foundation · 385 · White Monastery
Pachomius had invented the coenobitic house; Shenoute took the White Monastery from his uncle Pjol and turned it into something with no real parallel — a federation of houses for men and women, several thousand strong, bound by a written covenant each member signed, with a hierarchy of visitations and a discipline he applied himself and sometimes physically. He led it for something like eighty years; the tradition gives him a hundred and eighteen, which no one need believe to accept that he was extremely old. The part that matters beyond Egypt is the language. He wrote in Coptic, at length and with real literary ambition, when Greek was the language of anything serious, and he is consequently the largest body of original Coptic literature there is — the reason the language has a literature rather than a set of translations. He is also remembered for going down and burning a temple and for a hard hand with pagan landowners, which his own works do not hide.
What did Egyptian monasticism look like when it stopped being a matter of individuals?
Thousands of people under one written rule, in Coptic, run by a man who enforced it in person.