Jenny Cromwell and donating children!

One of the ancient texts Jenny will be referring to.

Jenny's talk will take place in the Geoffrey Manton Building Room 224 at 4.15pm. All welcome. 

From southern Egypt (Thebes) in the 8th century CE, a group of 25 legal documents record the practice of parents donating their male children to a local monastery. This corpus presents the only evidence for this practice in Egypt during the Christian and early Islamic period. After presenting the evidence, this paper will examine the information about the type of families involved, information about the children themselves, the reasons for their donation, and the role that children were to play within the monastery.