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The Day-to-Day Life of the Desert Fathers in Fourth-Century Egypt. By Lucien Regnault, translated by Etienne Poirier, Jr. Petersham, Mass.: St. Bede's Publications, 1999. xi + 257 pp. $24.95 (paper).
It's good to see this old friend in new clothing. Lucien Regnault's La vie quotidienne des peres du desert en Egypte au IVe siecle (Paris: Hachette, 1990) is not easy to come by in this country; I have a battered photocopy of it precariously held together by what must be the biggest paper clip on the market. Pere Regnault, as the back cover of this edition proclaims, devoted over forty years to the study of early monasticism, and this book is the fine product of that long effort. Whether in French or English, Regnault offers the best available overview of and introduction to the ins and outs of early Egyptian monasticism, that amazing time of Antony, Pachomius, Evagrius, Macarius the Great, and so many others. One could teach a good college or seminary course using just this book and Benedicta Ward's The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection (Kalamazoo: Cistercian, 1984).
For this work Regnault uses almost exclusively the Apophthegmata or Sayings of the desert fathers and mothers, and this immediately confronts both scholars and students with a thorny, perhaps intractable, methodological problem. The apophthegmata have their origins in fourth-century oral tradition but like their ancestors, the sayings of Jesus, underwent a complicated redactional process...