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.

Shenoute of Atripe led the White Monastery, a community of several thousand male and female Coptic monks in Upper Egypt, between approximately 395 and 465 C.E. Shenoute's letters, sermons, and treatises—one of the most detailed bodies of writing to survive from any early monastery—provide an unparalleled resource for the study of early Christian monasticism and asceticism. In Monastic Bodies, Caroline Schroeder offers an in-depth examination of the asceticism practiced at the White Monastery using diverse sources, including monastic rules, theological treatises, sermons, and material culture. Schroeder details Shenoute's arduous disciplinary code and philosophical structure, including the belief that individual sin corrupted not only the individual body but the entire "corporate body" of the community. Thus the purity of the community ultimately depended upon the integrity of each individual monk. Shenoute's ascetic discourse focused on purity of the body, but he categorized as impure not only activities such as sex but any disobedience and other more general transgressions. Shenoute emphasized the important practices of discipline, or askesis, in achieving this purity. Contextualizing Shenoute within the wider debates about asceticism, sexuality, and heresy that characterized late antiquity, Schroeder compares his views on bodily discipline, monastic punishments, the resurrection of the body, the incarnation of Christ, and monastic authority with those of figures such as Cyril of Alexandria, Paulinus of Nola, and Pachomius.

This book depicts the lives of female monks within a monastery located in upper Egypt in the period 385-464 CE.

This landmark, interdisciplinary publication of the Red Monastery church, the most important Christian monument in Egypt's Nile Valley, highlights its remarkable and newly conserved paintings and architectural sculpture.

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 duree - through archaeological and textual sources - and to assess its place within the world of Late Antiquity.

Shenoute of Atripe: stern abbot, loquacious preacher, patron of the poor and scourge of pagans in fifth-century Egypt. This book studies his numerous Coptic writings and finds them to be the most important literary source for the study of society, economy and religion in late antique Egypt. The issues and concerns Shenoute grappled with on a daily basis, Ariel Lopez argues, were not local problems, unique to one small corner of the ancient world. Rather, they are crucial to interpreting late antiquity as a historical period—rural patronage, religious intolerance, the Christian care of the poor and the local impact of the late Roman state. His little known writings provide us not only with a rare opportunity to see the life of a holy man as he himself saw it, but also with a privileged window into his world. Lopez brings Shenoute to prominence as witness of and participant in the major transformations of his time.

Shenoute the Great (c.347–465) led one of the largest Christian monastic communities in late antique Egypt and was the greatest native writer of Coptic in history. For approximately eight decades, Shenoute led a federation of three monasteries and emerged as a Christian leader. His public sermons attracted crowds of clergy, monks, and lay people; he advised military and government officials; he worked to ensure that his followers would be faithful to orthodox Christian teaching; and he vigorously and violently opposed paganism and the oppressive treatment of the poor by the rich. This volume presents in translation a selection of his sermons and other orations. These works grant us access to the theology, rhetoric, moral teachings, spirituality, and social agenda of a powerful Christian leader during a period of great religious and social change in the later Roman Empire.