Coptic was no longer perfectly understood by the beginning of the Modern age. In the Renaissance the Latin West rose to intellectual preeminence, and higher learning flowered. Knowledge of Coptic was imported into Europe. A key factor in the advancement of Coptic studies was the desire of the Roman-Catholic Church to bring eastern churches back into the fold.
Five milestones in the earliest history of Coptic studies in the West can be identified (Emmel 2004a). First, by the fifteenth century, Coptic manuscripts had reached Europe, probably including some brought to the Council of Florence (1439-1443) by Coptic clerics who attended to discuss union with Rome. Second, in 1481, Flavio Guglielmo Raimondo correctly identifies Coptic-Arabic manuscripts for what they were in an inventory of manuscripts kept at the Vatican Library. Third, Fabio Vigile (c.1480-1553) produces the earliest known but unpublished scholarly opinions on Coptic. Vigile is, as far as we know, the ‘‘first pioneer’’ of Coptic studies (Emmel 2004a: 9). Fourth, the Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher (1601/2-1680) publishes the first substantial descriptions of Coptic in his Prodromus copticus sive aegyptiacus (1636) and Lingua aegyptiaca restituta (1643). Fifth, in 1696, the Augustinian monk Guillaume Bonjour (1670-1714) completes the first grammar of Coptic, but it remains unpublished until recently (Aufrere and Bosson 2005).
At the beginning of the nineteenth century Etienne Quatremere produced a detailed survey of early Coptic studies in Europe up to his time (Quatremere 1808). Scholars have since done much to restore Coptic to a state of thorough comprehension. Hans Jakob Polotsky has described the early decades of this effort, following the decipherment of Hieroglyphic Egyptian in 1822 by Jean-Francois Champollion, who was himself no mean student of Coptic (Polotsky 1987/2007).
World History
