The Soul of a Dead Monk in the Sayings of the Desert Fathers

Record summary

The Greek and later Latin collections known as the Sayings of the Desert Fathers preserve brief stories in which monks receive warnings, visions, or revelations concerning dying brethren and the fate of souls. Individual sayings are difficult to isolate because the collections circulated in multiple languages and manuscript arrangements. They matter for comparison with deathbed and after-death encounter reports because they preserve a social technology of interpreting dreams, visions, and last words within ascetic communities. A researcher should search by specific saying and collection rather than treating the corpus as one event.