This chapter examines narrative representations of slavery in early monasticism. It then reads these accounts in light of extant material remains and in conversation with prescriptive regulatory precepts. Such contextualisation necessarily situates emergent communities within a late-Roman world where ‘attitudes of slaveholders [remained] constant’ and the ‘conditions in which slaves lived and worked persisted from generation to generation’ (Glancy). As the cracks and fissures routinely glossed over in more seamless depictions underscore the degree to which monastic ideals and ideologies, institutional and relational norms, remain inextricably intertwined with wider Greco-Roman practice, the chapter posits that emergent monastic mores may be best understood as at once dismantling and reinscribing the structural hierarchies of slavery. Against this landscape, where the jagged edges of lived experience remain patent, the chapter simultaneously premises reconceptualisations that effectively disrupt both static idealisation and wholesale denigration. Through engaging reading strategies that resist the limitations implicit to binaried definitions of practice, its aim is to breathe life into the larger than life.

The chapter analyses the presence of children in Byzantine Egyptian monasteries. It attempts to reconcile the seeming tension between the constant prohibition of and evidence for the ongoing presence of children in monasteries for an extended period. Ancient monastic and canonical norms provide vital information on this topic: most of them forbade any children in monasteries, even for a short period (e.g. to attend liturgies). However, some monastic sources confirm the presence of children in Byzantine-era Egyptian monasteries due to a variety of different circumstances, These varied from temporary to permanent residence, from children brought for education to those who were abandoned, traded, or donated to monasteries (because of social and economic hardships or medical conditions). For children facing such difficulties, the monastery was an opportunity to improve their quality of life, but, unfortunately, the monastic residence often became a place of violence and insecurity. Monastic obedience and submission to authority, alongside bodily punishments, were often and excessively applied in their education and formation as subjects of the monastic community and as future monastic members.

Children in early Egyptian monasteries were simultaneously a special, protected class and one of the most vulnerable populations – in some ways protected from the realities of the poverty-stricken world outside the monastic walls and the rigors of asceticism within, in other ways still vulnerable to the whims, desires, and ambitions of the adult monks around them. A status above the enslaved, but well below free adult men, children even in the monastery found their standing and status subject to negotiation. Children were in many ways a gift; caring for them was regarded as a sacred duty commanded directly by God. Their many needs and challenges, however, remained secondary to those of their adult caregivers. This chapter examines the education of children, their discipline (including corporal punishment), and their preparation for future lives as monastics.