The Monastic Landscape of Late Antique Egypt

Darlene L. Brooks Hedstrom is Professor of History and Director of Archaeology at Wittenberg University, Ohio. A fellow in Byzantine Studies, her research on Byzantine monastic Egypt has earned her awards from the Fulbright Binational Commission in Egypt, the American Research Center in Egypt, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Project Grants in Byzantine Studies from Dumbarton Oaks and the Erasmus Institute. Her publications center on the archaeology and history of monastic settlements in the Byzantine Near East with a particular focus upon Egypt. She is currently the Senior Archaeological Consultant for the Yale Monastic Archaeology Project and former Director of Archaeology for the Yale Monastic Archaeology Projects in Wadi Natrun and in Sohag, Egypt.

• Introduction; 1. Monastic archaeology in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; 2. Archaeology and twentieth century perceptions of the monastic landscape; 3. An ecohistory of the Egyptian landscape; 4. Late antique documentary evidence and the monastic landscape; 5. Telling stories about the Egyptian monastic landscape; 6. The archaeology of late antique buildings in Egypt; 7. Looking at Egypt's monastic built environments; Conclusions.

'In this fascinating contribution to the emerging field of monastic archaeology, Brooks Hedstrom provides a convincing new reconstruction of the monastic landscape of late antique Egypt. She continues by documenting how expanded excavations in recent years and new theoretical approaches to landscape emerging from critical theory clearly call these old ideas into question. After presenting a model of the overall Egyptian landscape based on these new perspectives from critical theory, the author progressively builds her reconstruction of the Egyptian monastic landscape through analyses of documentary sources, early monastic devotional literature, and the results of recent excavations. This well-written, well-illustrated, theoretically sophisticated, and comprehensively documented volume is destined to become required reading for advanced students and scholars of monastic archaeology in Egypt and beyond.' Choice