I titoli delle opere letterarie copte, ovvero quando il paratesto diviene testo

Coptic titles represent a privileged point of observation of the Coptic literary manuscript tradition and of the way the Copts interpreted and arranged their own history. Over the centuries, they have changed position inside the manuscript, layout, length, textual structure and even purpose, marking crucial junctions of the manufacture of the writing supports – the shift from roll to codex, and from papyrus codex to parchment codex – and important passages of the history of Coptic literature – from the translations from Greek into Coptic to the production of an original literature. The short, concise titles of the beginnings of Coptic literature (3rd-5th centuries), based on the Greek titles of the works which were by then translated into Coptic, slowly but progressively gave way to longer and longer titles, which, in some cases, at least as far as the homiletic and hagiographic production is concerned, became real micro-texts, up to two pages in length, whose narrative thread was sometimes partially independent from the content of the works they were attributed to. Some of them are analysed in this article.