What happened to Foucault?

From my review of Foucault’s Confessions of the Flesh, filed today with the TLS: “Foucault’s partisans and critics both find it strange to see the chic author of The Birth of the Clinic delving into, say, a philosophically rich book of Miscellanies by Clement of Alexandria, or a Christian reimagining of Plato’s Symposium by Methodius of Olympus. Foucault scholars find it mystifying to see him assert that one of Constantinople’s most illustrious bishops, Gregory of Nazianzus, instituted a form of spiritual government that remained ‘absolutely constant up until the eighteenth century’. Statements like this force us to ask: what happened to Foucault in the late 1970s?”