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Licensed Unlicensed Requires Authentication Published by De Gruyter August 24, 2022

VII. A Slave or a generous benefactor? Legal analysis of 8th-century donations of boys from the Monastery of St. Phoibammon in the Western Thebes

  • Maria Nowak

Abstract

This article discusses the Coptic donations of children from the monastery of St. Phoibammon in Western Thebes. These documents, unparalleled elsewhere, attest the donations of free boys made by their parents to the local monastery. In the first part of this article, previous scholarship on the donations is reviewed. In the second part, the various ways in which parents could surrender their children both in legal practice and statutory law are compared to the donations of boys. Finally, the third part offers a comprehensive analysis of these donations within a wider social and legal context.


* The article was written in the framework of the project Legal Networks in the Theban Region, financed by the National Agency for Academic Exchange (PPN/BEK/2019/1/00081/U/00001). – I would like to express my gratitude to Ewa Wipszycka and Wolfgang Kaiser for having commented on the earlier draft of this paper, to Marzena Wojtczak and Renate Dekker for their valuable remarks, and to Barry Keane for his editorial insight. All the remaining errors and inaccuracies are mine alone.


Published Online: 2022-08-24
Published in Print: 2022-07-26

© 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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