Amulet, Devotional Object, and Liturgy: On the Multifunctionality of Christian Manuscripts in Late Antique Christianity

In this essay, I put the work of sociologist Bernard Lahire on plural identies into dialogue with research on holy books and objects in late antiquity in order to argue that manuscripts shifted in and out of various functions for individual users—a point that the scribes and specialists behind these objects (especially monks) at times seem to have intuited when they made them. I conclude that, while synthetic categories such as letters, school exercises, liturgy, amulets, aide mémoire, and the like can still serve important analytical roles in scholarship, papyrologists, epigraphers, and the like should not think in terms of monofunctionality (e.g., a manuscript is either a school exercise or an amulet) nor should they frame these categories as absolutely discrete (amulet vs. school exercise). Instead, they should seek to identify a primary function—from the perspective of its scribe—while simutaneously recognizing the complex and even contradictory relationships humans and manuscripts would have had as they engaged with one another in diverse contexts and settings.