Golden Mouth: The Story of John Chrysostom, Ascetic, Preacher, Bishop

J. N. D. Kelly was a patristics scholar, and this Cornell University Press book is his scholarly biography of John Chrysostom, the ascetic, preacher and bishop of Constantinople known for his eloquence. Its strength is that Kelly was a leading specialist in early Christian biography whose earlier work on the church fathers is widely cited, and the book draws on Chrysostom's own extensive surviving writings and contemporary sources. Its limit is that a single volume biography necessarily compresses a long and eventful life, so a claim needing detailed treatment of one specific episode, such as Chrysostom's exile, is better served by a source focused on that episode specifically.