Overview

This book depicts the lives of female monks within a monastery located in upper Egypt in the period 385-464 CE. During this period, the monastery was headed by a monk named Shenoute; thirteen of his letters to the women under his care survive. These writings are fragmentary, only partially translated, little studied, and written in difficult-to-decipher Coptic. Despite these problems, Krawiec has used the letters to reconstruct a series of quarrels and events in the life of the White Monastery and to discern some of the key patterns in the participants' relationships to one another within the world as they perceived it.

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9780195129434

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... a compelling analysis of the interrelations between power and gender in a particular monastic community in Egypt in Late Antiquity ... very well argued ... full of interesting details. Orientalia Krawiec's book is a fascinating and well-written study and a valuable contribution to the several lines of research at the intersection of which her subject is located: Patristics, Gender Studies and the social and religious history of the Mediterranean world in Late Antiquity. Profiting from recent research on the literary and rhetorical analysis of patristic texts, she manages to glean a wealth of information from her reluctant sources. Orientalia

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