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  • The Monastic Landscape of Late Antique Egypt: An Archaeological Reconstruction by Darlene L. Brooks Hedstrom
  • Charles Stang
Darlene L. Brooks Hedstrom
The Monastic Landscape of Late Antique Egypt: An Archaeological Reconstruction
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017
Pp. 448. $135.00.

In the conclusion of her study of the late antique Egyptian monastic landscape, Darlene L. Brooks Hedstrom endorses a call made by Norwegian archaeologist Bjørnar Olsen: historians must strive to include non-human "things" in the study of the human past. In other words, Brooks Hedstrom suggests that the study of Egyptian monasticism, like so many other disciplines, must make what Richard Grusin calls "the non-human turn," that is, it must include in its purview not only the history of thought (recorded in the literature of elites) but also such non-human "things" as "animals, affectivity, bodies, materiality, technologies, and organic and geophysical systems" (Grusin, The Nonhuman Turn [University of Minnesota Press, 2015], vii). Grusin's wager is that precisely by shifting our focus away from the human, by displacing humans from the center of all our inquiry, we might paradoxically better understand and appreciate the place of humans in their environments, both natural and built, past and present.

What does this amount to in the study of Egyptian monasticism? What are the monastic "things" to which we should be better attending? First and foremost, the natural environment: the realities of living in the near or "outer" desert as opposed to the far or "inner" desert; the proximity of the desert to the sown, cultivated fields along the Nile; the rhythms of the Nile's floods and the conditions of life, human and non-human, along its shores. Second, the built environment: access to water in the near or far desert; finding or growing food at a distance from cultivated fields; types of construction materials and methods; spatial configurations that can accommodate both private and communal forms of life. Third and finally, if we are to restore non-human things as central to Egyptian monasticism, we must keep in mind missing things, the material ephemera of monastic life: mattresses, pillows, lamps, hooks, blankets, books, and so on. Brooks Hedstrom acknowledges that even archaeologists sometimes fail to keep the missing in mind, and too often imagine their excavated monastic spaces as having been as empty as they found them—as if the monks' built interiors should match not only the emptiness of the desert, but also the scorched and holy emptiness of their interior selves. Whereas scholars are increasingly aware of how many voices from the past were never recorded and so will never be heard, fewer are equally mindful of how many things are now missing, gone forever, whose role in the economy of life we cannot observe, but must still imagine. If the former recognition of lost voices has led to a historiography attuned to silences, the latter recognition should lead to one attuned to absences.

The challenge, of course, is not only that voices have gone silent, objects have gone missing, and the memory of monastic spaces has faded. The real hurdle, Brooks Hedstrom suggests, is that we scholars have taken the elite monastic literary record too much at face value. She speaks of our long scholarly subjection to the monastic "mindscape," that is, the idealized landscape of the desert and the sown, overdetermined by biblical narratives of the desert wilderness (although [End Page 135] she does acknowledge previous scholarly efforts, such as James Goehring's, to free us from precisely this). Most commonly this idealized desert is a dangerous landscape where the lonely monk does battle with demons, and thereby extends the realm of human habitation further and further into demonic territory. We find this monastic mindscape in such texts as the Apophthegmata patrum, Palladius's Lausiac History, and the Lives of the Monks of Egypt. Too often, this literary imaginary occludes the "desertscape," that is, a view of life in the desert that takes seriously the realities of the particular natural and built environments—in other words, what it really means to live in or on the edge of the Egyptian desert (as opposed, to say, the Judean desert). Brooks Hedstrom also...

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