The Greek Historia Monachorum in Aegypto: Monastic Hagiography in the Late Fourth Century (Oxford University Press, 2016) details one of the most widely read and disseminated Greek hagiographic texts of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Offering accounts of the lives of the Desert Fathers, the monachorum continues to be a core primary source for fourth-century Egyptian monasticism as well as one of the most fascinating, yet perplexing, pieces of monastic hagiography to survive from the entire patristic period. Cain has taken a cross-disciplinary approach, incorporating insights from source criticism, stylistic and rhetorical analysis, literary criticism and historical, geographical and theological studies to challenge scholarly orthodoxy about a broad range of the text’s interpretive issues and problems. Passages under discussion are presented in their original Greek (and Latin) and accompanied by a new English translation. Professor Cain specializes in late antique Greek and Latin literature but studies and teaches Latin literature from the Classical period to the Renaissance. He is the author of over two dozen articles and six books, including four on Saint Jerome of Striden (347–420 AD), and co-editor of two books. He is associate editor of the Journal of Late Antiquity and serves on the editorial board of two book series, Fathers of the Church (Catholic University of America Press) and Writings from the Greco-Roman World (Brill).
