“According to the Flesh”

Abstract

Abstract Biological kin, who were defined with precise language as “those according to the flesh,” lived in the monastery alongside those monks who had renounced their families to join the monastery. These monks faced particular challenges since they experienced enforced gender separation from spouses and relatives, witnessed the corporal punishment of relatives, and even saw relatives expelled from the monastery. Overall, the monks with kin were expected to live as though they had also renounced each other so that all monks had the same “kinship” with each other and so shared the same salvation. Despite these expectations, Shenoute found a way to have male and female monks visit each other without violating his own commands: male relatives often served as envoys carrying these very letters from Shenoute to the female community. Finally, the experiences of one female monk, Tachom, shows the intersection of the three patterns that determined a monk's life: power, gender, and family.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 3 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.