Coptic Literature in Context (4th-13th cent.) : Cultural Landscape, Literary Production, and Manuscript Archaeology : Proceedings of the Third Conference of the ERC Project Tracking Papyrus and Parchment Paths: An Archaeological Atlas of Coptic Literature : Literary Texts in their Geographical Context (PAThs')

The present volume is mainly the outcome of the international conference Coptic Literature in Context. The Contexts of Coptic Literature. Late Antique Egypt in a Dialogue between Literature, Archaeology, and Digital Humanities, which took place at Sapienza Università di Roma on 25-27 February 2019, representing the third annual conference organised by the ‘PAThs’ project. As its title proclaimed, the aim the conference – exactly like that of the ‘PAThs’ project itself – was to create an effective dialogue among scholars active in different disciplines – including codicology, palaeography, papyrology, literature, history of early Christianity, epigraphy, art, archaeology, and archaeometry – and their related methodologies, in order to achieve a multispectral knowledge of late antique Egypt, in the consciousness that only a transdisciplinary approach may lead to the comprehension of complex cultural phenomena such as the production of the ‘Coptic book’. Manuscripts – in their double nature of carriers of texts (and therefore of intellectual products) and material objects – were of course at the core of the meeting, but always in their connection with the geo-archaeological context of production, circulation and storage