TeTra | Chloé Agar "Christian and Pagan Practices in Coptic Hagiography"

TeTra Research Seminar | 29 April 2023
Chloé Agar (University of Oxford)
•The Dichotomy between Christian and Pagan Practices in Coptic Hagiography•
The creation, copying, and recitation to congregations of hagiography was in itself a cult practice within the cult of saints in Late Antiquity. Such texts include examples of other cult practices within them, which would have presumably been familiar to the lay congregants. But, as hagiography was recited in the devotional space of churches and saints’ shrines and was written by ecclesiastical figures, the writers chose which practices to include and which to exclude. Through comparing hagiographical, documentary, and archaeological evidence, I will show that the impression of cult practices given in hagiography is not a full reflection of the reality and that pagan practices were still alive and well in ostensibly Christian spaces.
oxford.academia.edu/ChloéAgar