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Â鶹ÊÓƵ the book: 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 asÌýHistoria 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.

°Õ³ó±ðÌýHistoria monachorumÌýis 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’sÌýLife 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.

¸é³Ü´Ú¾±²Ô³Ü²õ’sÌýHistoria monachorumÌýis presented here in English translation in its entirety. The introduction and annotations situate the work in its literary, historical, religious, and theological contexts.

Â鶹ÊÓƵ the author:ÌýAndrew Cain is Professor of Classics at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He has authored five books, includingÌýThe Letters of Jerome: Asceticism, Biblical Exegesis, and the Construction of Christian Authority in Late AntiquityÌý(Oxford, 2009) andÌýThe GreekÌýHistoria monachorum in Aegypto: Monastic Hagiography in the Late Fourth CenturyÌý(Oxford, 2016). He also has co-edited two volumes, is the translator of Fathers of the Church 121 (St. Jerome, Commentary on Galatians), and serves as Editor of the Journal of Late Antiquity.