Ambienti della letteratura copta e il progetto PAThs

This contribution discusses the methodological issues which are at the basis of two projects concerning Coptic manuscripts, CMCL (PI: Tito Orlandi) and PAThs (PI: Paola Buzi). It emphasizes those tools, created especially inside the ATLAS of PAThs, which allow the modern scholar to recover the geographical environments of Coptic literature, the ancient libraries, the selection and circulation of texts in the different periods of its development. The textual competence, articulating the contents of Coptic literature, has a long history, which begins since late antiquity: each historical phase, especially after the Council of Chalcedon, has its own image of the literary heritage, its own selection of the textual “competence” or “competences”. This image is not only varied and composite in itself, in the individual chronological phases, but also changes over time and according to geography. We have inherited, for the Sahidic literary tradition, the image transmitted by the clergy and intellectuals active in the eighth and ninth century, attested by manuscripts of the tenth to twelfth centuries, not the one of the previous periods. One of the great results of the research projects such as CMCL and PAThs is to make us overcome the borders of a phase of textual selection by taking note of the existence of ancient codices prior to these phases containing texts which were either destined to be marginalized for various reasons from the main stream of textual heritage or chosen to be kept; to give us other images of the Coptic textual situation in the different periods of the religious debates, or, according to a synchronic and spatial perspective, in relation to the different regions, dioceses, monastic settlements.