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Course A107: From Late Antiquity to Byzantium

Monasticism

Sources

The Lives of the Desert Fathers: The Historia Monachorum in Aegypto , trans. Norman Russel, in CS 34 (Michigan 1980)

The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection, trans. B. Ward, in CS 59 (Michigan 1984)

S. Basil of Caesarea, "The Long Rules", in Saint Basil, Ascetical Works , trans. M.M. Wagner, (The Fathers of the Church 9), 1962, pp.247-250, 289-291. Reprinted in C.M. Brand, Icon and Minaret: Sources of Byzantine and Islamic Civilisation, 1969, pp.60-3

A good bibliography online

Pachomius

A.N. Athanassakis, The Life of Pachomius (vita prima graeca) (Missoula 1975)

Pachomian Koinonia I-III, ed. A. Veilleux, CS 45-7 (Michigan 1980-2) [vol. 1, Life of Pachomius]

*Pachomian Koinonia I-III, ed. A. Veilleux, CS 45-7 (Michigan 1980-2) [Rules of the Pachomian Koinonia]

Shenoute

Besa, The Life of Shenoute, trans. D.N. Bell ( Kalamazoo Michigan 1983 )

D.W. Young, Coptic Manuscripts from the White Monastery: Works of Shenute (Vienna 1993)

A History of the Monks of Syria, by Theodoret of Cyrrhus, translated by R. M. Price (Kalamazoo, 1985)

Palladius, The Lausiac History

• trans. W. K. Lowther Clark (London 1918)
• trans R. T. Meyer, Ancient Christian Writers, 34, (London 1965)

John Moschus, The Spiritual Meadow trans. J. Wortley (CSC, Kalamazoo 1993) and trans. Benedict Baker, online

Studies

• D. Chitty, The Desert a City (Oxford 1966)
• P. Rousseau, Ascetics, authority and the Church in the age of Jerome and Cassian (Oxford 1972)
• P. Brown, Body and Society: Men, Women and sexual renunciation in early Christianity (London 1989) Part II
• S. Elm, "Virgins of God": The Making of Asceticism in Late Antiquity (Oxford 1994)
• J.E. Goehring, "The origins of monasticism", in Eusebius, Christianity and Judaism, eds. H.W. Attridge and G. Hata (Detroit 1992). Reprinted in his Ascetics, Society and the Desert: Studies in Early Egyptian Monasticism (Harrisburg 1999)
• Daniel Caner, Wandering, begging monks spiritual authority and the promotion of monasticism in late antiquity (Berkeley, Calif. 2002).

·       Egypt

• Roger Bagnall, Egypt in Late Antiquity (Princeton, 1995)
• H. Chadwick, 'Pachomius and the idea of sanctity', The Byzantine Saint, ed. S. Hackel (London 1981), 11-24
• P. Rousseau, Pachomius: the making of a community in fourth-century Egypt (Berkeley, 1985)
• C. W. Gregg, Early Egyptian Christianity (to 451 C.E.) (Leiden, 1991)
• H. Behlmer, "Visitors to Shenute's monastery", in Pilgrimage and Holy Space in Late Antique Egypt, ed. D. Frankfurter (Leiden 1998), pp.341-71
• T. Timbie, "The state of research on the career of Shenoute of Atripe", in The Roots of Egyptian Christianity, eds. B.A. Pearson, E. Goehring (Philadelphia 1992), 258-70
• Rebecca Krawiec, Shenoute and the Women of the White Monastery:
  Egyptian Monasticism in Late Antiquity . (Oxford, OUP, 2002)
• David Frankfurter, ' "Things Unbefitting Christians": Violence and Christianization in Fifth-Century Panopolis', online article in Journal of Early Christian Studies 8.2 , Summer 2000

• On the White Monastery and its archaeology see Minnesota in Egypt

General

• Judith Herrin, The Formation of Christendom, chap. 2
• Averil Cameron, The Later Roman Empire, chap. 6
• A.H.M.Jones, The Later Roman Empire, II, chap. 'The Church'
• R. Markus, The End of Ancient Christianity (Cambridge, 1991)

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Page modified February 25, 2007