Hugo Lundhaug and Lance Jenott attempt to resolve the scholarly debate over the origins of the Nag Hammadi codices by situating them as firmly as possible within the intellectual and spiritual context of Pachomian monasticism. Lundhaug and Jenott approach the problem from a range of perspectives: they revisit long-standing assumptions about late ancient Christianity, bring to bear new research on the social and economic realities of Egyptian monasticism, and attend closely to the materiality of the books themselves, their bindings, palaeography and scribal notations. While they do not provide incontrovertible proof of monastic usage or transmission (nor do they claim to), they adduce new types of evidence which, taken together, make a strong, if still not entirely convincing, case for the plausibility of monastic origins of the Nag Hammadi codices.

The first four chapters review the history of scholarship, including the dating and discovery of the manuscripts (ch. i) and recent work revealing the diversity of monastic lifestyles and theological outlooks, all of which complicates the hagiographical picture of orthodox and intellectually simple Egyptian monks (ch. ii). Chapters iii–iv critique commonly held theories about the origins of the Nag Hammadi codices, either that the codices were produced by Egyptian Gnostics or by circles of urban literati faced with declining Greek literacy.

The most original portions of the volume fall in chapters v–viii. In chapter v Lundhaug and Jenott revisit the origins of the cartonnage (papyri reused in bookbinding). Especially convincing is their argument that a letter from a certain oikonomos Paphnoute to his ‘beloved father Pachome’ is most likely an autograph of a Pachomian letter (pp. 136–8). Yet even with the probable autograph copy of Paphnoute's letter to Pachomius, Lundhaug and Jenott acknowledge that the cartonnage still do not provide incontrovertible proof of the monastic origins of the codices; they limit themselves to the claim that the cartonnage could have come from a monastery, and that the source of cartonnage is more ambiguous than previous studies have acknowledged (p. 111).

Chapter vi (‘Apocryphal books in Egyptian monasteries’) provides the most compelling case for monks having read and transmitted the Nag Hammadi codices, addressing the common objection that books like the Nag Hammadi codices would have been incongruous with Egyptian monastic culture of the fourth century and later. While monastic book lists generally fail to record apocryphal texts, and bishops and administrators inveighed against reading secret books, apocrypha continued to be transmitted in monastic libraries through the early Middle Ages, including some that share angelic or demonological terminology and thematic similarities with some Nag Hammadi tractates. Most telling is the so-called Berlin Gnostic Codex, which preserves the Apocryphon of John, and which was owned by a certain ‘Zacharias, arch-presbyter, abbot’ (p. 164). Such apocryphal texts could be transmitted in monasteries because they (here specifically Pachomian) lacked centralised libraries; monks kept books in their cells, and could have circulated them without close supervision. Ancient condemnations of monks’ use of apocrypha, along with the Nag Hammadi codices' notable lack of biblical texts, suggest, according to Lundhaug and Jenott, that the manuscripts were collected and put in their resting place ‘due to a purge of heretical books’ (p. 177).

In Chapter vii (‘The colophons’), Lundhaug and Jenott examine the Nag Hammadi codices as evidence for monastic copying. Their analysis is engaging and original, although not all the colophons point ineluctably to monastic practice. The colophon in Codex 7, following the Three steles of Seth, evokes terminology now familiar from monastic sources, as does a colophon in Codex 2 following the Book of Thomas, though not as definitively. Other colophons seem less convincingly monastic (pp. 189–97). Significantly, Lundhaug and Jenott show that a colophon in Codex 6 reflects informal manuscript circulation among members of a network of literate colleagues, and was not the product of a paid scribe (p. 202).

In Chapter viii (‘The codices’), Lundhaug and Jenott address previous approaches to the scribal copyists of the Nag Hammadi codices and their dialects. In general, the existence of identifiable scribal groupings among the codices and the existence of a range of dialectical variations have been taken as strikes against the monastic hypothesis. Instead, the codices are products of a network of private individuals who have exchanged texts up and down the Nile, travelling texts which have been preserved in the Nag Hammadi codices, in Lundhaug's and Jenott's reading pointing to a monastic, likely Pachomian, context.

Chapters ix and x conclude the volume, identifying Pachomian monasteries as the most plausible context for the use and transmission of the Nag Hammadi codices.

The volume as a whole reflects the authors’ deep learning and mastery of the scholarly literature, and will be a valuable reference for students of Egyptian monasticism and the Nag Hammadi tractates. The volume is clearly written and edited with exceptional care, with clear and useful maps and images, indices and bibliography. Yet the book is at times repetitive, and some chapters are belabored with critiques of select scholarship, while other relevant work on the history of the Gnostic movement is cursorily dismissed (for example, p. 57n). Throughout, they rely on the justifiable objection of recent scholarship to the modern category of ‘Gnosticism’ as if this also means that that Gnostics (or other related groups) did not exist (for example, p, 200). For these there is evidence even into the fourth century, such as Epiphanius’ description of the Archontics (discussed at pp. 66–9), or the Valentinian chapel destroyed by a mob in Callinicum in 388. At times their arguments read as tendentious; their revisionist description of the Nag Hammadi codices' theological proclivities in chapters iii and iv, for example, strikes me as convincing only if one is already convinced of the books’ monastic origins (pp. 63–4, 84–9). In the end, Lundhaug and Jenott make a strong case that the Nag Hammadi codices could plausibly have been used and copied by monks (although not the monks of hagiography), but they do not show that the monastic hypothesis is necessarily more plausible than other possible sources, communities and networks that simply have not left the volume of documentation that the Pachomian monasteries have.