In this book Megan Williams attempts to show how Jerome was instrumental in the forging of an association we take for granted in post-medieval times, that of the ‘monk’ with the ‘book’, or of monastic culture with the culture of scholarship. In the time of Jerome, however, monasticism stressed the simple virtues of humility and poverty, whereas scholarship was something that traditionally belonged to the elite. It involved a very expensive ‘infrastructure’, in particular books, but also assistants such as stenographers and copyists. In the first part of this book, Williams puts together a literary biography of Jerome, tracing chronologically the development of his scholarly projects within the context of his ascetic aspirations. It culminates in chapter iii, a study of Jerome's commentaries on the Old Testament prophets, or his opus prophetale, as he calls it. These commentaries are based on much Jewish and Christian learning, the latter derived primarily from Greek works. This reliance on tradition, in Williams's view, is what allowed Jerome to portray his scholarly endeavour as fitting the humility of a monk (p. 131). The second half of the book, perhaps the more intriguing, treats the ‘infrastructure’ of Jerome's scholarship. This consisted in the first place of books, which Williams contends must have amounted to many hundreds and perhaps over one thousand codices. It also involved secretaries and copyists and learned Hebrew consultants from among the Jews. This infrastructure, for its part, was dependent on the support of Jerome's wealthy patrons and readers. It took not a little ingenuity on his part, as Williams details, to represent this infrastructure and interact with its benefactors in a way that was in tune with the monastic ideal.