This book is concerned with the concepts of Christian holiness and spirituality, from Late Antiquity through to the Middle Ages.

Contents: Foreword; Hagiography and history: an introduction; Apophthegmata Matrum; Signs and wonders: miracles in the Desert tradition; The desert of the heart: importance of the Desert Fathers today; The image of the prostitute, from the 4th to the 12th centuries; Traditions of spiritual guidance: spiritual direction in the Desert Fathers; Discernment: a rare bird; A Tractarian inheritance: the religious life in a Patristic perspective; The miracles of St Benedict; Miracles and history: a reconsideration of the miracle stories used by Bede; The spirituality of St Cuthbert; Theodore of Tarsus: a Greek archbishop of Canterbury; Bede and the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons; A converting ordinance: Bede and the hymns of Charles Wesley; Translator's charity; Anselm of Canterbury: a monastic scholar; The place of Anselm in the development of Christian prayer; "Inward feeling and deep thinking": the prayers and meditations of St Anselm revisited; The Desert myth: reflections on the Desert ideal in early Cistercian monasticism; St Bernard and the Anglican Divines; The relationship between hermits and communities in the 12th century; The wounds of Christ: a medieval devotion and the Methodist revival; Laudabiliter vixit: the death of the Saints in some 12th-century sources; Saints and Sibyls: from Hildegard of Bingen to Teresa of Avila; "Faith seeking understanding": Anselm of Canterbury and Julian of Norwich; Julian the Solitary; Index.