Tradition as a governing theme in the writings of John Cassian

John Cassian has been criticized in recent scholarship for historical inaccuracy – but it is not self‐evident that his works were intended as histories in the sense that is supposed by that criticism. Instead, Cassian presents himself as the promoter of key traditions. This paper describes of Cassian's own thinking about ‘tradition’ as a key theme in his works. To that end, it aims to redress scholarly misgivings about the worth of Cassian's writings by taking them as the transmission of identifiable traditions into early to mid‐fifth‐century Gaul (rather than as documentary evidence for late fourth‐century Egyptian monasticism).