Clergy in the Apion archive: Texts and contexts

The article focuses on the attestations of clergy in the Oxyrhynchite archive of the Apion estate. In this group of texts, clerics feature in various roles such as administrators, cultivators, and legal specialists. A close reading of these documents within the context of normative sources and testimonies from outside the Apion archive allows us to come closer to an understanding of the clergy as a socially and economically diverse group poised to play intermediary roles in the networks of a great estate. The various aspects of the profiles of clerics recorded in the texts (wealth, education, skills, place of origin) encourage us to envisage the clerical status as an intersectional experience where symbolic-religious and socio-economic factors remained in constant interplay.