Review of Layton, The Canons of Our Fathers

MARGINALIA REVIEW OF BOOKS: In the Footsteps of Shenoute – Caroline T. Schroeder. Caroline T. Schroeder on Bentley Layton’s The Canons of Our Fathers.

Shenoute of Atripe, known in the Coptic Orthodox Church as St. Shenoute the Archimandrite, directed a federation of monasteries for men and women in Egypt from the mid 380s until his death in 465. The corpus of literature surviving from Shenoute and his successors Besa and Zenobios arguably constitutes the largest and most illuminating body of evidence for earliest Christian monasticism, especially when one considers that the majority of these documents are neither hagiographical nor legendary, but rather letters, sermons, treatises, and monastic rules written contemporaneously (or in very close temporal proximity) with the events and phenomena they describe. Every student of Christianity or monasticism should study these sources.

Why don’t we? Because they are largely inaccessible, something Canons of Our Fathers seeks to change. Shenoute and his successors wrote in Coptic, the last phase of the Egyptian language family. When Arabic overtook Coptic as the primary language of Egypt, local Christians no longer read Coptic fluently, and the manuscripts were no longer used and copied. When the White Monastery was “discovered” by Europeans, these manuscripts were taken or purchased by antiquities traders, scholars, and perhaps others and then dispersed page by page (not even codex by codex) across the globe, primarily in Western libraries, museums, and private collections. (Fig. 4) As a result, the pages of one letter or sermon might be in two, three, or more locations. Even fragments that have been published may not have been translated into a modern language.

More on Shenoute is here, here, and here. And there's more on the manuscripts of the White Monastery here and links. Cross-file under Coptic Watch.