Jean-Luc Fournet is the Chair of Written Culture in Late Antiquity and Byzantine Papyrology at the Collège de France in Paris.
In this outstanding and original book, Fournet provides a general synthesis on the 'invention' of Coptic and its progressive development until its recognition as an official language. -Alain Delattre, Universite libre de Bruxelles A major contribution. Fournet is the first to thoroughly explore the paradox of Coptic as a creation of Hellenized Egyptian intellectual circles. The linguistic-historical panorama he provides is wide and coherent, and his philological method is impeccable. -Anne Boud'hors, coeditor of Monastic Estates in Late Antique and Early Islamic Egypt