Overview

Egypt is revered as the home of the famous Desert Ascetics, who first embraced a monastic life and established homosocial communities on the borders of their urban centres in the Nile Valley. Regarded as angels and warriors, the wisdom of the Desert Ascetics formed part of the oral and literary tradition of wonder-working saints whose commitment to asceticism was legendary and inspirational. This book grounds the mythologized stories of Desert Ascetics in the materiality of the desert, demonstrating the closeness of the desert, the connections between non-monastic and monastic communities, and the exciting insights into lived monasticism through the archaeology of monasticism in Egypt.

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9781641891677

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The real gift of Hedstrom’s book ... comes when she moves away from the familiar stories that general readers can access readily enough. After asking how reliable the stories are – “And is reliability necessary?” – she sets out to describe “the actual lived experience of desert life.” She does this by generous use of other literary and documentary sources, and archaeology. The picture she paints is fascinating, and rather than ruining or undermining the power of the sayings and stories, she makes the lives of these men and women even more admirable. -- Tim Miller * Medieval World: Culture and Conflicts 12 (2024): 57 *

Author Information

Darlene L. Brooks Hedstrom is the Myra and Robert Kraft and Jacob Hiatt Associate Professor of Christian Studies at Brandeis University. She worked at the Monastery of John the Little in Wadi Natrun, Egypt, as the Chief Archaeologist and is currently the Senior Archaeological Consultant for the Yale Monastic Archaeology Project.

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