'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