24 IV: Perrine Pilette (CNRS – UMR8167 Orient & Méditerranée) Patriarchs, Month After Month : Rewritings of the History of the Patriarchs of Alexandria in the Copto-Arabic Synaxarion

The Coptic-Arabic Synaxarion, compiled at the turn of the Mamluk period, organizes the commemorations of saints and martyrs according to the Coptic calendar. Among these holy figures, the patriarchs hold a prominent place. This enables an analysis – through several case studies – of the adaptation, within the Synaxarion, of data from one of its main sources: the Arabic text of the History of the Patriarchs of Alexandria, which is considered the official history of the Alexandrian Church. In doing so, this opens the way for new hypotheses regarding the compositional processes behind this complex and still under-studied corpus.