How Do We Tell the Story of Medieval Copts? Inspirations from Burton Mack

Abstract

Abstract This paper experiments with Burton Mack’s invitation to rethink how scholars frame the past by examining two discourses in Copto-Arabic studies. First, I present the scholarly discourses of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries about the medieval Coptic past, and second, I examine how the traditional past is perceived in two medieval Copto-Arabic legal collections. I claim that closely reading these collections reveals the ways that their authors theorized and negotiated the authority of the past. There are marked differences between the two collections – differences that defined their intellectual contributions and their place in the tradition. More broadly, I demonstrate that Mack’s invitation to rethink and redescribe our subjects’ narratives about themselves can enrich Copto-Arabic scholarship by opening hitherto untapped areas, especially in the sociolegal realm.