Travel in the Texts: Monastic Journeys in Late Antique Egypt (original) (raw)
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This book situates discussions of Christian monasticism in Egypt and Palestine within the socioeconomic world of the long Late Antiquity, from the golden age of monasticism into and well beyond the Arab conquest (fifth to tenth century). Its thirteen chapters present new research into the rich corpus of textual sources and archaeological remains and move beyond traditional studies that have treated monastic communities as religious entities in physical seclusion from society. The volume brings together scholars working across traditional boundaries of subject and geography and explores a diverse range of topics from the production of food and wine to networks of scribes, patronage, and monastic visitation. As such, it paints a vivid picture of busy monastic lives dependent on and led in tandem with the non-monastic world.
The Monastic Landscape of Late Antique Egypt: An Archaeological Reconstruction., 2017
The study of monastic archaeology is entering an exciting phase in its history. More archaeologists and historians are studying the material remains of monastic communities to write a richer and more complex history of the past. The study of landscapes, monastic communities, and the value of excavations places monasteries in a wider context that is only enriching the connectivity of monastic and nonmonastic worlds. Darlene L. Brooks Hedstrom offers a new history of the field of Egyptian monastic archaeology. She traces 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.
"Early Egyptian Monasticism: Ideals and Reality, or: The Shaping of the Monastic Ideal."
Egyptian monasticism began and spread as a movement of popular piety, but successive generations of theologians attempted to give it inner theological coherence and consistency. Although we may find some clues in the early monastic terminology and even if we can engage in well-founded speculation, we shall never know what inspired or motivated the many thousands who took up the monastic life in Egypt at the end of the third century and the early fourth century to do so. They did not leave behind any written testimony. Our literary sources such as the Life of Antony and the Lives of Pachomius and his successors come later and they are clearly aimed at creating an ideal of the monastic life, an ideal that owes much, to be sure, to the earlier philosophical and spiritual tradition concerning the possibility of spiritual progress.
http://www.isdistribution.com/BookDetail.aspx?aId=115326 The White Monastery in Upper Egypt and its two federated communities are among the largest, most prosperous and longest-lived loci of Coptic Christianity. Founded in the fourth century and best known for its zealous and prolific third abbot, Shenoute of Atripe, these monasteries have survived from their foundation in the golden age of Egyptian Christianity until today. At its peak in the fifth to the eighth centuries, the White Monastery federation was a hive of industry, densely populated and prosperous. It was a vibrant community that engaged with extra-mural communities by means of intellectual, spiritual and economic exchange. It was an important landowner and a powerhouse of the regional economy. It was a spiritual beacon imbued with the presence of some of Christendom’s most famous saints, and it was home to a number of ordinary and extraordinary men and women, who lived, worked, prayed and died within its walls. This new study is an attempt to write the biography of the White Monastery federation, to reconstruct its longue durée – through archaeological and textual sources – and to assess its place within the world of Late Antiquity.