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Reviewed by:
  • The Cave Church of Paul the Hermit at the Monastery of St. Paul, Egypt
  • Caroline T. Schroeder
The Cave Church of Paul the Hermit at the Monastery of St. Paul, Egypt. Edited byWilliam Lyster. (New Haven: Yale University Press, publ. in association with the American Research Center in Egypt. 2008. Pp. xx, 395. $75.00. ISBN 978-0-300-11847-6.)

This sumptuous feast of a book presents groundbreaking, multidisciplinary work on the Monastery of St. Paul the Hermit near Egypt's Red Sea coast. Although the volume's primary purpose is to record and report on conservation work at the monastery's ancient cave church in 1999 and from 2001 through 2005, it in fact provides a much broader study. Tradition dates the site to a fourth-century founder, Paul the Hermit, a monastic inspiration to the famous Antony the Great. The monasteries dedicated to these men have endured as companion sites, and indeed this book is a companion volume to the magnificent Monastic Visions: Wall Paintings at the Monastery of St. Antony at the Red Sea(New Haven, 2002), edited by Elizabeth S. Bolman. This project was inspired when conservators and scholars working on the St. Antony campaign visited the neighboring monastery, and funding for both endeavors was provided by the American Research Center in Egypt and USAID as well as other sources.

Essays on Egyptian economic and political history, religious history, and literature associated with the site, and Coptic art and architecture combine with an astounding number of illustrations of the monastery church's wall paintings, historical photographs of the site, relevant manuscripts, site plans, and more. What emerges from this collection is a portrait of a contemporary, living religious community whose heritage and cultural memory remains firmly ensconced in late antiquity, but whose most significant historical moments (in the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries) are now much more clearly understood. [End Page 766]

Part 1 addresses the monastery's historical context and literary traditions. Stephen J. Davis maps out the influence of Jerome's Life of Paulon Western understandings of the early hermit. Other articles illuminate the history of the monastery in the medieval and early-modern eras, paying close attention to how economic trends in Egypt, local and national politics, and the influx of Western visitors shaped the institution. Mark N. Swanson analyzes the monastery's connections to the political environment, Islamicization, and economics (especially increasing poverty in the medieval period). He traces the community's connections to specific writers and patrons at the center of Coptic Egypt's thirteenth-century literary renaissance. The monastery, following nationwide developments during the period, declined and became uninhabited until an eighteenth-century "restoration." Febe Armanios's essay explains this second renaissance with an analysis of political factionalism and rivalries in the Ottoman period, which led to a decentralization of power in Egypt. Coptic Christians, who often had financial, administrative, or tax-collection expertise in their localities but were not implicated in governing factions, were consequently viewed as both trustworthy and capable. An increase in the power and influence of Coptic professionals ensued during the eighteenth century, which in turn allowed them to serve as mentors to other professionals and benefactors of cultural and religious institutions, including St. Paul's monastery. Gawdat Gabra's essay provides a glimpse into the manuscript library, a font of future research.

Part 2 examines the art and architecture at the ancient cave church and some surrounding buildings. Peter Sheehan's and Michael Jones's articles provide important architectural histories, but the heart of this section lies in a series of chapters on the extensive church wall paintings. The painting programs in the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries were expansive, and the conservation efforts expose a panorama of beauty heretofore obscured to the modern eye by centuries of dirt and smoke. I visited the monastery in 1999, prior to the conservation, and viewed some of the paintings. This volume's essays on and extensive photographs of the art are astonishing witnesses to the work the group accomplished in the intervening years. It is a credit to the authors and the project director that the book contains a meticulous documentation of the methods...

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