The White Monastery (3)
At first glance, you wouldn't expect to find the Roman d'Alexandre in a monastery: the figure of Alexander thirsting for (vain) glory, who pushes pride to the point of believing himself to be of divine descent, and the place given in this text to pagan wisdom, are in every way opposed to the values of monks. But, as with the philosophical sentences, this analysis does not do justice to the richness of the work, nor to the complexity of the expectations of its potential readers.
First of all, we must not underestimate the appetite for novelistic reading that the monks also cultivated, most often through the hagiographic genre. Other texts in the codex containing the sentences of philosophers are also in the same vein(Roman de Parthénopée, Histoire de la femme du général et de ses trois fils). This taste for narrative works also intersected with more contemporary concerns: Alexander's quarrels with the Persians echoed the wars of the 6th and 7thcenturies between them and the Byzantine Empire. But behind the Persian, it is probably the Muslim who lurks, if we are to believe the use of the ethnic Lamite by the author of this Coptic version of the Roman d'Alexandre in the episode of the capture of the city of the Lamites: indeed, this is one of the Coptic designations for Muslims. The work thus acquires an anti-Muslim dimension, giving it new legitimacy for inclusion in a monastic library.
