Your Egypt

[A_U_s_a_R]

DR. MALCOLM CHOAT
Macquarie University

TRANSPOSING NARRATIVE THROUGH LANGUAGES: THE GREEK AND COPTIC LIVES OF ANTONY

The Life of Antony was written in Greek shortly after the death of the great monk in the mid 350s. Tradition ascribes it to Athanasius, although some modern scholars have not been so sure. It set forth a narrative framework for integrating the new institution of monasticism into the ecclesiastical hierarchy and proved immensely influential in doing this within Egypt, in the wider Byzantine world and the Latin-speaking West. Recent readings have seen it as the cornerstone of Athanasius? ?ascetic program? whereby he fashioned monasticism in Egypt in the image he desired. Yet monasticism in Egypt was scarcely a monolingual institution: a substantial section of the monastic populace were Coptic speakers and would have had no point of access to a narrative written in Greek. This paper investigates the early reception in Coptic sources of the Life of Antony and asks when it was translated and how it effected monastic narratives and ideologies which were articulated in Coptic.


http://www.cca.unimelb.edu.au/byznarr/abstracts.html