For some three hundred years after its introduction into the written culture of Egypt, Coptic was limited to biblical translation and private and monastic correspondence, while Greek retained its monopoly on administrative, legal, and literary writing. This changed during the sixth century, when Coptic began to penetrate domains that were once closed to it, such as literature, liturgy, regulated transactions between individuals, and communications between the state and its subjects. Fournet examines the reasons for Coptic's late development as a competing language―which was unlike what happened with other vernacular languages in Near Eastern Greek-speaking societies―and explains why Coptic eventually succeeded in being recognized with Greek as an official language.
Incisively written and rich with insights, The Rise of Coptic draws on a wealth of archival evidence to shed new light on the role of monasticism in the growing use of Coptic before the Arab conquest.