Shenoute of Atripe (348–465) was the most important Egyptian monastic leader in late antiquity. He developed a formalized discipline with which he governed three monasteries (two for men, one for women) located in the village of Atripe, across the Nile River from the city Panopolis (modern Akhmim). Thanks to Shenoute’s leadership, these monastic complexes, collectively known as the White Monastery Federation, played a major role in the social, political, economic, and religious lives of people in the region (Christians and non-Christians alike) and would become the hub of Christian literary culture in Egypt well into the Arab period. Shenoute himself occasionally preached public sermons in his native Coptic tongue to large crowds consisting of monastics, clergy members, lay people, government officials, military professionals, and other local luminaries. In those moments, Shenoute repeatedly defined the moral contours of the Christian community by stridently and repeatedly lambasting any zdepravity he believed present among his hearers, such as exploitation of the poor by rich landowners, adultery, violation of monastic vows, theft, cultic veneration of pagan gods, and Origenist and eventually Chalcedonian heresy.

Here is another text that witnesses to the early period of the island monastery of Lérins. Its author, Faustus, succeeded Maximus twice, first as abbot of Lérins and then as bishop of Riez. For his part, Maximus became the abbot after the monastery’s founder, Honoratus, was appointed bishop of Arles in 427 or 428. Maximus served as abbot until 433 or 434, when he became bishop of Riez. Faustus then replaced Maximus as abbot of Lérins, and when Maximus died sometime between 457 and 461, Faustus replaced him again, this time as bishop of Riez. Shortly after Maximus’ death, Faustus preached a homily to the church of Riez that stressed how the monastic virtues Maximus acquired at Lérins were a providential training for his pastoral ministry as bishop of Riez. In fact, Maximus was but one of several Lérinian monks installed as bishops in the 420s and 430s: besides Honoratus becoming bishop of Arles, also Hilary was made bishop of Arles in 430 and Eucherius bishop of Lyons around 434. Of course, Faustus himself followed the same trajectory.

As noted in the introduction to Hilary’s Sermon, Honoratus founded a monastic community sometime between 400 and 410 on an island off the coast of what is now Cannes in southern France. Then called Lerina, the island is now called Île Saint-Honorat de Lérins. Inspired by the desert fathers he had visited during his travels, Honoratus initiated at Lérins a style of monastic living that stressed individual ascetic pursuits within a communal context. It has been described as a monastery of hermits in community. As time went on, however, and due to the influence of the writings of Augustine and John Cassian – the latter dedicated his second set of Conferences to Honoratus and Eucherius (another monk of Lérins, who was chosen bishop of Lyon around 434) – the monastery of Lérins came to place more emphasis on the communal aspects of monastic living.

The Life of Hypatius was likely written in the mid-fifth century by Callinicus, the second abbot of the monastery that Hypatius founded across the Bosporus Strait from Constantinople. From a literary perspective, the text is a fairly conventional example of a late antique Greek hagiography; it owes much in structure, tenor, and phrasing to the period’s most well-known hagiography, Athanasius’ Life of Antony. Based on evidence internal to the narrative, Hypatius would have lived from 366 to 446 and would have, along with two companions, set up their community some three miles south of Chalcedon around 400 in an otherwise unoccupied compound that included an apostolic church (that doubled as a martyrium), palace, and monastery built by the imperial official Rufinus. During the early years of Hypatius’ residence here, the site hosted the Synod of the Oak, an event that ultimately deposed John Chrysostom, although Hypatius was personally absent during the trial. Two of the Egyptian monks known as the Tall Brothers – Ammonius and Dioscorus – died during their stay, and their remains were deposited within the church.

Between 400 and 410, Honoratus, the scion of a noble Gallic family, founded a monastic community on the island of Lérins (modern Île Saint-Honorat de Lérins, just off the coast of Cannes in southern France). A charismatic figure, Honoratus inspired many men from Gaul and elsewhere, including his relative Hilary, to take up the ascetic life at Lérins. Some years later, around 427 or 428, when the island monastery had become an unqualified success, Honoratus left to become bishop of Arles, although he died shortly thereafter in 430. His successor as bishop, Hilary, commemorated the first anniversary of Honoratus’ death in 431 with a sermon delivered to the Christian community of Arles on his life and virtues. Having only been in office for a year, Hilary used the sermon to provide a kind of apologia for his own episcopal leadership, presenting himself as Honoratus’ handpicked and personally trained successor. Hilary served as the bishop of Arles until his own death in 449.

During the age of devotion, monasteries were the dominant institutions for the production, preservation, and consumption of books. This chapter uses a spatial device to map the character and range of monastic writing and reading. Monastic book consumption is described in terms of three zones. The first zone is the church, with the books needed for the performance of the liturgy and to support services every day of the year. The second zone can be represented by the refectory or other communal space, where the monastic Rule advised that, rather than engage in idle chatter, the brethren should listen to the reading of instructive and edifying texts. The third zone is the individual cell, the zone of texts for private reading. The chapter’s main temporal focus is on the period from the late fourteenth century to the end of the fifteenth century, the main age of monastic expansion.

This chapter provides an overview of Buddhist sexualities ranging from monastic celibacy in India, China and Japan, to Buddhist lay sexualities, to altruistic sexuality in Indian Mahayana Buddhism. It then examines religious sexuality in tantra in India and Tibet, including transgressive discourses in Indian Buddhist liturgies and sexual yoga techniques in Tibetan Buddhist literature. The chapter argues that these diverse and contradictory discourses all represent a shared concern with regulating sexuality and harnessing it for soteriological purposes. Both the renunciation of sensual experience in Indian monastic literature and the embrace of sensual experience in Tibetan sexual yoga have been framed as means for relieving suffering and attaining soteriological success. With examples from Vinaya literature, yogini tantras, premodern and contemporary literature, this chapter highlights the rich diversity of Buddhist sexualities and gender constructs.

Ways of Living Religion provides a philosophical analysis of different types of religious experience – ascetic, liturgical, monastic, mystical, devotional, compassionate, fundamentalist – that focuses on the lived experience of religion rather than reducing it to mere statements of belief or doctrine. Using phenomenology, Christina M. Gschwandtner distinguishes between different kinds of religious experiences by examining their central characteristics and defining features, as well as showing their continuity with human experience more broadly. The book is the first philosophical examination of several of these types, thus breaking new ground in philosophical thinking about religion. It is neither a confessional treatment nor a reduction of the lived experience to psychological or sociological phenomena. While Gschwandtner’s treatment focuses on Christian forms of expression of these different types, it opens the path to broader examinations of ways of living religion that might enable scholars to give a more nuanced account of their similarities and differences.

The Venerable Bede’s epistemology was scholarly and experiential. His work drew on the combined riches of classical and patristic knowledge, as he encountered them at the monasteries of Wearmouth and Jarrow. Supported by lavish patronage, he turned these resources to the teaching, preaching, and exegesis of the scriptures. His writing on pain, pleasure, poverty, and preaching suggests that every faithful Christian has experiential access to unique knowledge. They may taste future joys, enter Christ’s mind, and glimpse the divine nature through embodied practices infused by grace. Yet access to such knowledge is unequal. ‘The perfect’, with their greater understanding and virtue, are best suited for shaping societal and ecclesial life. They meditate unceasingly on holy things, without care or need and with resources beyond the reach of most. Bede’s epistemological emphases were integrated in his self-image, as teacher and monk, and his teaching elaborated an influential ‘inequality regime’.

In his discourse On Gluttony, the Syrian metropolitan Philoxenos of Mabbug shows that a glutton’s behaviour and attitude towards food and drink are rooted in false epistemologies of the self and God. This chapter shows that within this discourse Philoxenos tells the story of a gluttonous monk. By studying this embedded narrative of an imagined gluttonous monk, this chapter uncovers how Philoxenos uses rhetorical strategies to advance his thesis about the danger of gluttony: it perverts the monk and prevents the knowledge of God. Gluttony leads to heresy and death.

The Tridentine Decree on the religious life reflected long-standing ecclesial disaffection and aspirations for reform. The product of a lively conciliar debate, it was neither innovative nor theologically sophisticated but narrowly disciplinary. In the aftermath of the Council, several of its prescriptions concerning male religious went unheeded.