Books by Caroline T Schroeder
Children and Family in Late Antique Egyptian Monasticism, 2021
This is the first book-length study of children in one of the birthplaces
of early Christian mona... more This is the first book-length study of children in one of the birthplaces
of early Christian monasticism, Egypt. Although comprised of men
and women who had renounced sex and family, the monasteries of
late antiquity raised children, educated them, and expected them to
carry on their monastic lineage and legacies into the future. Children
within monasteries existed in a liminal space, simultaneously vulnerable
to the whims and abuses of adults and cherished as potential
future monastic prodigies. Caroline T. Schroeder examines diverse
sources – letters, rules, saints’ lives, art, and documentary evidence –
to probe these paradoxes. In doing so, she demonstrates how early
Egyptian monasteries provided an intergenerational continuity of
social, cultural, and economic capital while also contesting the traditional
family’s claims to these forms of social continuity.
The lives of Melania the Elder and Melania the Younger span one of the most important periods of ... more The lives of Melania the Elder and Melania the Younger span one of the most important periods of Christian history, reaching from the reign of Constantine through the reign of Theodosius II. They and their family members were well known to some of the most influential political and cultural figures of the period; their patronage promoted the work of major Christian thinkers from both before their time and during it. Their property and travels connected the political, economic, and religious worlds of the late antique Mediterranean. This volume examines the history of early Christianity as it was created and imagined through the lives of the two Melanias. The volume overlays the history of Christianity with a set of narratives that explore themes in the lives of the Melanias, such as constructions of gender, asceticism, orthodoxy and heresy, family and wealth, travel, patterns of memory, worship and hagiography. The resulting collaborative portrait of this family, its influence, and its interests offers a new window on to early Christian history, not by portraying Christianity as a timeless entity unfolding over centuries, but by considering in more complex ways the lives, representations, and later reception of two late ancient persons who attempted to be Christian.
Papers by Caroline T Schroeder
Proceedings of LaTeCH 2016 - The 10th SIGHUM Workshop at the Annual Meeting of the ACL, 2016
Zeldes, Amir and Schroeder, Caroline T. (2016) "An NLP Pipeline for Coptic". In: Proceedings of L... more Zeldes, Amir and Schroeder, Caroline T. (2016) "An NLP Pipeline for Coptic". In: Proceedings of LaTeCH 2016 - The 10th SIGHUM Workshop at the Annual Meeting of the ACL. Berlin, 146-155.
The Coptic language of Hellenistic era Egypt in the first millennium C.E. is a treasure trove of information for History, Religious Studies, Classics, Linguistics and many other Humanities disciplines. Despite the existence of large amounts of text in the language, comparatively few digital resources have been available, and almost no tools for Natural Language Processing. This paper presents an end-to-end, freely available open source tool chain starting with Unicode plain text or XML transcriptions of Coptic manuscript data, which adds fully automatic word and morpheme segmentation, normaliza-tion, language of origin recognition, part of speech tagging, lemmatization, and dependency parsing at the click of a button. We evaluate each component of the pipeline, which is accessible as a Web interface and machine readable API online.
Proceedings of LaTeCH 2018 - The 11th SIGHUM Workshop at COLING2018, 2018
Feder, Frank, Kupreyev, Maxim, Manning, Emma, Schroeder, Caroline T. and Zeldes, Amir (2018) "A L... more Feder, Frank, Kupreyev, Maxim, Manning, Emma, Schroeder, Caroline T. and Zeldes, Amir (2018) "A Linked Coptic Dictionary Online". Proceedings of LaTeCH 2018 - The 11th SIGHUM Workshop at COLING2018. Santa Fe, NM.
We describe a new project publishing a freely available online dictionary for Coptic. The dictionary encompasses comprehensive cross-referencing mechanisms, including linking entries to an online scanned edition of Crum's Coptic Dictionary, internal cross-references and etymological information, translated searchable definitions in English, French and German, and linked corpus data which provides frequencies and corpus look-up for headwords and multiword expressions. Headwords are available for linking in external projects using a REST API. We describe the challenges in encoding our dictionary using TEI XML and implementing linking mechanisms to construct a Web interface querying frequency information, which draw on NLP tools to recognize inflected forms in context. We evaluate our dictionary's coverage using digital corpora of Coptic available online.
Prepublication PDF of article in Coptica.
What are the Apophthegmata Patrum's "family values"? T... more Prepublication PDF of article in Coptica.
What are the Apophthegmata Patrum's "family values"? This collection of late antique sayings about primarily male ascetics might seem to have none. Some of the most memorable anecdotes eschew family and children. This essay argues, however, that family—the traditional ancient family, children and all—remained a core value for the monks of late antique Egypt. I will examine the phenomenon of holy people who heal children in the Apophthegmata Patrum, evidence from Shenoute's monastery, and documentary sources from late antique Egypt.
Children in the Roman world were viewed as containing society's future potential, symbolic of the family's and culture's legacy and inheritance. Monasteries, in their care for children, acted as alternative, nonbiological family systems and as agents in the support and continuation of traditional families. People brought their children to monks to be healed, and these communities of respected ascetics ensured the survival of the next generation of Christian families through their acts of healing and exorcising.
Published in Coptica 10 (2011)
Coptic SCRIPTORIUM is a platform for interdisciplinary and computational research in Coptic texts... more Coptic SCRIPTORIUM is a platform for interdisciplinary and computational research in Coptic texts and linguistics. The purpose of this project was to research and implement a system of stable identification for the texts and linguistic data objects in Coptic SCRIPTORIUM to facilitate their citation and reuse. We began the project with a preferred solution, the Canonical Text Services URN model, which we validated for suitability for the corpus and compared it to other approaches, including HTTP URLs and Handles. The process of applying the CTS model to Coptic SCRIPTORIUM required an in-depth analysis that took into account the domain-specific scholarly research and citation practices, the structure of the textual data, and the data management workflow. Overview Coptic SCRIPTORIUM (SCRIPTORIUM) is a platform for interdisciplinary and computational research in Cop-tic linguistics, literature, and history. The goal of this research project was to investigate, decide upon and implement a system of stable identification for the texts and research objects in SCRIPTORIUM in order facilitate their citation and reuse. SCRIPTORIUM began when two scholars from different disciplines (Amir Zeldes in Linguistics and Caroline T. Schroeder in Religious Studies) identified a shared need for digitized corpora of Coptic texts. The Coptic language was the last phase of the ancient Egyptian language family, in use from late antique to Byzantine periods of Egyptian history. Due to Egypt's dry climate, Coptic sources important to a number of academic disciplines have survived. Linguists conducting computational and statistical research into language as well as historians, religious studies scholars, and philologists seeking to query and investigate topics and terminology across large sets of primary sources would find a digital corpus annotated consistently according to recognized standards useful. Through SCRIPTORIUM, Zeldes and Schroeder began digitizing primarily Coptic literary texts (such as formal letters, sermons, gnomic sayings, and monastic rules) composed primarily by monks of the fourth through sixth centuries and copied by later scribes through approximately the twelfth century. In addition, SCRIPTORIUM has developed tools and standards for annotating Coptic literature for linguistic, paleographical, and historical information, as well as an online digital environment for reading and querying the texts, translations, and annotations. Identifiers for texts, annotations, and other features are necessary. Our basic requirements for the SCRIPTORIUM data identifiers were that they be stable, location and technology independent, and globally unique. We wanted an identifier scheme that would outlast any particular delivery mechanism, such as the web, but also required that the identifiers be resolvable in the context of the systems that do exist today. In particular, the SCRIPTORIUM data must be able to be cited as linked data on the web according to the principles of " 5 Star Linked Data. " (Berners-Lee, 2006) Our analysis took into account the specifics of the SCRIPTORIUM data resources and its current data production and management practices as well as the domain-specific scholarly practices of citation of the texts in the SCRIPTORIUM corpus.
"Shenoute in Code: Digitizing Coptic Cultural Heritage for Collaborative Online Research and Stud... more "Shenoute in Code: Digitizing Coptic Cultural Heritage for Collaborative Online Research and Study," Coptica 14 (2015): 21-36
The Apocryphal Acts of Andrew
In Jan Bremmer, The Apocryphal Acts of Andrew. Leuven: Peeters, 2000. pp. 110-126
Coptic represents the last phase of the Egyptian language and is pivotal for a wide range of disc... more Coptic represents the last phase of the Egyptian language and is pivotal for a wide range of disciplines, such as linguistics, biblical studies, the history of Christianity, Egyptology, and ancient history. It was also essential for "cracking the code" of the Egyptian hieroglyphs. Although digital humanities has been hailed as distinctly interdisciplinary, enabling new forms of knowledge by combining multiple forms of disciplinary investigation, technical obtacles exist for creating a resource useful to both linguists and historians, for example. The nature of the language (outside of the IndoEuropean family) also requires its own approach. This paper will present some of the challenges both digital and material in creating an online, open source platform with a database and tools for digital research in Coptic. It will also propose standards and methodologies to move forward through those challenges. This paper should be of interest not only to scholars in Coptic but also others working on what are traditionally considered more "marginal" language groups in the premodern world, and researchers working with corpora that have been removed from their original ancient or medieval repositories and fragmented or dispersed. The dry desert of Egypt has preserved for centuries the parchment and papyri that provide us with a glimpse into the economy, literature, religion, and daily life of ancient Egyptians. During the Roman period of Egyptian history, many texts were written in the Coptic language. Coptic is the last phase of the ancient Egyptian language family and is derived ultimately from the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs of the pharaonic era. Digital and computational methods hold promise for research in the many disciplines that use Coptic literature as primary sources: biblical studies, church history, Egyptology, linguistics, to name a few. Yet few digital resources exist to enable such research. This essay outlines the challenges to developing a digital corpus of Coptic texts for interdisciplinary research — challenges that are both material (arising from the history and politics of the physical corpus itself) and theoretical (arising from recent efforts to digitize the corpus). We also sketch out some solutions and possibilities, which we are developing in our project Coptic SCRIPTORIUM. Digital Humanities has defined itself as a field that can enable research on a new scale, whether distant reading of large text corpora, aggregation of large visual media collections, or enabling discovery in future querying and algorithmic research [Moretti 2013] [Greenhalgh 2008] [Witmore 2012]. Critical Digital Humanities scholars remind us that digitization initiatives sometimes replicate the Western canon rather than expand it, and that digitization is not in and of itself a more equitable mode of scholarship existing outside of politics [Wernimont 2013] [Wilkins 2012]. Digital tools and corpora for Coptic language and literature, we argue, can expand humanistic research not merely in terms of scale but also scope, especially in ancient studies and literature. Large English, Greek, and Latin corpora — as well as the tools to create, curate, and query them — have been foundational for work in the Digital Humanities. Computational studies on the documents from late antique Egypt can facilitate academic inquiry across traditional disciplines as well as transform our canon of Digital Classics and Digital Humanities scholarship.
Tony Burke, ed., Fakes, Forgeries, and Fictions: Writing Ancient and Modern Christian Apocrypha. Proceedings from the 2015 York University Christian Apocrypha Symposium (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2016)
Chapter in Tony Burke, ed., Fakes, Forgeries, and Fictions: Writing Ancient and Modern Christian ... more Chapter in Tony Burke, ed., Fakes, Forgeries, and Fictions: Writing Ancient and Modern Christian Apocrypha. Proceedings
from the 2015 York University Christian Apocrypha Symposium (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2016).
Although the study of the Bible was central to early Humanities Computing efforts, now Biblical S... more Although the study of the Bible was central to early Humanities Computing efforts, now Biblical Studies and Religious Studies are marginal disciplines in the emerging field known as Digital Humanities (English, History, Library Science, for example, are much more influential in DH.) This paper explores two questions: First, what does it mean for Biblical Studies to be marginal to the Digital Humanities when DH is increasingly seen as the locus of as transformation in the humanities? Second, how can our expertise in Biblical Studies influence and shape Digital Humanities for the better? Digital Humanities, I argue, constitutes a powerful emerging field with which Biblical Studies and Religious Studies must engage as critical participants or analysts. Moreover, our own field’s expertise on the history of canon, orthodoxy, and commentary can contribute to shaping a more inclusive and self-critical Digital Humanities.
A review essay in Marginalia of Bentley Layton's book, The Canons of Our Fathers: Monastic Rules... more A review essay in Marginalia of Bentley Layton's book, The Canons of Our Fathers: Monastic Rules of Shenoute
Digital Studies in the Humanities
This paper motivates and details the first implementation of a freely available part of speech ta... more This paper motivates and details the first implementation of a freely available part of speech tag set and tagger for Coptic. Coptic is the last phase of the Egyptian language family and a descendent of the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt. Unlike classical Greek and Latin, few resources for digital and computational work have existed for ancient Egyptian language and literature until now. We evaluate our tag set in an inter-annotator agreement experiment and examine some of the difficulties in tagging Coptic data. Using an existing digital lexicon and a small training corpus taken from several genres of literary Sahidic Coptic in the first half of the first millennium, we evaluate the performance of a stochastic tagger applying a fine grained and coarse grained set of tags within and outside the domain of literary texts. Our results show that a relatively high accuracy of 94-95% correct automatic tag assignment can be reached for literary texts, with substantially
worse performance on documentary papyrus data. We also present some preliminary applications of natural language processing to the study of genre, style and authorship attribution in Coptic and discuss future directions in applying computational linguistics methods to the analysis of Coptic texts.
This article presents an edition, translation, and analysis of a previously unpublished fragment ... more This article presents an edition, translation, and analysis of a previously unpublished fragment of monastic rules from the monastery of Shenoute, otherwise known as the White Monastery. The folio currently resides in the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek in Vienna. It comes from the very first known letter written by Shenoute. Therefore, it is one of our earliest monastic rule fragments. The article publishes the rules and examines their parallels in the Pachomian rules as well as their importance for understanding the early history of Shenoute and his monastery.
Outside of hagiography, the evidence for female anchorites in early Christian Egypt remains scarc... more Outside of hagiography, the evidence for female anchorites in early Christian Egypt remains scarce. House ascetics in cities survive for us in documentary and other sources, but women monks in non-coenobitic, nonurban environments are more difficult to locate, to the point at which some scholars have begun to question their very existence. This essay seeks to change the parameters of the scholarly debate over the nature of non-coenobitic female monastic experience. It examines hagiography, monastic rules and letters, and documentary papyri to reassess the state of the field and to produce a fuller portrait of anchoritic and semi-anchoritic female asceticism. Non-coenobitic women's monasticism existed, and it crossed boundaries of geography and social status, as well as the traditional categories of lavra, eremitic, coenobitic, and house asceticism. This interdisciplinary approach provides insights not only into women ascetics’ physical locations but also into their class, education, and levels of autonomy. An intervention into the historiography of women's asceticism in late antique Egypt, this study ultimately questions the advisability of using traditional categorizations of “anchoritic,” “lavra,” and “coenobitic” to classify female monasticism, because they obscure the particularities and diversity of female ascetic history.
Journal of The American Academy of Religion, Jan 1, 2009
Journal of Near Eastern Studies, Jan 1, 2006
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
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Books by Caroline T Schroeder
of early Christian monasticism, Egypt. Although comprised of men
and women who had renounced sex and family, the monasteries of
late antiquity raised children, educated them, and expected them to
carry on their monastic lineage and legacies into the future. Children
within monasteries existed in a liminal space, simultaneously vulnerable
to the whims and abuses of adults and cherished as potential
future monastic prodigies. Caroline T. Schroeder examines diverse
sources – letters, rules, saints’ lives, art, and documentary evidence –
to probe these paradoxes. In doing so, she demonstrates how early
Egyptian monasteries provided an intergenerational continuity of
social, cultural, and economic capital while also contesting the traditional
family’s claims to these forms of social continuity.
Papers by Caroline T Schroeder
The Coptic language of Hellenistic era Egypt in the first millennium C.E. is a treasure trove of information for History, Religious Studies, Classics, Linguistics and many other Humanities disciplines. Despite the existence of large amounts of text in the language, comparatively few digital resources have been available, and almost no tools for Natural Language Processing. This paper presents an end-to-end, freely available open source tool chain starting with Unicode plain text or XML transcriptions of Coptic manuscript data, which adds fully automatic word and morpheme segmentation, normaliza-tion, language of origin recognition, part of speech tagging, lemmatization, and dependency parsing at the click of a button. We evaluate each component of the pipeline, which is accessible as a Web interface and machine readable API online.
We describe a new project publishing a freely available online dictionary for Coptic. The dictionary encompasses comprehensive cross-referencing mechanisms, including linking entries to an online scanned edition of Crum's Coptic Dictionary, internal cross-references and etymological information, translated searchable definitions in English, French and German, and linked corpus data which provides frequencies and corpus look-up for headwords and multiword expressions. Headwords are available for linking in external projects using a REST API. We describe the challenges in encoding our dictionary using TEI XML and implementing linking mechanisms to construct a Web interface querying frequency information, which draw on NLP tools to recognize inflected forms in context. We evaluate our dictionary's coverage using digital corpora of Coptic available online.
What are the Apophthegmata Patrum's "family values"? This collection of late antique sayings about primarily male ascetics might seem to have none. Some of the most memorable anecdotes eschew family and children. This essay argues, however, that family—the traditional ancient family, children and all—remained a core value for the monks of late antique Egypt. I will examine the phenomenon of holy people who heal children in the Apophthegmata Patrum, evidence from Shenoute's monastery, and documentary sources from late antique Egypt.
Children in the Roman world were viewed as containing society's future potential, symbolic of the family's and culture's legacy and inheritance. Monasteries, in their care for children, acted as alternative, nonbiological family systems and as agents in the support and continuation of traditional families. People brought their children to monks to be healed, and these communities of respected ascetics ensured the survival of the next generation of Christian families through their acts of healing and exorcising.
Published in Coptica 10 (2011)
from the 2015 York University Christian Apocrypha Symposium (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2016).
worse performance on documentary papyrus data. We also present some preliminary applications of natural language processing to the study of genre, style and authorship attribution in Coptic and discuss future directions in applying computational linguistics methods to the analysis of Coptic texts.
of early Christian monasticism, Egypt. Although comprised of men
and women who had renounced sex and family, the monasteries of
late antiquity raised children, educated them, and expected them to
carry on their monastic lineage and legacies into the future. Children
within monasteries existed in a liminal space, simultaneously vulnerable
to the whims and abuses of adults and cherished as potential
future monastic prodigies. Caroline T. Schroeder examines diverse
sources – letters, rules, saints’ lives, art, and documentary evidence –
to probe these paradoxes. In doing so, she demonstrates how early
Egyptian monasteries provided an intergenerational continuity of
social, cultural, and economic capital while also contesting the traditional
family’s claims to these forms of social continuity.
The Coptic language of Hellenistic era Egypt in the first millennium C.E. is a treasure trove of information for History, Religious Studies, Classics, Linguistics and many other Humanities disciplines. Despite the existence of large amounts of text in the language, comparatively few digital resources have been available, and almost no tools for Natural Language Processing. This paper presents an end-to-end, freely available open source tool chain starting with Unicode plain text or XML transcriptions of Coptic manuscript data, which adds fully automatic word and morpheme segmentation, normaliza-tion, language of origin recognition, part of speech tagging, lemmatization, and dependency parsing at the click of a button. We evaluate each component of the pipeline, which is accessible as a Web interface and machine readable API online.
We describe a new project publishing a freely available online dictionary for Coptic. The dictionary encompasses comprehensive cross-referencing mechanisms, including linking entries to an online scanned edition of Crum's Coptic Dictionary, internal cross-references and etymological information, translated searchable definitions in English, French and German, and linked corpus data which provides frequencies and corpus look-up for headwords and multiword expressions. Headwords are available for linking in external projects using a REST API. We describe the challenges in encoding our dictionary using TEI XML and implementing linking mechanisms to construct a Web interface querying frequency information, which draw on NLP tools to recognize inflected forms in context. We evaluate our dictionary's coverage using digital corpora of Coptic available online.
What are the Apophthegmata Patrum's "family values"? This collection of late antique sayings about primarily male ascetics might seem to have none. Some of the most memorable anecdotes eschew family and children. This essay argues, however, that family—the traditional ancient family, children and all—remained a core value for the monks of late antique Egypt. I will examine the phenomenon of holy people who heal children in the Apophthegmata Patrum, evidence from Shenoute's monastery, and documentary sources from late antique Egypt.
Children in the Roman world were viewed as containing society's future potential, symbolic of the family's and culture's legacy and inheritance. Monasteries, in their care for children, acted as alternative, nonbiological family systems and as agents in the support and continuation of traditional families. People brought their children to monks to be healed, and these communities of respected ascetics ensured the survival of the next generation of Christian families through their acts of healing and exorcising.
Published in Coptica 10 (2011)
from the 2015 York University Christian Apocrypha Symposium (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2016).
worse performance on documentary papyrus data. We also present some preliminary applications of natural language processing to the study of genre, style and authorship attribution in Coptic and discuss future directions in applying computational linguistics methods to the analysis of Coptic texts.
Co-panelist was Todd Hanneken, St. Mary's University, San Antonio.
I provide these slides primarily so people attending the conference can go look up projects or websites I referenced. Please keep in mind there are many many outstanding projects I didn't mention.
Originally paper entitled:
Tag, You're It: Creating a Richly Annotated Coptic Digital Library
(HG-229371) and Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (BE 4172/1-1) These guidelines are also available on the project site (https://kellia.uni-goettingen.de/downloads/KELLIA-transcription-white-paper.pdf) and are included as an appendix to the main KELLIA Project White Paper and Report (https://kellia.uni-goettingen.de/downloads/KELLIA-white-paper.pdf)
-tools to process Coptic texts
-a searchable, richly-annotated corpus of texts using the ANNIS search and visualization architecture
-visualizations of Coptic texts
-a collaborative platform for scholars to use and contribute to the project
-research results generated from the tools and corpus