Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

Avant Propos / Lillian I. Larsen -- Communicating monasticism: reading and writing monastic texts in late antique egypt / Malcolm Choat and Maria Chiara Giorda -- Monastic letters on papyrus from late antique Egypt / Malcolm Choat -- From textual to ritual practice: written media and authority in Shenoute's Canons / Paul Dilley -- Monastic wills: the continuation of late Roman legal tradition? / Esther Gareland and Maria Nowak -- Writing monastic testaments: a communication from generation to generation / Maria Chiara Giorda -- The wisdom of the wall: innovation in monastic epigraphy / Jacques van der Vliet -- Writing and monastic doctrine / Fabrizio Vecoli -- Monastic graffiti in context: the temple of Seti I at Abydos / Jennifer Westerfeld -- biblical recitations and their function in the piety of monastic Egypt / Ewa Wipszycka.

As senders of letters, copyists of literary texts, compilers of accounts, readers, and teachers, the monks of late antique Egypt articulated their interactions with their ascetic and secular environments via their role as authors, scribes, and owners of written text. This volume edited by Malcolm Choat and Maria Chiara Giorda examines the presence and practice of writing, modes of written communication, and the symbolic and spiritual value of the written word in monastic communities. Contributions cover evidence from papyri and inscriptions to literature transmitted in manuscripts, positioned within the shift in recent scholarship away from literature such as hagiography as a source of positivistic history, towards evidence that derives more directly from the monk or period in focus.