Authoring Asceticism in Late Roman Gaul, ca. 400–430

Abstract This chapter pivots from analysis of poetry specifically to outline an emergent conversation over best Christian literary practices among participants in the monastic movement of southern Gaul, and to examine the ascetic textual communities that formed around competing literary programs and procedures. Investigation focuses on innovations in ascetic reading, writing, and education developed by regional monastic experts and impresarios—Sulpicius Severus, John Cassian, and Eucherius of Lyon—whose theories and practices of literature stood in various degrees of tense relation with traditional aristocratic versions. Interpretations of their experiments in monastic literacy illuminate important facets of Gaul’s nascent ascetic culture. As ascetic leaders strived to define their own religious authority, they were particularly anxious to determine the nature of ascetic intellectualism and fix their communities’ distance from literary “worldliness.” Driven by these concerns, authorities from these groups produced competing diagnoses of, and remedies for, Christian society’s concerning relation to classicizing composition and the reading of secular texts.