This book examines the formation of the Christian ascetic tradition in the western Roman Empire during the period of the barbarian invasions, c.400–600. In an aggressively competitive political context, one of the most articulate claims to power was made, paradoxically, by men who had renounced ‘the world’, committing themselves to a life of spiritual discipline in the hope of gaining entry to an otherworldly kingdom. Often dismissed as mere fanaticism or open hypocrisy, the language of ascetic authority, the book shows, was both carefully honed and well understood in the late Roman and early medieval Mediterranean. It charts the development of this new moral rhetoric by abbots, teachers, and bishops from the time of Augustine of Hippo to that of St Benedict and Gregory the Great.

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To talk about grace properly is to adduce the dependence of the slave on his master, or the way the footman clings inseparably to his patron or lord. … Just as it is unfitting for a helmsman's rower to fail him, or a bishop's attendant, or a commander's soldier, so it is fitting that grace and its foster child, obedience, should be linked inseparably together through servitude.(Faustus of Riez, De gratia, prologue, [T]he pusillanimous youth preferred the penance of the monastic to the dangers of a military life; … whole legions were buried in these religious sanctuaries; and the same cause, which relieved the distress of individuals, impaired the strength and fortitude of the empire.

Pope Gregory the Great (590–604) was arguably the most important Roman writer and civic leader of the early middle ages; the Roman martyrs were certainly the most important cult figures of the city. However modern scholarship on the relationship between Gregory and the Roman martyrs remains curiously underdeveloped, and has been principally devoted to comparison of the gesta martyrum with the stories of Italian holy men and women (in particular St Benedict) told by Gregory in his Dialogues; in the past generation the Dialogues have come to be understood as a polemic against the model of sanctity proposed by the Roman martyr narratives. This paper explores Gregory's role in the development of Roman martyr cult in the context of the immediate social world of Roman clerical politics of the sixth and seventh centuries. Gregory's authority as bishop of Rome was extremely precarious: the Roman clerical hierarchy with its well‐developed protocols did not take kindly to the appearance of Gregory and his ascetic companions. In the conflict between Gregory and his followers, and their opponents, both sides used patronage of martyr cult to advance their cause. In spite of the political necessity of engaging in such ‘competitive generosity’, Gregory was also concerned to channel martyr devotion, urging contemplation on the moral achievements of the martyrs – which could be imitated in the present – as opposed to an aggressive and unrestrained piety focused on their death. Gregory's complex attitude to martyr cult needs to be differentiated from that which was developed over a century later, north of the Alps, by Carolingian readers and copyists of gesta martyrum and pilgrim guides, whose approach to the Roman martyrs was informed by Gregory's own posthumous reputation.

This essay surveys the cultural uses of the Egyptian desert in western ascetic culture across the fifth and sixth centuries. Challenging the commonly-held assumption that the desert was effectively suppressed by clerical hierarchies or monastic communities in the West, the essay argues that the institutions of the episcopacy and the monastery, the twin pillars of the medieval Church, in fact sought to lay their foundations squarely in the memory of the desert. The bishops selected for discussion are Caesarius of Arles, Fulgentius of Ruspe, and Gregory of Tours; the monastic communities are those described in the Life of the Jura Fathers and the Rule of Saint Benedict.