This carefully argued and insightful study represents a significant addition to the intellectual history of late antique coenobitic monasticism, and it is a particularly helpful guide to the preoccupations and rhetorical strategies of some monastic leaders in regard to their disciples. The term “care of souls” takes on a special meaning here. Neither is it the material, political, or other types of support that monastic leaders sought to obtain from external patronage or muster on their own, nor does it merely concern their delivery of preaching, teaching, and pastoral care. The aspect of “care” that Dilley focuses on instead—claiming rightly that it has been neglected by monastic scholarship—is the thorough and relentless efforts of monastic leaders to enforce obedience on and contain the wandering and thus sinful thoughts of their disciples. If this were a book about modern political regimes or modern civic, business, and religious institutions, we may be tempted to use modern terms, such as discrimination, hazing, intimidation, abuse, blackmail, brainwashing, propaganda, peer pressure, and big brother, to characterize the “care” that Dilley identifies in the life cycle of average monks. Dilley is comfortable with a modern approach to ancient societies; indeed he uses the term “hazing” (76–77) and is seemingly not unaware of the darker psychological and sociological dynamics of monastic “care.” His own modernist approach is grounded, however, in the use of cognitive sciences as a window into the past. Accordingly, his terms for making sense of monastic “care” tend to be clinical, even when adopted from ancient terminologies: that is, the promotion of “heart work” (15, 65, 108 and elsewhere), “metacognition” (97), “internalized patterns of thought-feeling” (138) or “habitus” (154), and more generally an array of Foucaultian “technologies of the self” (107–108).

The book begins with a provocative reading of biblical salvation history: Adam and Eve's sin of disobedience and overall evil thinking is still as much of a challenge for Christians to overcome, despite God's gift of grace, as it was for the castaway Israelites. Dilley takes this understanding of the human condition to be deeply seated in the minds of fourth–sixth century coenobitic monastic leaders, prompting them to take extraordinary measures to groom their flocks for the purpose of securing their ultimate salvation. The detailed story of their efforts is then examined in three parts of the study, with hagiography, normative sources, and sermons serving as the main body of evidence. In part 1 (21–96), Dilley reviews a series of “costly” entrance procedures and rituals in which, on one hand, almost all credible candidates are given a chance to join a monastery, while on the other, these candidates are vetted and screened thoroughly before being fully accepted, that is, through interrogations, hazing, the placement of onerous demands and oaths, and various symbolically-laden rituals of worldly detachment. What happens to monks privately and publicly in the decades to follow is the subject of parts 2 and 3. Part 2 (97–219) is the book's most detailed and interesting section. It identifies and details the three “cognitive disciplines” that monastic leaders used to redirect their monks’ “embodied minds” (15) away from wandering thoughts and disobedience to habits conducive to salvation. The first of these disciplines is intimacy with scripture, the encouragement of which included obligatory scriptural, scribal, memorization, recitation, and listening exercises for everyone in addition to being subjected on a regular basis to highly emotional or “ekpathetic” (127 and following) catechisms, all with a view to encouraging the monk's internalization of scriptural truths. The second discipline is instilling a fear of God and its corollaries of shame, self-blame, and guilt through the internalization of fear itself, acts of public and private shaming and rebuke, privacy deprivation, corporeal punishment, and acts of psychological anguish. The last discipline, prayer, comprised a variety of personalized prayer strategies and affirmation spectacles to help disciples hear God's voice more clearly, activate their consciences both positively and prophylactically in accordance with divine will, and even see themselves as entering into a dialogue with the divine. Part 3 (221–297) examines certain aspects of communal life and ritual, notably the emergence of commemoration ceremonies of exemplary monastic leaders, which were designed to reinforce group identity, stress certain teachings over others, and standardize models of good behavior.

Dilley is a fine scholar, a thoughtful and insightful interpreter, and an engaging writer. A strong point of the study, besides his use of cognitive science to enrich our understanding of the thought processes of ancient Christians, is his knowledge of ancient rhetoric, from Aristotle to Quintillian. His treatments of protrepic speech, ekpathetic rhetoric, and mimesis are all helpful ways to contextualize and read the rhetorical strategies of monastic leaders.

A number of issues diminish the overall value of this study. First, whatever the book's title, it is mainly about Egyptian monasticism in the traditions of Pachomius (ob. 348), Theodore (ob. 368), Horsiesius (ob. 387), and Shenoute (ob. c. 465); parallels with other contemporary monastic traditions are helpful but the experience described here is decidedly local and particular. Second, the secondary bibliography is rather thin in certain areas, notably for developments outside of Egypt and in languages outside of English. Third, historical source criticism is practically absent, even though the types of evidence Dilley employs warrants special consideration. Fourth and finally, the study aims to capture “the efforts and consequences of contemporary religionists” (293) but is certainly stronger at examining strategies than assessing outcome; for instance, we start hearing about considerable turmoil in these Egyptian monasteries only late in the book, without ever coming to understand whether such turmoil may have been a contributing cause of the brand of monastic “care” in force or perhaps its consequence.

Dilley's book aspires to contribute to a far-reaching debate, begun by Foucault, on “monasticism's place in cultural history” (7). It fulfills this promise, albeit more with respect to late antique Egypt than to Europe and the Mediterranean and more in regard to the disposition of monastic leaders than to the experience of their followers.