Shenute

Shenoute of Atripe, also known as Shenoute the Great or Shenoute the Archimandrite (Coptic: ; died 1 July 465), was an Egyptian saint, and the abbot of the White Monastery in Egypt. He is considered a saint by the Oriental Orthodox Churches and is one of the most renowned saints of the Coptic Orthodox Church.

Early life The Life of Shenoute, Sahidic Coptic script, papyrus, 6th-7th century CE. From Egypt. British Museum Shenoute was born in the middle of the fourth century CE (the date 348 CE, often mentioned but not universally accepted, is based on an inscription in his monastery, dating from the 12th or 13th century).

He may have lived as late as 466; tradition ascribes to him an inordinately long life of 118 years.

Around 385 CE, Shenoute became the father of the White Monastery in Upper Egypt. It has often been assumed that Shenoute was the immediate successor of the White Monastery's founder, Pacol. However, the reconstruction of Shenoute's literary corpus made it possible to realize that Pacol died in the 370s and was then succeeded not by Shenoute but by another father, Eboh and that a spiritual crisis during Eboh's tenure as head of the White Monastery, a crisis which seems to have involved carnal sin, enabled Shenoute to come to prominence and to become Eboh's immediate successor.

Shenoute was known for his strict monastic regulations within the walls of the White Monastery.

At the Council of Ephesus Because of his popularity in Upper Egypt and his zeal, Shenoute was chosen by Cyril, the ecclesiarchal Patriarch of Alexandria, to accompany him in representing the Church of Alexandria at the Council of Ephesus in 431 CE. He produced literary works for the Coptic Church comprising 25,000 folios. Monastery of Saint Shenouda in Milan, Italy Coptic Monastery of St. Shenouda in Rochester, New York, U.S. St. Shenouda Coptic Orthodox Monastery in Putty, New South Wales, Australia

There is also a Coptic Orthodox church - St. Mary and St. Shenouda - in Coulsdon, England.

Works and translations

There has been difficulty in accessing and reconstructing the works of Shenoute for a variety of readings. The number of legible manuscripts his works survive in are not many, and he wrote in Coptic, which is a language that ceased in use as a spoken language in the Middle Ages, which added to the obscurity of his writings. For a long time, his works stopped being transmitted, and the remaining manuscripts were subject to decay from then on. Shenoute was responsible for collecting his own literary works into two collections, which were then transmitted. These were the Canons and the Discourses (or Logoi). Johannes Leipoldt published several volumes of his works, although he did so without access to all the manuscripts and so did not produce a critical edition. The transmission and structure of these two collections were first reconstructed in a dissertation by Stephen Emmel. Dwight Young has published some Coptic editions of this work with English translation. Bentley Layton has additionally published new Coptic texts of his rule and their translations.