SSCN Voumes 1-10, 1994-2004

St. Shenouda Coptic Newsletter

point Krawiec suggests that it "is the disparity between Shenoute's idealized expectations and the reality that existed among the women that served as the basis for many other conflicts." Two assumptions here are troubling: Why are Shenoute's expectations "idealized," and why do the female monks represent "reality"? (As opposed to Shenoute's irreality? fantasies?) Why couldn't one reverse this claim? I imagine that Shenoute believed his position to be very real, based as it was on Scripture. If the two assumptions are questionable, what about the conclusion? One can pose such questions throughout the volume. Shenoute and the Women of the White Monastery should nevertheless be of interest to everyone who studies and cares about early Christian monasticism; Krawiec offers numerous insights about women at the White Monastery and we are in her debt for drawing attention to these female monastics. My concern is that some readers, following the subtitle, "Egyptian Monasticism in Late Antiquity," will seriously mistake a part, a fractious and perhaps even very small part, for the salvific whole. If Krawiec had subtitled her volume "Gender, Power, and Authority at the White Monastery" and stressed that she was examining only a portion of early monastic life and thought, her book would have the proper emphasis. All at the White Monastery was not power, gender, and authority. Men--and women-- were, after all, praying. Tim Vivian, St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Bakersfield, CA

Krawiec believes that Shenoute "did not seek to eradicate the monks' sexual differences, but to create a monasticism that did not allow for distinctions between male and female monks." For Krawiec, however, this "genderless monasticism" only "served the purpose of his discourse of monastic power in that it was a clear justification for his expansion of male authority over the female community." Wait a minute. Why was it automatically an expansion of male authority and not simply Shenoute's authority? Was Shenoute, either intentionally or unintentionally, really trying to expand male authority? Krawiec's own insistence on Shenoute's lust for power makes this seem unlikely, but for her it seems that Shenoute's patriarchy was grounded in the aridly sexist landscape of late antiquity and early Christianity: Shenoute's "construction of the monastery as a family," Krawiec believes, allowed him to "mimic the asymmetry of the patriarchal household." Since most secular scholars won't, or can't, discuss the spiritual, what we all too often get is everything but: sociology, semiotics, gender studies. This gives a lopsided view of Christianity, one that is ultimately unfair but one, which gets taken for the norm in academic circles. Scholars quote and cite one another and their truncated representations of Christianity become tradition, handed on like Christmas stockings. Still, scholarly books are valuable when they inform; they are probably even more valuable when they jar and rattle. Shenoute and the Women of the White Monastery both informs and rattles, but often problematically so. At one

St. Shenouda Coptic Newsletter

-16-