Journal of Late Antiquity

The Historia monachorum in Aegypto (HM) is one of the most influential and yet understudied late antique texts about the monks of the Egyptian desert. Originally written in Greek by an unknown author in the late fourth century, this work was widely read in western European monasteries throughout the Middle Ages owing to its translation into Latin in 403–4 by Tyrannius Rufinus (345–411). A contemporary of Jerome and Augustine, Rufinus is well known to modern scholars for his translations of Greek patristic literature into Latin, most notably the Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius of Caesarea and many works by Origen, whose doubtful orthodoxy called into question Rufinus's motives as a propagator of his doctrines. In his recent book The Greek Historia monachorum in Aegypto: Monastic Hagiography in the Late Fourth Century (Oxford, 2016), Andrew Cain began the work of rehabilitating the [End Page 442] Greek HM by examining the authorship, rhetorical style, theological arguments, and historical context of the Greek and Latin texts. In the volume under review, Cain provides readers with a clear and accessible translation into English of Rufinus's Latin translation of the HM. The result is a welcome addition to the library of the literature of late antique desert spirituality, which will serve scholars of the monastic tradition and their students for generations to come.

On the surface, the HM presents a rogues' gallery of wonder-working desert ascetics. While most of them lack the name recognition of an Antony or a Pachomius, their miracles are no less impressive. For example, we hear the story of an old hermit named Patermuthius (Chapter 9), who on one occasion bid a dead monk to talk and on another made the descending sun stand still so that he could reach the town of an ailing brother before nightfall. When the man of God arrived to find that his friend had already died, he summoned him back from the dead only to learn that the monk preferred to be with Christ than to return to the living. In another episode, Patermuthius is able to teleport at will, "whisked away, in the twinkling of an eye, to whatever place he wanted, no matter how far away it was" (136). These stories are equally charming for the candid details that they offer about their incidental characters. When a member of the visiting entourage succumbs to sleep while listening to these tales, he receives a rebuke from God in a dream. He woke up startled and "right away related to us, discreetly in Latin, what he had seen" (138; emphasis mine).

While Rufinus's translation of this late fourth-century inquiry about the monks in Egypt made available to Latin readers a mosaic of prose portraits of lesser known, but no less powerful, hermits of the desert, the underlying message of monastic spirituality presented by the texts would be difficult to parse without Cain's insightful introduction. After providing information about the life of Rufinus and his industry as a translator, Cain follows three important lines of inquiry for understanding the Latin text of the HM as a whole. First, a comparison of the anonymous Greek original with Rufinus's Latin translation shows that while Rufinus adhered to the general structure of his source, he was much freer in his treatment of its content, translating the sense of the original rather than rendering it verbatim. Second, despite these differences, Rufinus follows the lead of his source in representing the Egyptian monks typologically as successors to the Old Testament prophets and New Testament apostles. While much of this is done indirectly through intertextual parallels, both texts succeed in conveying "the subliminal message that the outstanding Egyptian monks actualize in their lives the fullness of God's grace as revealed across the entire spectrum of the Bible" (28). Third, and most importantly, Cain argues that the presents a model of monastic...