From September 394 to early January 395, seven monks from Rufinus of Aquileia’s monastery on the Mount of Olives made a pilgrimage to Egypt to visit locally renowned monks and monastic communities. Shortly after their return to Jerusalem, one of the party, whose identity remains a mystery, wrote an engaging account of this trip. Although he cast it in the form of a first-person travelogue, it reads more like a book of miracles that depicts the great fourth-century Egyptian monks as prophets and apostles similar to those in the Bible. This work was composed in Greek, yet it is best known today as Historia monachorum in Aegypto (Inquiry about the Monks in Egypt), the title of the Latin translation of this work made by Rufinus, the pilgrim-monks’ abbot. The Historia monachorum is one of the most fascinating, fantastical, and enigmatic pieces of literature to survive from the patristic period. In both its Greek original and Rufinus’s Latin translation it was one of the most popular and widely disseminated works of monastic hagiography during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Modern scholars value it not only for its intrinsic literary merits but also for its status, alongside Athanasius’s Life of Antony, the Pachomian dossier, and other texts of this ilk, as one of the most important primary sources for monasticism in fourth-century Egypt. Rufinus’s Historia monachorum is presented here in English translation in its entirety. The introduction and annotations situate the work in its literary, historical, religious, and theological contexts.

The Greek Historia Monachorum in Aegypto was one of the most widely read and disseminated Greek hagiographic texts during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. To this day it remains, alongside Athanasius' Life of Antony, one of the core primary sources for fourth-century Egyptian monasticism as well as one of the most fascinating, yet perplexing, pieces of monastic hagiography to survive from the entire patristic period. However, until now it has not received the intensive and sustained scholarly analysis that a monograph affords. In this study, Andrew Cain incorporates insights from source criticism, stylistic and rhetorical analysis, literary criticism, and historical, geographical, and theological studies in an attempt to break new ground and revise current scholarly orthodoxy about a broad range of interpretive issues and problems.

The study of historic foodways is as multifaceted and varied as food itself. The changes we see in food habits and choices over history reveal evolving social and political climates and help us envision our ancestors' everyday lives and imagined afterlives. Food certainly played a role in funerary rites; it was offered to the dead, of course, but also shared at the grave among the living family members, symbolically bridging between this world and the next. Choosing the food was embedded in a series of traditions and norms; how it relates to what was actually eaten in associated settlements enables an understanding of its meaning. Feasts, whether for the dead or the living, were laden with political and social meaning. Fasting, although requiring abstention from certain foods, also involves the management-from sourcing and storing to cooking and eating-of the permitted foods, a key concern in contexts such as monasteries where fasting occurred. This collective work demonstrates the diversity of possible approaches to food. It presents the current state of research on the foodways of Egypt and Sudan and highlights the importance of further interdisciplinary collaboration for a "big picture" approach. It brings together 16 articles covering archaeology (in the broadest sense), theory, anthropology, language, ethnography, and architecture to illustrate food traditions and history in Egypt and Sudan from as early as the 4th millennium BC to the 20th century.