Ricerc@Sapienza

Despite the undeniable fact that Coptic Egypt produced a literature that, with very few exceptions, was Christian, above all in its early production there is a sporadic re-emergence of the ‘classical’ tradition, although sometimes unconscious and invariably revisited in the new Christian perspective. In fact, in dealing with Coptic literature one should not make the mistake of using the manuscript funds of the White Monastery and the Monastery of the Archangel Michael in Hamuli, Fayyūm (9th-10th/11th centuries) as a magnifying glass to interpret the whole literary development in the Coptic language. Such a distortion would fail to take into account the dramatic changes that Christian Egypt underwent in its first millennium. Moreover, it is important to remember that the works written in Coptic represent only a minor part of the literary production of the period taken into account here, since in those same centuries, for literary purposes, concurrent use was also made of Greek. This article re-considers early Coptic literature and proposes a new perspective.