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As senders of letters, copyists of literary texts, compilers of accounts, readers, and teachers, the monks of late antique Egypt articulated their interactions with their ascetic and secular environments via their role as authors, scribes, and owners of written text. This volume edited by Malcolm Choat and Maria Chiara Giorda examines the presence and practice of writing, modes of written communication, and the symbolic and spiritual value of the written word in monastic communities. Contributions cover evidence from papyri and inscriptions to literature transmitted in manuscripts, positioned within the shift in recent scholarship away from literature such as hagiography as a source of positivistic history, towards evidence that derives more directly from the monk or period in focus.
Review: "Much attention has been paid to the words of the earliest Christian canonical and extracanonical texts, yet Larry Hurtado points out that an even more telling story is being overlooked - the story of the physical texts themselves. He introduces readers to the staurogram, possibly the first representation of the cross, the nomina sacra, a textual abbreviation system, and the puzzling Christian preference for book-like texts over scrolls." "Drawing on studies by papyrologists and palaeographers as well as New Testament scholars - and including photographic plates of selected manuscripts - The Earliest Christian Artifacts examines the distinctive physical features of early Christian manuscripts, illustrating their relevance for wider inquiry into the complex origins of Christianity." -- book jacket.
The Manichaean Church in Kellis presents an in-depth study of social organisation within the religious movement known as Manichaeism in Roman Egypt. In particular, it employs papyri from Kellis (Ismant el-Kharab), a village in the Dakhleh Oasis, to explore the socio-religious world of lay Manichaeans in the fourth century CE. Manichaeism has often been perceived as an elitist, esoteric religion. Challenging this view, Teigen draws on social network theory and cultural sociology, and engages with the study of lived ancient religion, in order to apprehend how laypeople in Kellis appropriated Manichaean identity and practice in their everyday lives. This perspective, he argues, not only provides a better understanding of Manichaeism: it also has wider implications for how we understand late antique ‘religion’ as a social phenomenon
Sortilege—the making of decisions by casting lots—was widely practiced in the Mediterranean world during the period known as late antiquity, between the third and eighth centuries CE. In My Lots are in Thy Hands: Sortilege and its Practitioners in Late Antiquity, AnneMarie Luijendijk and William Klingshirn have collected fourteen essays that examine late antique lot divination, especially but not exclusively through texts preserved in Greek, Latin, Coptic, and Syriac. Employing the overlapping perspectives of religious studies, classics, anthropology, economics, and history, contributors study a variety of topics, including the hermeneutics and operations of divinatory texts, the importance of diviners and their instruments, and the place of faith and doubt in the search for hidden order in a seemingly random world.
The volume offers the acts of a meeting held at the University of Turin on the foundations of power and the conflicts of authority as documented by the monastic sources of East and West in Late Antiquity, with special reference to Max Weber's analysis of these notions. The issue is here examined from a variety of perspectives: the different meanings of power and authority in ancient monastic sources; the criteria by which authority is established within the monastic organizations; the kind of power and authority exercised towards outsiders; the relationship between monks and other authorities, especially the Church; the monks and their economic activity; the strategies for the solution of conflicts. The wide range of historical and cultural problems raised by these questions is what the present volume tries to illuminate through individual studies of a number of specific phenomena, events, and figures (from Shenute to John Cassian, from Abraham of Kashkar to Maxim the Confessor), paying particular attention to monasticism in Egypt, Palestine, Africa, and Persia.
Do the terms ?pagan? and ?Christian,? ?transition from paganism to Christianity? still hold as explanatory devices to apply to the political, religious and cultural transformation experienced Empire-wise? Revisiting ?pagans? and ?Christians? in Late Antiquity has been a fertile site of scholarship in recent years: the paradigm shift in the interpretation of the relations between ?pagans? and ?Christians? replaced the old ?conflict model? with a subtler, complex approach and triggered the upsurge of new explanatory models such as multiculturalism, cohabitation, cooperation, identity, or group cohesion. This collection of essays, inscribes itself into the revisionist discussion of pagan-Christ...
The volume collects papers presented at the International Conference "Greek Medical Papyri - Text, Context, Hypertext" held at the University of Parma on November 2-4, 2016, as the final event of the ERC project DIGMEDTEXT, aimed primarily at creating an online textual database of the Greek papyri dealing with medicine. The contributions, authored by outstanding papyrologists and historians of the ancient medicine, deal with a variety of topics focused on the papyrological evidence of ancient medical texts and contexts. The first part, devoted to "medical texts", contains some new reflections on important sources such as the Anonymus Londinensis and the Hippocratic corpus, as well as on spec...
[Italiano]:Questo volume è la prima opera dedicata ai contatti tra latino e copto nell’Egitto tardoantico e bizantino. Esso si pone nel solco di un rinnovato interesse per quest’area multilingue e multiculturale, ma affronta un tema inesplorato con l’obiettivo di dimostrare che questo può essere indagato con profitto. I contributi esaminano fonti di diverso tipo sulla base di un approccio pluridisciplinare. Alcuni di essi affrontano temi di ampio respiro, come la presenza del latino in contesti monastici o scolastici accanto a varietà locali, mentre altri trattano questioni circoscritte, come l’uso del latino in determinati ambienti o in specifici documenti. Tutti i contributi mos...
Darlene L. Brooks Hedstrom offers a new history of the field of Egyptian monastic archaeology. It is the first study in English to trace how scholars identified a space or site as monastic within the Egyptian landscape and how such identifications impacted perceptions of monasticism. Brooks Hedstrom then provides an ecohistory of Egypt's tripartite landscape to offer a reorientation of the perception of the physical landscape. She analyzes late-antique documentary evidence, early monastic literature, and ecclesiastical history before turning to the extensive archaeological evidence of Christian monastic settlements. In doing so, she illustrates the stark differences between idealized monastic landscape and the actual monastic landscape that was urbanized through monastic constructions. Drawing upon critical theories in landscape studies, materiality and phenomenology, Brooks Hedstrom looks at domestic settlements of non-monastic and monastic settlements to posit what features makes monastic settlements unique, thus offering a new history of monasticism in Egypt.
This work tells the story of a community of fourth-century monks living in Egypt. The letters they wrote and received were found within the covers of works that changed our understanding of early religious thought - the Nag Hammadi Codices. This book seeks to contextualise the letters and answer questions about monastic life. Significantly, new evidence is presented that links the letters directly to the authors and creators of the codices in which they were discovered.