ABSTRACT
Patristic authors provided only rudimentary information about Demetrius, and much of that was not complimentary. For centuries, what was known about the archbishop and his forty-three-year career, the third longest in Coptic history, was meager. By the tenth century, an anonymous author had redressed that omission by drafting the Encomium on Demetrius [EncDem], which provided the foundation for Demetrius’s hagio-biography. That composition serves as the focus of this chapter and the next. Here, the aim is to resolve the thorny problem of dating the EncDem by identifying its literary parallels and socio-historical setting; the following chapter addresses the encomium’s hagiographic traditions and its presentation of Demetrius’s biography.
