The Forgotten Desert Mothers: Sayings, Lives, and Stories of Early Christian Women (review)

Swan, Laura. The Forgotten Desert Mothers: Sayings, Lives, and Stories of Early Christian Women. (Mahwah, New Jersey: Paulist Press. 2001. Pp. v, 218. $13.95 paperback.)

Eight Righteous Women, the modern American icon decorating the cover of The Forgotten Desert Mothers, speaks to the intensely devotional nature of Swan's work as well as her contemporary style. Laura Swan is the prioress of Saint Placid Priory and a scholar of Catholic theology. As such, she is able to encapsulate for her audience recent scholarly readings of the women's desert movement (Elm, Harvey, McNamara) and her own meditative musings on monastic themes (silence, prayer, asceticism). Of course, the primary material itself is brilliant. For example, the author discusses the provocative vita of Amma Syncletica, who after having renounced all of her inheritance, "cut her hair as a sign of consecration and moved with her blind sister to the family tomb outside of Alexandria" (p. 42). Similarly, Swan's lively analysis of "lesser known desert mothers," such as Matrona of Perge, who led a monastic community of mixed-class, cross-dressing women (pp. 94-95), is engaging. In the last section of the book Swan grapples with Christian ascetic practice in a twenty-first century American context, particularly the role of self-abnegation, sexuality, and sanctity in modern Catholicism. Finally, in an appendix, Swan provides an English translation of the ordination rituals (cheirotonia) surrounding the consecration of female deacons. Overall, this reader found The Forgotten Desert Mothers to be a theologian's version of Kathleen Norris's highly successful The Cloister Walk (1997). On account of its accessible interpretation of early Christian women's vitae and its willingness to incorporate ancient asceticism into the twenty-first-century world, Swan's book would work very well in an undergraduate survey course on women and Christianity.