The ten papers in this volume were delivered at a workshop held in Groningen in 2005, which took its title from a well-known article by James E. Goehring about the literary construction of the desert in Egyptian monastic writings. Three of the papers focus on Coptic sources – one by David Frankfurter, whose specialism is the religious transformation of late antique Egypt, the other two by Jacques van der Vliet and Peter van Minnen, which include responses to and criticisms of Frankfurter's work (which was the original purpose of the workshop). A more general essay on the importance of the idea of the desert in early Christianity by Claudia Rapp is followed by a paper on sixth-century western asceticism by Conrad Leyser, who argues that the ‘memory of the desert’ was pervasive in both episcopal and monastic thinking. Lynda L. Coon then writes about Carolingian appeals to the Egyptian desert tradition, mainly with reference to Fulda, and there follow four essays, including some of the longer ones, on imitation of the desert Fathers and other themes in later medieval religious life. As the principal contributor, Frankfurter sets the tone for some of the other essays by arguing that Coptic hagiography, as legend, is intimately connected with sacred landscape, supplying an aetiology of local traditions about saints and a validation of cultic centres. But he also teases out history from legend by identifying authentic details in a number of hagiographies about the paganism the overthrow of which so many of them portray. Van Minnen, in a paper in which it is quite difficult to discern any clear plan, dissents from Frankfurter on both the purpose and the historical value of hagiography. He emphasises that hagiography is a literary tradition based on the Bible and earlier models, best understood as ‘salvation history’, in the sense of a story of the process of turning from paganism to Christianity in the fourth century, written at a time when memories had faded and the historical reality was no longer known. While appreciative of the many interesting observations on the process of Christianisation in Egypt (and elsewhere in the Roman empire) which van Minnen's paper contains, I am inclined to side with Frankfurter's approach to the history which may lie behind hagiography, though I wonder whether the anthropological theorising which he considers necessary to understand it really adds much to what the historical–critical method, with its traditional shrewd judgement of plausibility, close reading of texts and broad human sympathy, can tell us.