Beauty consuming itself like incense burnt before God in solitude: these stories of penitent women from the fourth- century egyptian desert fascinated Christian

First Published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In the fourth century, the deserts of Egypt became the nerve center of a radical new movement, what we now call monasticism. Groups of Christians-from illiterat

Late antique and early medieval hagiographic texts present holy women as simultaneously pious and corrupt, hideous and beautiful, exemplars of depravity and mod