Paper Dolls of Late Antiquity

This essay was part of a 2026 NAPS Conference Book Review Panel devoted to Things Unseen: Essays on Evidence, Knowledge, and the Late Ancient World by Ellen Muehlberger. Read the full forum here. 

Let’s begin where Ellen Muehlberger does. In the very first chapter, she introduces a scene that is deceptively ordinary: a boy, about fourteen, sitting in a classroom somewhere in the late ancient Mediterranean—Antioch, perhaps—who is working through an assignment. He is asked to compose a speech in character, to answer a question that is both precise and conceptually unstable: “What would a prostitute who has come to her senses say?”

This is not simply an exercise in writing. It is an exercise in inhabiting, in rehearsing, in producing a voice that is not his own and yet must come to feel as though it is. As Muehlberger carefully shows, these exercises trained boys not only to represent women but to experience themselves as capable of doing so with authority. What begins as rhetorical play becomes, through repetition, a form of knowledge. Or, perhaps more precisely, a conviction of knowledge that does not require verification.

Muehlberger’s formulation is as elegant as it is unsettling: these imagined speeches, “even though they were deliberately made up—indeed, especially because they were made up—worked to instill a disposition of arrogance and a confident, self-generated knowledge of others.”[1] The force of that claim rests not simply on the presence of imagination, but on its elevation into evidence. The aim of this exercise is to train certainty and not empathy.

What emerges in this chapter, then, is a clever read of both the ancient world and the scholarly exercise: the less real the woman, the more knowable she becomes. The “impossible woman” as the chapter gestures then is not a failure of representation; she is its most efficient form. She is a paper doll of late antiquity and infinitely reproducible. As a repetitive figure she remains internally coherent and rhetorically satisfying. Most of all she is resistant to contradiction because she cannot answer back. She cannot exceed the script. She exists precisely at the point where imagination replaces encounter.

This is where Muehlberger’s intervention becomes so important for how we think about the archive of late antiquity. Muehlberger is not simply describing a pedagogical practice; she is identifying a mechanism by which gendered knowledge is produced and stabilized. These boys, trained in speaking as women, carry that practice into adulthood. They weave their way into the writing of histories, sermons, and, important for my own work, hagiographies. The classroom becomes the quiet foundation for a much larger discursive world—one in which women are already known before they are ever encountered.

At this point, I want to bring Muehlberger’s argument into conversation with Christine Luckritz Marquis, whose work on ascetic bodies exposes a related dynamic. Luckritz Marquis observed in her article “Better off Dead” that female and feminized bodies within monastic literature function not as subjects but as problems to be resolved—problems whose resolution often takes the form of elimination.[2] In the texts Luckritz Marquis examines, “the best female form is the dead one,” a conclusion that raises the pointed question: better for whom?

If we place this alongside Muehlberger’s rhetorical women, our paper doll pattern comes into focus. The imagined woman is already contained. The ascetic woman, when she appears in narrative form, is subjected to a similar containment—her body disciplined then her story ends. In both cases, the instability of the female figure is resolved through forms of control that render her legible. The rhetorical exercise and the ascetic narrative operate on different registers, but they converge on a shared outcome: a woman who can be known without any remainder.

This convergence becomes even more visible, when we turn to the layered Marys of late antiquity, whose overlapping identities resist any attempt at singularity. Mary of Egypt is perhaps the most striking example highlighted in the chapter, not because she is unique, but because she is so clearly assembled from prior forms as Muehlberger notes. She is not, strictly speaking, the prostitute of the rhetorical exercise, and yet she arrives already shaped by that figure. Her story read through a lens that expects sexual excess is quickly followed by repentance and transformation. She carries within her the folds of other Marys: Mary Magdalene, whose retrospective and false association with prostitution is itself a product of interpretive layering. The many Marys of the New Testament all collapse in on one another and take other unnamed women with them. These figures do not remain discrete. They produce a composite Mary that is at once overdetermined and strangely flat.

In this sense, Mary of Egypt is not one woman, and she cannot be. She is, rather, what the tradition makes possible when rhetorical types and the ascetic imagination converge. She becomes, as I have argued elsewhere, a figure constructed through “a web of interconnected themes… where gender violence and sanctity blur,” and where narrative excess produces what can only be described as monstrous coherence—but maybe that’s where the eventual Mary of Egypt escapes the final act where she is named in the sand after she has resolutely died.[3]

In the vita, before she is Mary, she is a sexual predator and a terrifying specter who floats without a name or identity. As I note in my last chapter of Gender Violence in Late Antiquity, she frequently reduces the pursuing monk to tears and prostrate gestures. He is frequently described as shaking with fear. Even in her description of her pre-flight to the desert life, she is more recognizably male than female. The yet to be named Mary is careful to note—a section of the text that Muehlberger draws our attention to—that she was not a typical prostitute. She would not accept payment for her sexual conquests.

The question is not whether this soon to be Mary was a prostitute, but why she must eventually be read as one. The answer lies not in her story, but in the structures and literary folds that precede it. Muehlberger’s chapter helps us see those structures with new clarity. The rhetorical training of boys does not simply prepare them to write; it prepares them to recognize certain kinds of women, to identify them as already understood. The “is she is she not” a prostitute, that blurry figure of sexual excess, must come to her (and his) senses and answer our historical questions. She cannot be an anomaly; she must be a template. And once that template is in place, it becomes remarkably difficult to ignore the writing in the sand. Even figures who resist it are eventually chained back to it.

This is where Muehlberger’s discussion of ventriloquism becomes especially sharp. The act of speaking in another’s voice might appear, at first glance, to offer the possibility of empathy, a way of bridging difference and maybe even give a woman agency. But as she shows, this hope is misplaced. There is no bridge but a link back. Identification does not undo hierarchy (patriarchy?). It can only reinforce it. To speak as another is not necessarily to encounter them—it may instead be to replace them—especially when she’s dead.

We see this dynamic repeatedly in late ancient Christian texts, where male authors inhabit female perspectives only to redirect them toward familiar ends. In my own work, I have described this process as a form of narrative appropriation, in which “the violent reality many wo/men still face” is not condemned but reworked into a theological framework that renders it meaningful.[4] He who casts the first stone or review take note!

The female voice, when it appears, is already aligned with that framework. It confirms what the author, and the audience, expects to hear. What Muehlberger allows us to see is that this is not simply a literary strategy. It is also the product of a long-standing habit of thought and performance. The confidence with which these voices are produced—the ease with which they are accepted—derives from a training that begins in the classroom and extends outward into the broader culture of knowledge-making. The result is a system in which imagined women stand in for real ones, not as approximations, but as authoritative and repetitive representations.

This has significant implications for how we, as late ancient historians, approach these texts. Muehlberger’s work forcefully challenges the assumption that we can recover women’s voices from the sources that survive. It does not foreclose that possibility, but it does complicate it. The voices we encounter are already always mediated, already always shaped by practices of imagination or fantasy that carry their own authority.

At the same time, her work does not leave us without resources. By exposing these mechanisms, she invites us then to read differently. We must attend not only to what is said, but to how it becomes sayable. The impossibility of these women, their instability, their excess, then becomes a point of entry rather than a barrier. It reminds us that what appears coherent is often the result of sustained effort, that what feels natural has been carefully constructed.

What I find most compelling about Things Unseen as a whole, and in this chapter in particular, is its focus on these affective dimensions of knowledge. Muehlberger is interested not just in what late ancient Christians knew, but in how they came to feel certain that they knew it (and how we too become certain in what we know). The rhetorical exercises she examines do more than produce texts. These habits persist, shaping not only ancient writing but modern scholarship.

And so, we find ourselves implicated in the very structures and folds she describes. We, too, work with fragments, with mediated voices, with figures who are always already constructed—most especially when we’re chasing after women. The difference, perhaps, is that we are asked to do so with an awareness of the limits of that process.

Muehlberger’s prose, as always, makes this look effortless. The argument unfolds with clarity and control. Her examples are carefully chosen and the implications allowed to emerge without overstatement. But beneath that surface lies a deeply challenging claim: that knowledge, particularly knowledge about others, is never neutral. It is produced through practices that carry their own histories and their own investments.

To return, then, to the boy in the classroom: he writes, he performs, and he learns. He learns not only how to speak, but how to know. The question is what happens when that knowledge encounters the world beyond the classroom. When that same knowledge meets bodies that do not conform, voices that do not align, or lives that exceed the script so he must once again play the man.

Muehlberger does not resolve that tension, and neither should we. Instead, she leaves us with a more difficult task: that is, to recognize the repetitive patterns that make knowledge possible and to remain attentive to what they render unseen.

Jennifer Barry is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Mary Washington and is a Women’s Studies and Religion Program Fellow at Harvard University (2026-2027). She is a historian of late antiquity whose research examines early Christianity, gender, violence, ecclesiastical historiography, and the construction of religious identity. She is the author of Bishops in Flight: Exile and Displacement in Late Antiquity (University of California Press, 2019) and Gender Violence in Late Antiquity: Male Fantasies and the Christian Imagination (University of California Press, 2025). Her two forthcoming monographs include Scandalous Christian Histories in Late Antiquity (University of Edinburgh Press) and Terrifying Women in the Ancient World (Basic Books).

[1] Ellen Muehlberger, Things Unseen: Essays on Evidence, Knowledge, and the Late Ancient World (University of California Press, 2025), 20.

[2] Christine Luckritz Marquis, “Better off Dead?: Violence, Women, and Late Ancient Asceticism,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 33.2 (2025): 305-334.

[3] Jennifer Barry, Gender Violence in Late Antiquity: Male Fantasies and the Christian Imagination (University of California Press, 2025), 167.

[4] Barry, Gender Violence in Late Antiquity, 167.

Things Unseen Forum

Known Knowns and Known Unknowns: Ellen Muehlberger’s Things Unseen: Essays on Evidence, Knowledge, and the Late Ancient World

by Bradley K. Storin

Ellen Muehlberger’s latest monograph, Things Unseen, reminds readers that knowledge is a product, the output of an intricate machine. The “Knowledge Machine” (to borrow the title of Michael Strevens 2020 book) is sophisticated, with as many cogs, regulators, pinions, gears, gimbals, switches, widgets, and valves as variation in the knowledge-products it creates.

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Paper Dolls of Late Antiquity

by Jennifer Barry

Let’s begin where Ellen Muehlberger does. In the very first chapter, she introduces a scene that is deceptively ordinary: a boy, about fourteen, sitting in a classroom somewhere in the late ancient Mediterranean—Antioch, perhaps—who is working through an assignment. He is asked to compose a speech in character, to answer a question that is both precise and conceptually unstable: “What would a prostitute who has come to her senses say?”

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Unseen Metaphysics versus Institutional Bureaucracy: Retelling the Story of the Fifth Ecumenical Council

by Matthew R. Crawford

I recall being a newly minted PhD, well over a decade ago, trading Syriac vocabulary decks with Ellen, whom I regarded as an established scholar in the field. Several years later, I received insightful comments from her on translations I contributed to the series Cambridge Edition of Early Christian Writings, which she and Brad edited. It is, therefore, an honor to return the favor today by engaging with her work in this forum. Let me also say I am pleased to see an entire session devoted to her book.

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Thoughts on Medieval Knowing

by Young Richard Kim

In the lead up to this conference, a very good friend at a similar career stage as me, texted to ask me about the new registration tiers for the North American Patristics Society. Registrants are asked to categorize themselves as “established,” “junior/standard,” or “senior scholar.” Without hesitation, I assured my friend that we were both “established,” although it got me to thinking about when we might be obliged to claim “senior scholar” and swallow its higher registration fee. Certainly, there was no doubting that we are not “junior,” even if I wrestled for a bit at what “standard” means.

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Mummy Portraits and the White Gaze

by Christine Luckritz Marquis

In her latest book, Ellen Muehlberger asks us to sit in the tensive space between knowing and seeing. Throughout her faux-lecture series turned collected essays, she presses on how “ancient people knew differently.” While the first three chapters explore how late ancient Christians used what they “knew” to find evidence and create a vision of others and themselves, her fourth essay turns to our own engagements of the past. She eloquently shows how what we “see” – such as Egyptian Fayyum funerary portraits – offers us an illusion of “knowing” ancient peoples, when in fact what we witness is evidence of our own modern fixation on “individuality, essence, and truth in faces.”

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The Part You Don’t See

by Ellen Muehlberger

By now, if you have read the other posts in this forum or even just the preface to my book, you know that Things Unseen is built around a gimmick. I have always liked the kinds of books that had started out as lectures in an invited series, and as I started doing more of my own writing, I really liked the register and tone they seemed to license in their authors. With no invitation on my desk, though, and none in the mail, I decided to just skip ahead to writing a book as if it had started out as a series of lectures. Strictly speaking, then, my book is a fake.

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Death of the Desert Forum | The Author's Response

AJR is honored to host this review panel for Christine Luckritz Marquis’s Death of the Desert: Monastic Memory and the Loss of Egypt’s Golden Age (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022). You may find all the responses and the author’s response here. 

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As anyone who has written a book knows, it is truly a gift when others engage with your work. Thank you to Ancient Jew Review for the invitation and for hosting this dialogue. It is an especially gratifying experience to respond to the deep, thoughtful, and generous responses of these three colleagues. Ciara, Ellen, Rebecca, thank you for investing time in reading my book and in thinking alongside its arguments and places we might continue the conversation. To structure my response, I want to highlight a couple of things I hoped the book would do when I wrote it. Then, I express appreciation for particular things you have reflected back to me before replying to the primary question I see each of you posing.

My book sought to place the Origenist Controversy and Egyptian monasticism in more immediate dialogue, rather than as two separate scholarly discourses running parallel but rarely intersecting, as they often are. That was important to me because I was also committed to stressing the desert itself as a character in these narratives. And, as I offered close and complex readings of my sources, I sought to do so with a historiographical awareness of the ethical implications for our own time.

Ellen, thank you for your explicit engagement of my cover art: “where a single bright fireline separates the viewer and the grassland she stands on from the place the fire has already been, its details close but not quite visible on the other side of the destruction.” I negotiated for use and adjustment of Richard Misrach’s gorgeous photograph (during COVID no less) because I did want the image to resonate deeply with my argument about the desert. You saw that the art was also part of my argument about how we can and cannot see the past that has spread across the desert. Ciara, I am grateful to you for recognizing my insistence throughout the book “that the Sayings can only be understood by considering these three lenses [violence, memory, and race].” While different chapters highlighted aspects of the larger narrative I sought to weave, throughout I am gratified that you heard the call for a reframing of monastic history that reckons with these three threads. You saw them in each chapter and drew them together again as a “challenge” I offer to my readers. Rebecca, thank you for highlighting that “narratives are themselves integral to an unfolding event.” As you rightly gathered, I am as interested in our present moment’s narratives as I am in those of the past. We continue to wrestle with “our own demons that come from deciding what and how to remember, erase, and forget in interpreting the events and webs of relation around us.” While I finished writing the book in the midst of reckoning with racist legacies and Civil War statuary, our current moment only continues to press us to think about whose narratives are amplified and what healing or harm such amplification produces.

And now to the questions! Rebecca, you query “how successfully the memory of Theophilus was rehabilitated,” reflecting in your footnote that the negative accounts of Palladius, Ps.-Martyrius, and Socrates of Constantinople “still influence the way we describe (and teach) about Theophilus and his involvement in the Origenist Controversy.” As you note, Banev has been far more thorough than I in addressing this continued legacy of demonizing Theophilus.[1] And your reference to Theophilus’s treatment in the 13th century marginalia of Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana Plut. 70.7 reflects that vein of treatment. There were two worlds my book was trying to straddle, the one that questions and critiques Theophilus – much of what Western scholarship has inherited from Latin and Greek sources – and the one that continues to deeply honor him – Egyptian Coptic and Syrian Christians revere him as a Saint. His death is included in the Coptic Synaxarion on Paopi 18, 404 CE (modern pronunciation Baba; Gregorian October 28). His entry remembers him as merciful, charitable, a student of his predecessor Athanasius, a discoverer of miraculous treasure, and a builder of many churches.[2]

Several seasons digging in the northwestern desert of Egypt made me keenly sensitive to the role that Theophilus and Egyptian monastic heritage play in contemporary Egyptian Christianity.[3] As a religious minority in a Muslim-majority country, the complexity of maintaining and preserving Christian identity means that any criticism of Theophilus and other heritage figures can be a quite sensitive situation. I thought quite a bit about the many ethical implications my work might have for not only Egyptian/Coptic and Syrian/Syriac studies within academic circles but also for these presently oppressed religious communities. So, when I was writing, I was truly trying to balance which “we” was considering Theophilus. He is totally rehabilitated from an Egyptian and Syrian Christian position. That does not erase your crucial point that he often is not taught or written about from such a perspective by many who consider themselves scholars of late antiquity. Thank you for raising this important question because it allows me an opportunity to reflect with more nuance on this contemporary tensive issue among those who honor and those who study in and outside a tradition.

Ciara, I keep turning over the question you pulled from my third chapter: “how scholars think about societal practices – such as damnatio memoriae – and how this phenomenon can occur on the individual level.” I acknowledge that this is one of the more speculative edges of my book, and intentionally so. Thank you for raising this part of the project because in some ways it’s among the things I am most invested in as a scholar. One of the struggles as I lived with this material first as a dissertation and then later transforming it into a rather different book was the tension between knowing some things did not make sense and trying to offer an alternative model that might be more historically accurate. Thus, I found myself wrestling with the limits of history as a field. How do we ask good questions when our material is scarce? Are responsible, necessarily somewhat speculative, workarounds possible? It was this professional identity questioning that helped me think through how we might begin to engage the Sayings of the Desert Fathers in ways beyond gnomic. I try in the book and elsewhere in my work to note when I shift from more solid evidence to what I like to call responsible historical imagining. I hope even when others disagree with my readings they consider the invitation to stretch the methods and questions we take up.

Ellen, you likewise picked up on the dynamic relationship between individual and communal I was exploring. You pressed me on the “need to grapple with the Christian literary tendency to over indicate violence,” asking whether “an instance of ‘violence’ against the self” might “be compared to the destruction of a public site of another tradition’s practices.” As you note, the field continues to wrestle with where, how, and when we delineate something as “violence.” I come down in the book quite clearly on violence as including language. Part of what I wanted to think through was precisely how commonly violent language appears in many texts and how often modern scholars have tended to overlook such rhetoric. I have continued to try to think through what it means to “over indicate violence.” What work (conscious and unconscious) does that literary habit do? Both to ancient authors/readers/hearers and modern scholars who read it?

 I suspect I was and continue to be informed by our own historical context as I think through verbal violence. I wonder whether the erasure of memories/“facts” of one’s own past needs to feel violent to the perpetrator for it to produce violent results? Perhaps an individual monk trying to remove memories of his past life did not see his actions as self-harm, but those he may have left behind – a mother, a wife, children, enslaved individuals – may certainly have experienced his abandonment and denunciation of his past life as harm. And that the Sayings as reflective of a mostly male legacy so willing to erase large swaths of the past might invite us to ask who monks tend to demonize when they do so – here, the corpus clearly points to women, young men, and enslaved persons.

For my continued scholarship beyond the book, taking these experiences of past self-erasure as violence seriously has helped me reimagine how individuals marginalized by these actions might be reimagined back into the late ancient world. If we are looking for often obscured women, queers, and enslaved individuals – those most often subjected to violence then and now – we might well find glimpses of their realities by attending to how pervasive violence was. In “Divining Slaves in Late Ancient Egypt,” I argue against the scholarly tendency to view Egypt as a space not particularly prone to enslavement practices.[4] And, more recently, I have begun to join a growing body of scholars, such as Jennifer Barry, in addressing the role of gender violence in our sources and the scholar habits that continue to be informed by this violent legacy.[5] In “Better Off Dead: Violence, Women, and Late Ancient Asceticism,” I make the case for recognizing how often women and trans monks were accused in monastic sources of violence even as it was male monks who were in fact the main perpetrators.[6]

Christine Luckritz Marquis is Associate Professor of Church History at Union Presbyterian Seminary. Her teaching and research expertise explore early Christian communities and their practices, especially late ancient communities in Egypt, Syria, Ethiopia, and the Arabian Peninsula. Her interests include food, memory, and spatial practices, the role of violence in identity formation, racial and ethnic discourses, material culture, and Christian interactions with neighboring Christians as well as non-Christians, especially Jews and Muslims. Her first book is Death of the Desert: Monastic Memory and the Loss of Egypt’s Golden Age (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022). The book explores how memory and spatial practices were transformed by acts of violence among Egyptian ascetics. She has also co-edited and translated The History of the Great Deeds of Bishop Paul of Quentos and Priest John of Edessa, Texts from Christian Late Antiquity volume 29 (Piscataway, New Jersey: Gorgias Press, 2010). She has also published book chapters, articles, and translations. She is currently researching the history of sources of sweetness and their relationship to understandings of the divine and afterlife.

[1] Krastu Banev, Theophilus of Alexandria and the First Origenist Controversy: Rhetoric and Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

[2] “السنكسار بابه 18,” السنكسار بابه 18: نياحة البابا ثيؤفيلس 23 - CopticChurch.net, accessed June 16, 2026, https://www.copticchurch.net/synaxarium/2_18.html?lang=ar. 

[3] Here I would note the importance of Stephen J. Davis for me, both his mentorship during my time with Yale Monastic Archaeology Project and his scholarship, especially his The Early Coptic Papacy: The Egyptian Church and Its Leadership in Late Antiquity (Cairo and New York: American University in Cairo, 2004).

[4] Christine Luckritz Marquis, “Divining Slavery in Late Ancient Egypt: Doulology in the Monastic Works of Paul of Tamma and Shenoute,” in Slavery in the Late Antique World, 150–700 CE, eds. Christopher L. De Wet, Maijastina Kahlos, and Ville Vuolanto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022) 149–69.

[5] Jennifer Barry, Gender Violence in Late Antiquity: Male Fantasies and the Christian Imagination (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2025).

[6] Christine Luckritz Marquis, “Better Off Dead: Violence, Women, and Late Ancient Asceticism” JECS 33.2 (Summer 2025): 305–34.

Death of the Desert Review Forum

This AJR Forum, organized and guest edited by Candace Buckner, features responses from Ellen Muehlberger, Rebecca Stephens Falcasantos, and Ciara Mulcahy to Christine Luckritz Marquis’s book, Death of the Desert: Monastic Memory and the Loss of Egypt's Golden Age (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022). The forum concludes with a reflection penned by the author.

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Monastic Memory and the Loss of Egypt’s Golden Age

by Ciara Mulcahy

Using Theophilus’ raid of the monastic community and attack against the Tall Brothers at Nitria as its focal event, Christine Luckritz Marquis’ wonderful new monograph, Death of the Desert, argues that “violence was inherent in the Egyptian monastic project from its outset” (p. 5). Luckritz Marquis threads together various narratives of violence from fourth-century historians and the Sayings of the Desert Fathers.

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Remembering Broken Promises and Shattered Voices

by Rebecca Stephens Falcasantos

In the wake of collective trauma, memory practices can be protective strategies that channel grief while also shielding the community from continuing harm. In Death of the Desert: Monastic Memory and the Loss of Egypt’s Golden Age, Christine Luckritz Marquis proposes that we see just such a response in a case of violence that effectively ended the great ascetic experiment of the late antique Egyptian desert.

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Teachings from a Lost World

by Ellen Muehlberger

Evagrius of Pontus’s treatise On the Practical Life, written near the end of the fourth century, is a rich collection of advice for managing the rigors of his program of Christian discipline. Near the end of the text, he offers readers one more source of guidance beyond his teachings. “It is also necessary,” Evagrius wrote, “to make diligent inquiry of the upright ways of the monks who have gone before us and to correct ourselves with respect to these, for one can find many noble things said and done by them.”

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Death of the Desert Forum | The Author's Response

by Christine Luckritz Marquis

My book sought to place the Origenist Controversy and Egyptian monasticism in more immediate dialogue, rather than as two separate scholarly discourses running parallel but rarely intersecting, as they often are. That was important to me because I was also committed to stressing the desert itself as a character in these narratives. And, as I offered close and complex readings of my sources, I sought to do so with a historiographical awareness of the ethical implications for our own time.