Roxanne Bélanger Sarrazin: Apocrypha, Magic, Liturgy, Kartoniert / Broschiert

Klappentext

Roxanne Bélanger Sarrazin examines a group of Coptic prayer texts known in modern scholarship as "magical liturgies", preserved in manuscripts, mostly from Egypt, dating from the 5th to 13th centuries. Drawing on the sociological concept of "multiple identities", she explores how these prayers can, from an etic perspective, be described as "apocryphal", "magical", and "liturgical". Her approach involves a rigorous comparative analysis and employs several scholarly categories as lenses for evaluating the sources. It sheds light on how these prayers might have been conceptualized and used by people in Late Antique and early Islamic Egypt, and on the roles they played in the formation of Christian identities. In addition, the book draws on concepts from Material Philology. It pays particular attention to the material and paratextual features of the manuscripts containing these prayers, and assesses what these features can tell us about the contexts in which the manuscripts were produced and used. By analyzing the textual, material, and paratextual aspects together, the study reveals that the "magical liturgies" were most probably composed in monastic and ecclesiastic contexts. The Coptic manuscripts transmitting them, too, were produced and used in such settings in Late Antique and early Islamic Egypt.