The Reception and Use of Monastic Literature: Text Creation and Community Formation

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This volume explores how Greek and Latin authors across the Mediterranean and Europe deployed related texts to form monastic communities in different veins. Using the Apophthegmata Patrum as an exemplar, Zachary B. Smith argues that late antique, early medieval, and Byzantine authors selectively utilized monastic sayings texts to form their particular monastic worlds. By translating, editing, systematizing, and elaborating on these sayings, the authors formed their communities in specific ways. Early Byzantines marshalled the sayings to form ascetic subjects through contemplating the sayings, with less reference to monastic systems. In systematizing the original alphabetic collection, an anonymous editor turned the sayings into an encyclopedia that deemphasized individual contemplation, and instead emphasized the role of the master. In Europe, translating the sayings into Latin, systematizing them in Latin, making "midrashim, " and distilling them into rules furthered this process of using the sayings as tools for institutional formation in the medieval period.