| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Middle East and Northern Africa

David Brakke. Demons and the Making of the Monk: Spiritual Combat in Early Christianity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2006. Pp. ix, 308. $49.95.

This timely book deals with a neglected topic vital for understanding the true nature of monastic spirituality from the second century to the seventeenth. Demons today have, for the most part, been reinterpreted as psychological imbalances or the results of childhood trauma, but they were not so for the early monks. Demons were as real (and almost as common) as people, and infinitely more dangerous. Jesus of Nazareth, after all, had spent much of his ministry casting them out. David Brakke examines both demons and monks, and argues "that neither can be understood apart from the other as they developed over the course of the fourth and early fifth centuries in Christian Egypt" (p. 5). Why Egypt? Because, "although demons tempted and frightened monks in other areas of the ancient Mediterranean, the literature from Egypt shaped subsequent Christian demonologies in both the Byzantine East and the medieval West" (pp. 5–6). This is a little limiting (we miss some spectacular Syrian demons), but it does not imperil the author's essential thesis.

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