Title: Review of Anne Boud’hors, Le canon 8 de
Chénouté : d’après le manuscrit Ifao Copte 2 et les fragments complémentaires
Author(s): Esther GAREL
Journal: SHEDET(Annual Peer-Reviewed Journal Issued
By The Faculty Of Archaeology, Fayoum University)
Issue: 2 Date: 2015
Pages: 87-88
Cite as: Esther GAREL. (2015).Review of Anne
Boud’hors, Le canon 8 de Chénouté : d’après le manuscrit Ifao Copte 2 et les
fragments complémentaires. SHEDET(Annual Peer-Reviewed Journal Issued By The
Faculty Of Archaeology, Fayoum University), 2 (2015) pp. 87-88. https://doi.org/10.36816/shedet.002.16
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Review of Anne Boud’hors, Le canon 8 de Chénouté : d’après le manuscrit Ifao
Copte 2 et les fragments complémentaires
Esther GAREL
The writings of Shenute who was between about 385 and 465 the head of a
monastery in Upper Egypt, known as the ‘White Monastery’ or ‘Monastery of
Shenute’, have been massively revealed when the remains of the monastery’s
library were discovered in the 1880s. The few hundred manuscripts kept in this
library were quickly cut up and dismantled and are now scattered in collections
worldwide, often in a very fragmentary state. Copies of Shenute’s works (about
one hundred) have known the same fate. Stephen Emmel has shown how these works
were structured1 : eight volumes of Discourses (in Coptic ⲗⲟⲅⲟⲥ) addressed to
various people, and nine volumes of Canons (ⲕⲁⲛⲱⲛ) intended for monastic
communities, and a correspondence. The most complete witness of volume 8 of
Shenute’s Canons is kept, for its most part, in the IFAO (French Institute of
Oriental Archaeology) in Cairo, and known as « Ifaocopte 2 ». It belonged to the
library of the White Monastery. A few other fragments are now in the French
National Library in Paris, the National Library of Naples and the British
Library in London. Manuscript known as IfaoCopte 2 is the best kept witness of
the collections of sermons by Shenute and maybe even of all the manuscripts that
once belonged to the library of the White Monastery (128 leaves out of 160 are
preserved). It is the critical edition and translation of this manuscript that
Anne Boud’hors offers in this book.