A Slave or a generous benefactor? Legal analysis of 8th-century donations of boys from the Monastery of St. Phoibammon in the Western Thebes

This article discusses the Coptic donations of children from the monastery of St. Phoibammon in Western Thebes. These documents, unparalleled elsewhere, attest the donations of free boys made by their parents to the local monastery. In the first part of this article, previous scholarship on the donations is reviewed. In the second part, the various ways in which parents could surrender their children both in legal practice and statutory law are compared to the donations of boys. Finally, the third part offers a comprehensive analysis of these donations within a wider social and legal context.