Religion & Pluralism in the Medieval Mediterranean Working Group: Lev Weitz (Catholic University of America), "Thieves in the Temple: A Rural Bishop in Medieval Egypt"

Please join us for the second meeting this term of our Religion & Pluralism in the Medieval Mediterranean Working Group. Lev Weitz (Associate Professor of History, Catholic University of America) will be presenting a talk titled "Thieves in the Temple: A Rural Bishop in Medieval Egypt." Dr. Weitz has provided the following abstract: Peasants pilfering vestments from monasteries, village chiefs employed to stop them, and recalcitrant monks resisting bishops’ demands for cash—these stories of medieval life in provincial Egypt are richly illustrated by a small corpus of eleventh-century Arabic documents that is this talk’s focus. Arabic documentary sources constitute a fundamental but still underappreciated body of source material for the social history of the medieval Islamic world, especially that of much-neglected rural regions. To this end, this talk examines the correspondence of an eleventh-century bishop of Egypt's Fayyum province, pieced together from library collections in Berlin and Washington and the finds of recent archaeological excavations.

The bishop’s letters yield new, ground-level insights into the institutional operation of the Coptic Church in the Fatimid Caliphate: the triangular relationships among ecclesiastics, lay elites, and monks, the church's all-important fiscal arrangements, and Christians' place in the caliphate’s linguistic and cultural landscape. Light refreshments will be served and a discussion will follow. For any questions related to this event, please contact Francisco J. Cintrón Mattei.

Lev Weitz is a historian of the Islamic Middle East. His scholarly interests lie in the encounters among Muslims, Christians, and Jews that have shaped the Middle East’s history from the coming of Islam to the present. He is the author of Between Christ and Caliph: Law, Marriage, and Christian Community in Early Islam (UPenn Press, 2018), which examines the multiconfessional society of early Islam through the lens of shifting marital practices of Syriac Christians. Lev is currently working on a project entitled On the Edge: Global Transformations in the Medieval Egyptian Countryside, which explores how Muslim and Christian communities in provincial Egypt experienced hemispheric trends—the expansion of Islam, the rise of Arabic, trade and slavery across the Nile and Sahara—that transformed Afro-Eurasia on either side of the year 1000.

Please contact Francisco Cintrón Mattei with any questions you have about this event. Thanks!