The Church Fathers · c. 400–404
The History of the Monks in Egypt
Historia Monachorum in Aegypto
Anonymous, translated by Rufinus
What it is
Seven pilgrims travel up the Nile in the winter of 394 and write down what they saw: a monk who kept a lion out of his garden by argument, another who had not looked at a woman in fifty years, and towns where the ascetics outnumbered the citizens.
Why it lasted
Together with the Lausiac History, the book that carried Egyptian monasticism into Latin. Its picture of a desert crowded with holy men is what Western readers pictured when they imagined the fathers.
Scripture it works from
Where to read it
Public domain and free to read in full, though not held here. The archives below have it.
These open a search on each archive rather than a direct link, which is the honest way to point at an edition nobody here has checked line by line.
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