Contents: Introduction -- On defining the holy man -- Ascetics as mediators and as teachers -- 'For next to God, you are my salvation' : reflections on the rise of the holy man in late antiquity -- 'What we heard in the Lives of the saints we have seen with our own eyes' : the holy man as literary text in tenth-century Constantinople --Demystifying the role of sanctity in Western Christendom -- The origins of the Carolingian attempt to regulate the cult of saints -- The missionary life -- Holy men and the transformation of political space in medieval Rus' --The holy man and the Christianization from the apocryphal apostles to St. Stephen of Perm -- Prophecy and the holy men in Islam --The etiquette of devotion in the Islamic cult of saints