The contemporary writing produced within late Roman ascetic circles was as important as the asceticism itself – perhaps even more so. To write about asceticism was, in any case, an ascetic act – Derek Kreuger has made that much clear. It also changed a haphazard and varied range of Christian experiments in anachōrēsis, ‘withdrawal’, into a movement, a culture, that cast its web with time, albeit thinly, over the whole of the ancient world.

In the case of this book, the boundaries are more narrowly drawn; but the ten papers presented give two vital impressions: first, the way in which the written evidence helped precisely to create and define a single culture, so scattered along the river and so soon to be transplanted, as it were, to Gaza and to Palestine more generally; and second, the sheer number of topics that inquiry opens up – the materiality of communication (papyrus in particular), the continuity of custom and ideology that it sustains, the difference between the portable and the rooted (epistolography and epigraphy), the achieved permanency of ‘monasticism’ as an ideal with a theology (and an anthropology) of its own, and the relation between what monks wrote and what they read (the Bible especially).

Egypt has been for some time a happy hunting ground for scholars whose skill and interest has been the letter. This is perhaps a natural consequence of preservation; but the focus has two immediate effects: first, it elevates a richly documented province into an essential component of the empire itself – indeed, the loss of the letter's long reach was a crucial factor in the empire's decline; and second, it shows the different levels of conscious identity that shared documentation could bring into mutual play. One can catch in the vocal character of exchange – its liturgical, legal, pithy, reflective, antagonistic and exegetical disclosures – something of the busier, raucous, angry and anxious, and socially extended ambiance that can be more hushed, more formal and more predictable in the polished and carefully edited missives of the élite. This book opens such windows, brings one down to street level, and gives the writing a space to work in.

It is sometimes felt, not least by reviewers, that collections of papers can be too dispersed in their attention to offer a useful picture more generally. Fortunately, publishers have become increasingly watchful in guarding against a scattered effect, and one is particularly reassured by the prudence of the best, as in this case: the resulting cohesiveness is also, of course, a compliment to the editors. Malcolm Choat (at Macquarie University) and Maria Chiara Giorda (currently at the Fondazione Bruno Kessler in Trento) are well established and widely respected scholars in this field, with books and papers to prove it. The point still needs to be made explicitly, because, as Lillian Larsen stresses in her short but trenchant introduction, there are still too many who blithely continue with what she calls the ‘well-crafted caricature’ of monastic Egypt as a refuge of ill-educated (if not wholly uneducated) peasant enthusiasts. In the cause of underpinning a powerful antidote to such prejudice, the editors between them pack with incontrovertible detail more than a third of the book.

Their seven remaining colleagues are far from blushing bystanders: they are ones who hit more particular nails on their particular heads – the transition from the creation to the (ritual) use of texts (Paul Dilley), the transition from custom to law (Esther Garel and Maria Nowak), the way in which writing (especially epigraphy) enhanced the significance of space (Jacques van der Vliet), the ideological and institutionalising force of the written word (Fabrizio Vecoli), the taking of Coptic seriously (Jennifer Westerfeld), and the balance between reading and listening (Ewa Wipszycka). What strikes one immediately about this list (in itself only partial in its allusions) is that it identifies the characteristics of any literary culture at the time. (Coptic here plays the role of any language anywhere else that was neither Syriac nor Greek nor Latin.) It makes the monastic writer and reader the peer of any writer and reader in the empire. The monks of Egypt provide just one example – but how rich – of how their ascetic colleagues beyond Egypt were able to erect a cultural machine equal to any other in the Christian commonwealth. Its effects had equal force, even if its purposes were different. We underestimate, in other words, the challenge that any literate monk could bring to bear on any comparable religious leader.

So, we are dealing here with an important book, which might easily slip through the net of scholars with their eyes elsewhere. Anything that tells us more about the Christian empire as a reading and writing society, with its breadth of vision, its itchy feet, the economic and social ventures that it was ready to risk, will find in these pages further detail to add to the stockpile of creative energy that literate Christianity thrived on; and that is an opportunity that we cannot afford to miss.