goal’ as ‘an “actual history” – the actual concerns, anxieties, and conflicts that the demonic helped monks negotiate within their culture' (p. 156). He pursues this goal through two major sections. In the first, Brakke introduces the generic figure of the monk in Egypt then follows this with chapters on Anthony the Great, Evagrius Ponticus, Pachomius and Shenoute. In the second section, the chapters are thematic and may be described in brief as follows: the ‘Ethiopian’ demon as the hypersexualised ‘Other’ who provokes social and personal changes; the demon and the ‘gaze,’ with particular attention to female monks and feminine demons; and the demon as the figure for pagan gods as a focal point in the monastic transformation of religious society. Throughout the study, Brakke demonstrates his mastery of the source material (as particularly evident in his eye for supporting anecdotes) and his conversance with recent trends in scholarship and with modern critical theories. The book has much to recommend it. To mention but a few of its strengths, the literature and its historical context are presented thoroughly and accurately; the discussion of Evagrius is excellent – probably the best to be published recently in a broad-based study of this sort; the analyses are always incisive and thought-provoking, even when the evidence Brakke marshals is rather more tenuous than his presentation would suggest. An example of that last point may be helpful. This reviewer found several insightful points in the chapter on the ‘Ethiopian’ demon that had been drawn from postcolonialist theory, which Brakke used in a particularly illuminating way to evaluate some well-known stories about Abba Moses the Ethiopian. On the other hand, it did seem on occasion that similar modes of interpretation put considerable strain on the literary evidence. For example, in the same chapter, Brakke identified erotic subtexts in two anecdotes (see pp. 169–71), but detecting those subtexts is less a matter of noticing any particular features that emerged from the anecdotes themselves than of appealing to the typology that Brakke developed in the course of the chapter. It is not self-evident that Brakke has rightly detected the monks’ ‘actual concerns, anxieties, and conflicts’ in these cases. But then the interpretive presentation of Egyptian monks and the literature about them is itself a long-established practice with a venerable tradition behind it. For this reason, there is to my mind a touch of irony in Brakke's decision not to study John Cassian in the body of his text (though in the conclusion it is clear that Brakke knows those writings well, too): in some striking ways, Brakke is like a latter-day John Cassian.