'I have plucked the finest flowers of the unmown meadow and worked them into a row which I now offer to you', wrote John Moschos as he began his tales of the holy men of seventh-century Palestine and Egypt. This translation offers readers contemporary insights into the spirituality of the desert.

Throughout the Christian world, women have chosen to lead disciplined lives of prayer and asceticism. Descriptions of early role-models—Macrina, the two Paulas and Melanias, Radagunde—and others by contemporaries, usually men, provide details of their austerities, their aspirations, and their relationship with the Church and the world, not least with male authority figures.

Defining spirituality as 'the dynamic unity between the content of a faith and the way in which it is lived by historically determined human beings', Vauchez steps outside the clerical world usually studied to trace the religious mentality of the laity, the ordinary and often illiterate majority of Christians.

In the Early Middle Ages, the irish temperament—individualistic, poetic, and deeply loyal to family—produced great and learned saints and a unique monastic literature. Before the Norman Invasion, the isolation of the island allowed the development of traditions quite different from those of the continent or Britain. The rules, maxims, litanies, and poems of early irish monks convey the spirituality of the Isle of Saints in the sixth to eighth centuries.

Jacob of Sarug's (d. 521) homily on Simon Peter, when our Lord said, “Get behind me Satan!” (Matt 16:23) touches the themes of Jesus’ divinity and death, warfare with Satan, the harrowing of hell, and his relationship with Peter. Peter’s rebuke of Jesus’ willingness to die gives Jesus (through Jacob) the occasion to explain what his death will accomplish. The volume constitutes a fascicle of The Metrical Homilies of Mar Jacob of Sarug, which, when complete, will contain the original Syriac text of Jacob's surviving sermons, fully vocalized, alongside an annotated English translation.

This timeless travelogue by noted hymnographer and missionary A. Mary R. Dobson recounts her journey to the manuscript-rich monastery of St. Catherine’s in the Sinai peninsula. Traveling with her cousin, Orientatlist Rendel Harris, Dobson wrote an account of her journey that still captures the imagination of modern day readers.

Although written before the modern discoveries that define Ancient Near Eastern studies today, Paton’s historic foray into the history of Syria and Palestine served to start a continuing discussion that remains active today. Covering the Babylonian, Aramaean, Egyptian, Hittite, and Assyrian empires, Paton demonstrates what was known of the history of the region with the limited resources of nineteenth-century explorations.

In this brief study of the creation account in Genesis 1, Radau makes full use of the Sumerian materials available in his day. Summarizing the sea monster versus deity scenario known from the Enuma Elish’s account of Marduk against Tiamat, he shows how Yahweh fits this role in Genesis 1. Going into linguistic detail of the Hebrew and Sumerian sources, he draws a set of correlations between the two.

This volume contains Schrader’s study of the underworld journey of Ishtar. He examines this Old Babylonian epic together with samples from Assyrian poems. The text is given, along with a translation, commentary and glossary.

In this brief study, Jeremias examines the representations of life after death in the Babylonian and Assyrian sources. The descent of Ishtar, basic concepts of the grave, descriptions of the afterlife and the realm of the blessed are all examined. The possibility of return from death and the biblical outlook on the subject are also part of the exploration.