In Monastic Desires, Derek Krueger approaches two still rather obscure topics, Middle Byzantine homoeroticism and homophobia, through one central, monastic guide, Symeon the New Theologian, whose life and writings embody both. Chapter 1 introduces Symeon, whose use of ‘tropes of erotic literature’ (p. 1) in his monastic writings has long been studied by scholars who tend to overlook its explicitly homoerotic nature, an oversight K.’s opening chapter corrects. He focuses especially on the Parable of the Rebel in Symeon’s Tenth Ethical Discourse, with comparisons to his Hymns on Divine Love, arguing that its evocative homoerotic language was meant to instill a passionate desire for closeness with God, using language and imagery that likely resonated with the monks hearing it.

To further set the scene for his study, K. skillfully weaves sources across genres and periods, tracing biblical, theological, and philosophical references in Symeon’s writing while establishing historical context. Chapter 2 reconstructs ‘a culture of opprobrium as it might have been present in Middle Byzantium’ through the ninth-century, decidedly homophobic, George the Monk. K. describes his method as an ‘archaeology of opprobrium’, a stratigraphic reading of one specific passage in George’s Chronicle where perpetrators of same-sex penetration are graphically punished under the reign of Justinian. K. digs through the strata of prior authors George drew on, tracing their objectives and their engagement with law, scripture, patristics, and liturgy, and he shows how George reshaped what he inherited to speak to his Middle-Byzantine audience.

Chapter 3 turns to literary sources, notably medieval Greek romances, to examine the ‘formation of the monk as lover’ (p. 85). K. shows Symeon using himself as an example, leaning into homoerotic desires evidently familiar to him and paralleling the pothos of romantic heroes, a longing that lets him bind worldly, fleshly desire to monastic celibacy.

Chapter 4 shifts form and may serve as a delayed introduction to the volume. K. surveys Middle-Byzantine typika and other monastic writings circulated in Middle Byzantine monasteries by authors like Basil of Caesarea, Theodore Studite and Paul Helladikos among others, demonstrating how they frame the threat of same-sex desire in monasteries and how that related to Byzantine ideas of gender. K. then justifies why the topic deserves discussion at all: ‘the assumption that queer people in the past are radically different from queer people in the present has tended to disrupt the very hope for a history of queer people […] same-sex desires present continuities grounded in material bodies, even as they are experienced differently from place to place’ (p. 127); and, as K. argues, monasteries were particularly queer environments. Further, K. defends his approach to the rest of the book, choosing to ‘describe Byzantine monasticism as [he has] come to understand it rather than explain [his] methods’, and framing history itself as ‘an exercise in empathy’ (p. 127).

One possible cost of trading methodological justification for a conversive approach is that it risks letting certain groups of people fall through the cracks, in this case women who experienced same-sex desire in monastic settings. Without a clear defense for the chosen corpus, their near-absence from the narrative reads less like a limitation explicable by the available sources and more like a possible disregard for female monastic homoerotic experience, especially given K.’s own claim that ‘there is no ascetic life independent of the flight from the social construction of desire’ (p. 128). At least one typikon resembling those K. uses in this chapter survives from a female monastery, the twelfth-century Theotokos Kecharitomene, that expresses fear about younger women entering the cells of older sisters, ‘causing scandal’.Footnote ¹ K. himself shows later in the book that ‘genital rubbing’ could be listed as a sin for women with women as well as for men with men, as in the penitential manual known as the Kanonarion (p. 182). The other genres K. draws on to demonstrate anxiety about male same-sex desire – chronicles, exegesis, law – seem to show little of the same anxiety around female homoeroticism, but one wonders if that reflects a genuinely lesser concern or if it is just another example of how women can be left out of history because of the specific concerns of the authors who have survived. Reading female monastic texts against the framework K. lays out here, to ask whether they fit similar patterns, would be a welcome next step in scholarship.

The book’s second half moves first to hagiography, then to Symeon’s biographer and copyist, Niketas Stethatos. K. reads four tenth-century Constantinopolitan hagiographical fictions, the Lives of Nephon, Basil the Younger, Andrew the Fool, and Gregentios, arguing that despite being fictions, they demonstrate a shared moral vision of same-sex desire as an impediment to attaining heaven, while in certain cases being something warranting repentance. We can note that within the discussion of the Life of Basil, Krueger considers a rare hagiographical reference to gynaikomania, sexual contact between two women (p. 159–61).

Chapters 7 and 8 examine Niketas as both transmitter of Symeon’s writing and as ‘a highly skilled author with theological and philosophical interests of his own’ (p. 230). K. studies Niketas’ Three Hundred Chapters, in which ‘ascetic practice reorients desire by reorganizing the senses, reconfiguring the experience of pleasure and fulfilment’ (p. 209). K. then looks at how Niketas’ own monastic writings, including the Life of Symeon the New Theologian, informed, or were informed by, Niketas’ own experience of Symeon’s life and ideas, and he compares the establishment of the cult of Symeon the Studite by Symeon the New Theologian with the establishment of the cult of Symeon the New Theologian by Niketas.

Although the book centres around one main protagonist, K. succeeds in making Symeon legible not as an isolated case of homoeroticism but as one monk within a society that had its own culturally constructed conceptions of same-sex desire, not entirely alien to our own. Monastic Desires follows many earlier articles and book chapters written by K. that discuss gender and sexuality, and it is an important step towards bringing more queer histories into Byzantine studies, one that should generate debate and spark further studies.