In the late fourth century seven monks ventured forth into the Egyptian desert in pursuit of piety, learning and inspiration. Their adventures are preserved in the Historia Monachorum, a text that survives in both Greek and Latin. The Greek version is the subject of C.’s monograph, the first thorough treatment of it in any language. And thorough C. is, systematically considering questions of text, translation, provenance, date, authorship, genre, literary influence and style, before turning to thematic issues around pilgrimage, typology, characterisation, theology, monasticism and propaganda. If the book ultimately fails to add up to more than the sum of its parts, those parts are nevertheless a significant achievement, and this is important reading for anyone interested in hagiography and pilgrimage.
After a programmatic prologue, the book falls in two rough parts: Chapters 1–5, on form, and Chapters 6–11, on content. C. begins with textual questions, affirming the validity of A.-J. Festugière's edition (Historia Monachorum in Aegypto. Édition critique du texte grec [1961]), but arguing, against Festugière and earlier editors, that the Greek recension is the original. Since the case is cumulative, and rests in part upon other hypotheses he develops, C.’s may not be the last word, but it will certainly reignite debate. Chapter 2 progresses to provenance, date and authorship. C. argues that these travelling monks be linked to Rufinus and Melania's monastic convent, dates the text to the last few years of the fourth century, affirms single authorship, suggests cautiously that the author might be the Spaniard Anatolius and discusses the consequences of deliberate anonymity. Chapter 3 considers the work's genre, identifying its affinities to travel writing, collective biography, encomium, martyr narratives and apophthegmata. C. ultimately labels it ‘an innovative hybrid composition’ (p. 58), characteristic of the age. Chapter 4 lays out literary influences and intertexts C. can identify; there are no clear cases of borrowing from Classical Greek literature, but an abundance from the Bible. C. also includes a very interesting discussion of echoes between the Historia Monachorum and the Life of Antony – there is one parallel firm enough to suggest the author of the former knew the latter, but otherwise the paucity of concrete references suggests that our anonymous author deliberately prioritised Egyptian oral traditions in portraying Antony (to avoid repeating material, to add his own distinctive layer to the accruing legends or to de-centre Antony in monastic tradition). Chapter 5 provides an extremely detailed account of style (C.’s ‘The Style of the Greek Historia Monachorum in Aegypto’, REAug 58 [2012], 57–96, contains even more detail), encompassing figures of sound, repetition, redundancy, parallelism, imagery and assorted extras, as well as prose rhythm.
The book then turns to thematic questions. Chapter 6 begins by considering the pilgrimage itself. C. first teases out what we can glean of the monks' itinerary (an accompanying map would have been helpful), before considering the symbolism of the literary picture, designed to emphasise the heavenly seal on the monks' enterprise. Chapter 7 picks up this latter theme by arguing that the monks encountered in Egypt are consistently painted as new prophets and apostles via direct and indirect typological parallels with Old and New Testament texts. Particularly exciting is C.’s demonstration of the composite typologies by which this author layered his monastic portraits with echoes from both biblical canons. The monks are thus not subsumed to any one predecessor; in fact they are neither inferior nor superior to their biblical forebears, but are rather inspired by the same Spirit and part of the same unbroken and ongoing sacred history. C. concludes with a fascinating reminder of the implicit consequences of such Scriptural ties for the authority of the Historia Monachorum and its author. Chapter 8 considers characterisation, specifically of the supporting cast's hostile members – pagans, Syrian ascetics and Manichaeans. The manifold tales of the monks' successful and often miraculous conversions of ‘Hellenes’ not only demonstrate the monks' divine support but also that the author envisaged Christianisation and monasticisation as occurring not by imperial dictate but by monks' grass roots actions. A systematic disapproval of ostentatious asceticism privileges Egyptian monastic ideologies over their Syrian alternatives. And the unflattering portrayal of Manichaeans vindicates Egyptian monks of any suspicion that their asceticism was akin to that of this much-suspected and imperially proscribed group. Chapter 9 considers how the Historia Monachorum foregrounds monks in salvation history. They not only have divinely-given authority over nature and its inhabitants, but are also, by merit of their liminal position on earth and in heaven, sources of practical support, and, in their manifold conversions, ministers of salvation. Chapter 10 turns to the author's intentions and his target audience. The Historia Monachorum is explicitly designed, C. demonstrates, to provide, first, a stimulus to emulation and reminder of ascetic excellence for veteran monks, and second, edification and guidance to ascetic beginners. C. also maps these two (male) groups, less persuasively, onto eastern Greek-speaking monks and western Latin-speaking senatorial Christians with knowledge of Greek. This work is thus for C. not only entertaining but didactic, a ‘free form “guidebook”’ (p. 243) designed to present the Egyptian monks as both models for imitation and divinely-inspired teachers. In Chapter 11, C. closes by noting that much of the ascetic lore here echoes that of Evagrius, and proposes that the Historia Monachorum was intended to propagate and defend that problematic figure's ideas.
C.’s work has much to recommend it – it is lavishly footnoted and well cross-referenced, contains an extensive bibliography, five indexes and few typos, and is generally detailed in discussion and judicious in judgement. C. is at his best in discussing style, intertextuality and typology, and certainly succeeds in his primary aim of rehabilitating this understudied work (p. 3). Rehabilitation is all the rage, and being shown the value in works previously neglected is always welcome. But it is perhaps in that rather limited goal that the book proves more worthy than stimulating. It is at its least persuasive when it treats its most interesting content, as with C.’s argument that this work represents propaganda for Evagrian monasticism, which is suggestive rather than definitive, with no real solution proposed to the (acknowledged) problem that, while Evagrius is one of the monks encountered, he is not singled out for detailed treatment. If this diffidence is to be ascribed to concerns over Evagrius' orthodoxy, C. only implies it in passing (p. 270 n. 130). There is also a more wide-reaching problem – frustrating, rather than fatal – in the recurring tension between the positivistic and the rhetorically sophisticated. I will mention just one example, namely the historicity of the speeches of monks recorded. At the conclusion of Chapter 5's discussion of style, C. notes that rhetorical sophistication permeates both the narrator's own voice and those of his protagonists. Acknowledging that desert Copts were unlikely to have spoken with such sophistic aplomb, C. suggests that these speeches preserve the core content of their historical originals, but that they have been rhetorically retouched for an educated audience. That conclusion is not a bad one. But C. dismisses the alternative explanation – that the speeches are fabricated – as ‘remotely conceivable’. It seems to me rather more so, given ancient historians' normal approach to embedded speeches. And tellingly, at different points C. both acknowledges (p. 122 n. 127) and dismisses outright (p. 268) that very parallel. That seems to me indicative of a deeper issue, namely that C.’s desire to showcase this author's literary sophistication jars with an unwillingness to acknowledge its potential consequences for the text's historicity. Literary qualities do not necessarily compromise a text's reliability. But it must be acknowledged, I think, that they can do so. Chapter 6, ‘The Pilgrimage: Reality and Representation’, sees this issue writ large, since it uses the Historia Monachorum to reconstruct a historical journey and a sophisticated literary agenda without ever acknowledging that the one could invalidate the other.
Nevertheless, there is little doubt that this monograph will immediately become the standard reference point for this intriguing work of early hagiography. In that sense we can not only offer C. our thanks, but also anticipate with pleasure the future work that his pioneering book will surely prompt.
