Friday, August 18, 2023

Review of The Rediscovery of Shenoute

BRYN MAYR CLASSICAL REVIEW: The rediscovery of Shenoute: studies in honor of Stephen Emmel.
Anne Boud'hors, David Brakke, Andrew Crislip, Samuel Moawad, The rediscovery of Shenoute: studies in honor of Stephen Emmel. Orientalia Lovaniensia analecta, 310. Leuven; Paris; Bristol: Peeters, 2022. Pp. xxii, 546. ISBN 9789042948303

Review by
Ellen Muehlberger, University of Michigan. emuehlbe@umich.edu

[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review.]

Shenoute of Atripe was many things: leader of the White Monastery in Upper Egypt from about 385 C.E. until his death some time in the first part of the fifth century; the organizer of an extended group of Christian monastic communities for both men and women; a defender of orthodoxy who was not afraid to break a window or throw a punch; a preacher who indicted everyone from liars, adulterers, and demon worshippers to wage thieves and the merely half-hearted. What Shenoute has not been, though, is well-known to most modern scholars of the ancient world. He wrote in Coptic, a language that has not benefitted from being labeled one of the “classics”; instead of being transmitted and studied in an established discipline, Shenoute’s works, collected and edited at his own monastery, remained there for the most part until the great extractive force of the colonial antiquities market gave those pages value, and thus wings. ...

Some PaleoJudaica posts on Shenoute and the White Monastery are here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Cross-file under Coptic Watch.

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