LOUISE BLANKE is Lecturer in Late Antique Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh. She has authored An Archaeology of Egyptian Monasticism: Settlement, Economy, and Daily Life at the White Monastery Federation (2019) and has directed archaeological projects and participated in fieldwork at sites in Egypt, Denmark, Jordan, and Qatar. JENNIFER CROMWELL is Senior Lecturer in Ancient History at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her research interests lie in the study of village and monastic life in late antique and early Islamic Egypt. She is the author of Recording Village Life: A Coptic Scribe in Early Islamic Egypt (2017).
'This remarkable and important book offers a valuable and necessary deepening of our understanding of early Christian monasticism by turning our attention again and again to the social-material-economic dimensions of that world. The exacting and painstaking scholarship found throughout this book reveals how much we can learn by taking seriously the eloquence of the hidden, the obscure, and the minute: papyri, pottery shards, barely legible inscriptions, paleobotanical evidence, the ghostly presence of ancient waterways, and so much more. It is hard not to marvel at the imaginative reach required to build an entire world out of this fragmentary evidence and to appreciate the immense effort undertaken to do so.' Doug Christie, Cistercian Studies Quarterly