Shenoute and the Women of the White Monastery

Download or read book Shenoute and the Women of the White Monastery written by Rebecca Krawiec and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2002-01-24 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.