Today I received an email asking me about a letter of St Shenouda of Atripe, the 4th century Coptic abbot. The letter in question was apparently written to a nun, saying “I knew you long ago.” The email asked if I knew the source.
Well, I have almost no familiarity with the works of Shenouda (or Shenoute), so I thought that I would poke around a bit. The email author was French, so I wondered what existed in French.
Interestingly Emile Amelineau translated some material by Shenouda into French as long ago as 1907, in his “Oeuvres de Schenoudi”. Vol. 1 is here; vol. 2 here. But… neither has a table of contents! Cunningly, the editor has also ensured that none of the names of the works appears in the running titles. This would not be great in printed volumes; in a PDF it is impossible to gain an overview of the volume and its contents without significant work. Flinders Petrie had hard words for Amelineau’s destructive ineptitude as an archaeologist at Abydos; a century later, I feel ever so slightly vexed at such carelessness.
On reading his interminable introduction, in search of information, I find that he is not really editing anything. What he is doing is printing chunks of fragments from papyri. So, for him, each section is just whatever was found in such a manuscript. That may be better than nothing, but it does not help us here.
It seems that the reconstruction of Shenouda’s works had to wait until modern times, and the labours of Stephen Emmel.1. But that will have to wait for another day.