ABSTRACT
Coptic hagiography has suffered from a bad reputation ever since 1922 when Hippolyte Delehaye, in an otherwise outstanding article, spoke of ‘the artificial character of this wretched literature’, which in his eyes defies both history and common sense, and ‘bears witness to an inferior level of culture and a profound poverty of thought’. 2 Although nobody would use such terms today, the ‘extravagance’ and ‘absurdity’ of the situations narrated have often been noted, and seem to have become for many the defining features of that literature. 3 However, this image is founded only on a specific group of rather late martyrologies, which can by no means stand as representative of all hagiography in Coptic.
