Studies On The Formation Of Christian Armenia

This is the third collection of articles by Nina Garsoïan on Early Armenian history and civilization. A number of articles included here continue earlier investigations of Iranian and Byzantine political and, especially, doctrinal and social influences on Medieval Armenia, precariously wedged between the two super-powers of the period, Byzantium and Sasanian Persia. A second theme is the development of the autocephalous Armenian Church as it freed itself from foreign pressures and achieved its own dogmatic position. Last, several studies consider some inadequacies in some recent historiography and suggest a more promising redirection in our approach to Armenian history and the formation of its national identity.

This book presents the dramatic and complex story of Armenia's ecclesiastical relations with Byzantine and subsequently Roman Christendom in the Middle Ages. It is built on a broad foundation of sources – Armenian, Greek, Latin, and Syrian chronicles and documents, especially the abundant correspondence between the Holy See and the Armenian Church. Krzysztof Stopka examines problems straddling the disciplines of history and theology and pertinent to a critical, though not widely known, episode in the story of the struggle for Christian unity.

Excerpt from The Conversion of Armenia to the Christian Faith It may not be amiss, therefore, at the present j unc ture to inquire into the early history of the Armenian nation, and more particularly to study the conversion of Armenia to the Christian faith. The writer of the following pages began this investigation for his own information, and is impelled to offer to the public the result of his studies in this field of research, partly by the interest attaching to the subject itself, and partly by the hope of thereby doing something to enable European Christians more readily to sympathize with their Armenian brethren in their present affliction. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

The articles here aim to develop and expand Professor Garsoïan's earlier research on the bilateral influences on Early-Christian Armenia, between Byzantium and the Sasanians. On the one hand, they continue her examination of Armenia's essentially Iranian society and institutions in the 4th-7th centuries; on the other, they are directed to an investigation of its autocephalous Church. This maintained relations with the Antiochene Christological school it shared with the Church of Persia longer than has been generally admitted, but simultaneously brought about an ideological transformation through which Christianity came to define the Armenian identity in the national tradition.

Professor Thomson deals here with the origins of Armenian Christian literature and its development as an individual literary culture. At the same time, these studies make available to students of Patristics and Byzantine history some of the wealth of information preserved in the Armenian sources. One set of articles, focusing on the question of origins, looks at the influence and use made of Christian Syriac and Greek writings, both theological and historical, as well as those of late classical antiquity. Others examine how the Armenians viewed themselves in their ambiguous position between Byzantium and Iran, and how those views were expressed in their historical writing. A key theme, as the author would see it, is the formulation of a 'received tradition', and the ways in which later writers interacted with it and used it, removed from its original context, to create their own images of Armenian individuality.

A collection of essays from leading historians which explores the ways in which history was written in Europe and Asian between 400 and 1400.

How was history written in Europe and Asia between 400-1400? How was the past understood in religious, social and political terms? And in what ways does the diversity of historical writing in this period mask underlying commonalities in narrating the past? The volume, which assembles 28 contributions from leading historians, tackles these and other questions. Part I provides comprehensive overviews of the development of historical writing in societies that range from the Korean Peninsula to north-west Europe, which together highlight regional and cultural distinctiveness. Part II complements the first part by taking a thematic and comparative approach; it includes essays on genre, warfare, and religion (amongst others) which address common concerns of historians working in this liminal period before the globalizing forces of the early modern world.