Men in a Coptic Town in Late Antique Egypt: Reexamining the Jeme Corpus

Terry G. Wilfong (University of Michigan)

In my 2002 book "Women of Jeme", I examined the lives of women in a 7th-8th century CE town in southern Egypt; this paper will be a preliminary reexamination of the same body of evidence to get at the roles and status of men.  The town of Jeme was administered by men, its religious and economic life were run by men, but its conflicting cultural traditions of male and female roles complicated men's positions in its society.  Indigenous Egyptian traditions of greater autonomy for women, filtered through centuries of Greek and Roman influence, did not always correspond to the ideals for men, maleness and masculinity promoted by local church authorities.

The paper will also look at the methodological challenges faced in this task, and how the approaches of modern masculinist studies may (or may not) help. The problematization of "men" as a category can help understand men's lives at Jeme in general, but the specifics of the lives of individual men, and how they were affected by gender, can be much harder to get at in the Jeme material than the lives of women. By using gender as a prism for seeing the interaction between individuals and society at the end of antiquity, this paper seeks to add additional layers to problem of question of how the individual, the family, and the administration interacted.