The Living Monastery as Archive: Byzantine art in the Monastery of St. Catherine, Egypt

This paper examines the living monastery as an understudied archive for medieval art historians. It focuses on a particular encounter experienced at the Monastery of St. Catherine in Egypt, which is the oldest continuously living Orthodox monastery in the world (established, 6^th century CE) and simultaneously one of the richest repositories of Byzantine artefacts known to scholars. Although the monastic collection was recently digitized, archival work at the site itself raises (at least) two important questions about the scholarly reception of Byzantine material culture which the digital archive obscures. The first question regards the overlaps between monastic space and museum space in the church of the monastery where, in certain parts, we find icons intriguingly decontextualized from their original liturgical functions; and the second question regards the integral role of the Sinaitic desert landscape in the overall archival experience of this site. The broader goal of the paper is to reflect on the multiple shifting identities an artefact can acquire owing to its location within a living monastery, and the challenges this poses to our normative categories of archival investigation and analysis.