Last year's study of monastic schools brought us face to face with the increasingly important role played by Coptic (the Egyptian language of late Antiquity Egypt) in a pedagogical framework that was nonetheless Greek in spirit; it also made us aware of the pragmatic character that teaching could take on, to the point where we wondered whether certain texts considered to be scholastic were not more akin to a professional activity. We couldn't close this cycle on schools without giving a special mention to Coptic teaching and professional training. These are two little-known chapters in the great book of Late Antique culture that we'll be leafing through this year. They echo some of the current preoccupations of our increasingly multilingual societies, which are increasingly questioning the usefulness of classical lectures in the face of vocational training, in particular by advocating the increasingly early adaptation of the former to the latter. We'll be looking at how late Antiquity responded to both situations.
This two-pronged investigation, based mainly on papyrological sources (some of which have never been published before), will help us to revise the misconceptions too commonly held by historians of the period, and to gain a better understanding of the character and functioning of Egypt's written culture in Late Antiquity.
