ABSTRACT
The eleventh-century monk Otloh of St Emmeram wrote more about himself and his interior emotional/spiritual journey in monasticism than any Western Christian writer after Augustine and before the genre-defining first-person life narratives of twelfth-century figures such as Guibert of Nogent and Peter Abelard. This portrait proceeds primarily through Otloh's self-reflexive texts, particularly his first-person narrative Liber de temptatione cuiusdam monachi (Book of the Temptation of a Certain Monk) and the four first-person visions he included in his Liber visionum (Book of Visions). In these texts Otloh recounts how the Devil tormented him with sexual visions, pushed him to breaking point with doubts about his faith, the Bible, and even the existence of God, and then falsely condoled with him that God seemed to have deserted him in his hour of need.
