Monastic Bodies: Discipline and Salvation in Shenoute of Atripe. By Caroline T. Schroeder

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Much of what we know about late antique monasticism in the eastern Mediterranean comes from the texts produced by charismatic ascetics and their followers: sermons, letters, rules of conduct, and sacred biographies written in Coptic, Greek, and Syriac. Recently, scholars of the late ancient world have turned to these sources to reconstruct and contextualize the religious and social worlds of the “great old men” of the desert and the communities they fostered. Jennifer Hevelone-Harper's Disciples of the Desert: Monks, Laity, and Spiritual Authority in Sixth-Century Gaza (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005) and Cornelia B. Horn's Asceticism and Christological Controversy in Fifth-Century Palestine: The Career of Peter the Iberian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) are good examples of this trend in research. Hevelone-Harper's elegant book taps a rich vein of spiritual and practical correspondence—over 800 extant letters—that reflects the cares and concerns of abbots and hermits in the village of Tawatha (near Gaza) for each other and for the laity among whom they lived. Horn's learned study uses the lens of hagiography to examine how the followers of Peter the Iberian portrayed the role of this prominent ascetic in the Christological controversies that shook Jerusalem in the fifth century. Richly contextualized in their respective historical frameworks, these works share sensitivity to the function of asceticism as a locus of authority in late antique communities, both religious and secular.