Shenoute led the White Monastery near Sohag in Upper Egypt for some eighty years, and under him it grew into one of the largest monastic federations in the Christian world — several thousand monks and nuns living under a written rule that he enforced without much gentleness.
He is the outstanding author in Coptic, and effectively made it a literary language: his sermons, letters and canons are the bulk of what survives of Coptic prose. He accompanied Cyril of Alexandria to the Council of Ephesus, and his writing is fiercely concerned with the poor, with justice against local landowners, and with the practical shape of a common life. He is a central figure in the Coptic Orthodox Church and little known outside it.