Abstract
In reconsidering how settlements became monastic, I explore the notion of a monastic habitus, as conceived by Pierre Bourdieu, to provide a "structuring structure" to the manner by which monastic space was ordered and replicated in Late Antique Egypt. Through the application of Bourdieu's habitus, Henri Lefebvre's production of "social space," and the phenomenology of landscape archaeology as expressed by John Wylie and Matthew Johnson, I examine the site of Dayr al-Dik, a monastic settlement located in repurposed quarries. In a setting in which the textual records are unable to take the historian into the monastic settlement, the material remains present a unique body of physical structures to assess the feasibility of rereading space from the perspective of a monastic habitus which emerges from Byzantine structuring structures within a Christian milieu.