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After the Apocalypse: Church Renewal and Renovation in Medieval Egypt

This presentation explores the construction of ecclesiastical architecture in the Islamic world by focusing on the renewal of Coptic churches in medieval Egypt. While scholars have explored Egypt’s late antique churches, their medieval counterparts have received scant attention. In the centuries following the Arab conquest, churches became crucial sites of Coptic identity that were in a continual state of transformation. Since Islamic law prohibited Christians from erecting new churches, Coptic patrons refurbished existing ones, collaborating with artists who drew on Islamic, Syrian, and Byzantine visual cultures. Material transformations find parallels in Coptic intellectual culture. Beginning in the eleventh century, Coptic elites composed liturgical encyclopedias that recorded their ideas about sacred space for the first time. Written in Arabic, the compendia articulate Coptic beliefs through engaging Islamic, Syrian Orthodox, and Greek theologians. Underlying this production were concerns over the survival of the faith under Islamic rule. Here, I trace the transformation of Coptic churches after the conquest, from their appearance as ruins in apocalyptic literature to their renovation at the hands of Coptic archons and reconceptualization by theologians. The resultant monuments challenge prevailing understandings of the relationship between Christian and Islamic art, and also persistent models of interfaith exchange in medieval Egypt.

Heather A. Badamo is an associate professor in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Her work investigates the visual manifestations of exchange in the eastern Mediterranean, with a particular focus on Christian-Muslim contact. Her first book, Saint George Between Empires: Image and Encounter in the Medieval East, explores the political repurposing of Saint George by competing states and communities during the era of the Crusades. She has received support from the American Philosophical Society, the Council of American Overseas Research Centers, Dumbarton Oaks, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the American Research Center in Egypt, and the IIE Fulbright Foundation. She is currently in residence at the Getty, where she is at work on a book about the “Copto-Arabic Renaissance,” which considers how medieval Coptic elites employed the sacred arts to ensure communal survival in the midst of seismic linguistic and cultural transformations.

Image: Interlace cross, undated medieval secco wall painting, apse, “Church of the Crosses,” Dayr Abu Fana, near al-Minya, Egypt. Photo Ó Heather A. Badamo

The Global Approaches to Sacred Space lectures are generously funded by the SGS Global Research Workshop series with further support from the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies, CESTA, CMEMS, CREEES, the Departments of Art & Art History, Classics, French & Italian, History, and Religious Studies.

Co-organized by Prof. Bissera V. Pentcheva and Andrei Dumitrescu.