According to Philip Schaff, Swiss-born professor of church history at Union Theological Seminary in New York from 1887 to 1901, asceticism was ‘unscriptural, unnatural and morally dangerous’ (327); its eastern version was particularly dubious, most strikingly as practised by the stylite saints: ‘One knows not whether to wonder at their unexampled self-denial, or to pity their ignorance of the gospel salvation’ (328). Such views of late antique asceticism have, of course, long ceased to find place in respectable scholarship. Elizabeth Clark's lively study of nineteenth-century protestant professors in America which closes this volume demonstrates just how far English-language scholarship in the field has come in recent years. The rôle and influence of the dedicatee of this volume, Philip Rousseau, is made very clear indeed. This is a Festschrift where, happily, a number of of papers take direct and explicit inspiration from the honorand, in productive dialogue with his significant scholarly output.

This is, therefore, an impressively cohesive edited volume, which acts as an excellent guide to the state of scholarship in the field of late antique asceticism. It features many of the best-known names working in what we might think of as the new patristics, most of them, notably, based or at least trained in the USA. The book consists of fifteen substantive chapters, divided into four largely convincing sections, which take us from Egyptian texts, through questions of ascetic discipline and landscapes more imaginary than real to the history of scholarship. As is customary, limited space precludes detailed examination of all contributions. The first section, ‘Books as Guides’, shows nicely the richness and complexity of current scholarship on Egyptian monasticism. It demonstrates in particular that attention to Coptic as well as Greek and Latin pays huge dividends. Malcolm Choat shows that scholars have consistently overrated the importance of Athanasius' version of Antony in Egypt, purely on the basis of the influence of Athanasius' text elsewhere, particularly in the West. Samuel Robensohn reconsiders the relationship between that text and the Life of Pythagorus, arguing for more of a shared intellectual culture than a sharp dichotomy between philosophical schools and early monasticism. Other chapters in this section consider the writings of Pachomius (Joel Kalvesmaki, Janet Timbie) and Athanasius (Georgia Frank) in their broader intellectual milieu. In Part 2, ‘Disciplines and Arenas’ we move from penitential spectacles in Syria (so despised by Philip Schaff) in Daniel Caner's piece, to the common life enjoyed by John Cassian's monks (Catherine Chin), and then the rather different community founded by the saintly Macrina, the only female ascetic in this book (Virginia Burrus). The study of Gregory Nazianzus' self-fashioning in his orations both for and against Maximus the Cynic by Susanna Elm provides a slightly out-of-place conclusion to this section.

We return to Egypt in Part 3 ‘Landscapes (with Figures)’, as James Goehring considers the construction of a mythical ascetic landscape and its rôle in constructing and promoting a broader Christian culture in Late Antiquity. The rôle of more classical pastoral landscapes in Christian discourse is considered by Robin Darling Young, while the rôle of animals in a new Christian anthropology is shown to be more complex than we might have thought by Patricia Cox Miller. A surprising cameo for Homer meanwhile appears in Blake Leyerle's study of the motif of xeniteia, or voluntary exile, in the writings of Evagrius of Pontus, who presented himself as an Odyssean wayfarer. Finally, the two papers in ‘Founding the Field’ provide a very nice coda to the previous studies, in providing fascinating insights into the history of the field of patristics. Claudia Rapp looks at Adolf Harnack, very much the founding father of patristic scholarship in Germany, and his scholarly influences. These include his equally renowned contemporaries Theodor Mommsen and Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, but also, more surprisingly, contemporary science, especially geology, which provided his metaphor of the ‘palaeontological layer of church history’ which he sought to uncover. Finally, Elizabeth Clark has gone back to the archival sources as part of her larger project to write the history of the particularly protestant strain of patristic scholarship in the USA. These professors (such as Philip Schaff) saw asceticism as a foreign import, as something hard to explain; their scholarship tended to derogate eastern Christianity as a ‘degenerate’ form (Roswell Hitchock) (325), with its form of asceticism spreading a spiritual ‘disease’ (327). This kind of reflection on the historiography of patristic scholarship seems timely. Moreover, as Clark concludes ‘we can thank Rousseau and others for treating us to a more just understanding of Christianity's past’ (332). This volume provides a truly fitting tribute to Philip Rousseau and its sensitive and nuanced studies will be warmly welcomed by those engaged in the study of the history of asceticism in Late Antiquity.