How does a human being become a “Father of the Church,” materially
embodied in books on library shelves devoted to Migne, Sources
Chrétiennes, or simply “BR”? As scholars work now to make Shenoute the
Great (347-465) such a “Father,” this paper examines the earliest
efforts to make him such – the compilation of selected works of the monk
into large volumes of “discourses” (logoi). Examination of
surviving manuscript fragments, including their colophons, marginal
annotations, layouts, and decorations, may help us to see what kind of
author early medieval monastic editors sought to create and how later
monks used these works and understood their authority.
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