Ecclesiastical Connections of Medieval Мatarcha: New Finds of Byzantine Lead Seals

Introduction. Matarcha was the cathedral city of the Diocese of Zichia of the Patriarchate of Constantinople. It was a major religious and missionary center in the Northwestern Pre-Caucasus. The priests of this autocephalous archdiocese took an active part in the church life of the Byzantine Empire. In this context, among the most important sources on the history of the Byzantine Matarcha, a special place is occupied by the monuments of Byzantine sphragistics. Methods. The paper examines three Byzantine church seals of the 11th–12th centuries, discovered during the research of the Taman settlement (medieval Matarcha was the center of the diocese of Zichia of the Patriarchate of Constantinople). The owners of the seals were: deacon Michael, monk Ignatius and nun Euphemia. Analysis. The article provides information about the previously known 19 seals belonging to the church hierarchs of Zichia and other representatives of the clergy. Similar finds of seals in the Crimean urban centers (Cherson and Sughdea) are indicated. Results. The few details that relate to the ecclesiastical history of the diocese of Zichia emphasize the exceptional value of each new find of seals, and the evidence of direct contacts and established correspondence between the Orthodox clergy once again shows that, in addition to the cleric – deacon, the monastic brotherhood also played a significant role in the development of relations between the church and society. To a certain extent, this could also be facilitated by the trips of the city’s residents to pilgrimage sites, as evidenced by the brought relics, the finds of which are known.

Laughter and Grief in Twelfth-Century Accounts of the Death of William Rufus

The death of King William Rufus while hunting in August 1100 is often acknowledged as a fitting end for an unpopular and ineffective monarch, based largely on descriptions of the event in several twelfth-century texts. While it will never be possible to arrive at a definitive explanation of what happened, near-contemporary representations of the king’s behaviour and death reveal much about perceptions and expectations of medieval kingship. By examining varying descriptions of the king’s laughter – sometimes cynical and manipulative, sometimes generous and inclusive – and the corresponding portrayals of the extent of his subjects’ grief at their monarch’s passing, it is possible to reconstruct the outlines of a debate over appropriate emotional performance and its contribution to successful – or unsuccessful – rulership. The very positive depiction of Rufus’s emotional regime in Gaimar’s Estoire des Engleis sits in stark contrast to the more negative mainstream view, represented especially in the Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis.

Inter-Confessional Church History: East Syrian Christian Identity and Islam in the Ecclesiastical History of Kitāb al-Maǧdal

Kitāb al-Maǧdal is a large East Syrian theological treatise that was composed in Arabic, probably in the late tenth or early eleventh century CE. One section of the work is an ecclesiastical history of the Church of the East. This essay argues that close analysis of this section reveals that elite East Syrian identity in the period overlapped to a significant extent with contemporary Muslim identity, at the level of vocabulary and conceptions of revelation and communal history. In this sense, the work represents a kind of “inter-confessional” history writing. The essay aims to contribute to recent studies of Middle Eastern Christian identity and historiography, which have focused of Syriac sources and/or late antiquity rather than Arabic sources for the Islamic middle periods.

Contemporary Historiography on Christianity in Roman Africa

This essay follows the broad contours of patristic and ecclesiastical history relative to African Christianity. Rival Catholic and Protestant narratives of the origin and trajectory of African Christianity in the early modern period continued to influence historiography, even after the acceptance of critical historical methods in the 19th century. The advent of archeological research in the colonial period opened new vistas on African history and ushered in the sociohistorical approach which characterized early Christian studies in the 20th century. Finally, the “linguistic turn” in early Christian studies inspired by critical theory has directed recent research toward issues surrounding the identities of African Christians, rhetorical and real.

Hagiography, Historiography, and Identity in Sixth-Century Gaul

Gregory of Tours, the sixth-century Merovingian bishop, composed extensive historiographical and hagiographical corpora during the twenty years of his episcopacy in Tours. These works serve as important sources for the cultural, social, political and religious history of Merovingian Gaul. This book focuses on Gregory’s hagiographical collections, especially the Glory of the Martyrs, Glory of the Confessors, and Life of the Fathers, which contain accounts of saints and their miracles from across the Mediterranean world. It analyses these accounts from literary and historical perspectives, examining them through the lens of relations between the Merovingians and their Mediterranean counterparts, and contextualizing them within the identity crisis that followed the disintegration of the Roman world. This approach leads to groundbreaking conclusions about Gregory’s hagiographies, which this study argues were designed as an “ecclesiastical history” (of the Merovingian Church) that enabled him to craft a specific Gallo-Christian identity for his audience.

Hagiography, Historiography, and Identity in Sixth-Century Gaul

Gregory of Tours, the sixth-century Merovingian bishop, composed extensive historiographical and hagiographical corpora during the twenty years of his episcopacy in Tours. These works serve as important sources for the cultural, social, political and religious history of Merovingian Gaul. This book focuses on Gregory's hagiographical collections, especially the <i>Glory of the Martyrs, Glory of the Confessors, and Life of the Fathers</i>, which contain accounts of saints and their miracles from across the Mediterranean world. It analyses these accounts from literary and historical perspectives, examining them through the lens of relations between the Merovingians and their Mediterranean counterparts, and contextualizing them within the identity crisis that followed the disintegration of the Roman world. This approach leads to groundbreaking conclusions about Gregory's hagiographies, which this study argues were designed as an 'ecclesiastical history' (of the Merovingian Church) that enabled him to craft a specific Gallo-Christian identity for his audience.

Den mångtydiga ortodoxin

The history of Christianity is marked by frequent debates over doctrinal truth. From an early stage, Christian authors began to use the terms "or­thodoxy" and "heresy" to deal with diversity of faith. While the orthodox faith was seen as the one that had been preserved from the time of the apostles, heresies were seen as later innovations. This idea was expressed in the Ecclesiastical History by Eusebius of Caesarea in the fourth century, and became influential in later Christian history writing. Up until the twentieth century, orthodoxy and heresy were concepts typically associated with doctrinal content. However, with Walter Bauer's immensely influential work Rechtgläubligkeit und Ketzerei im Frühesten Christentum (1934), a socio-historical understanding of orthodoxy and heresy came to be adopted. According to this view, the concepts corresponded to social realities. With the influence from poststructuralist thought from the 1980s onwards, further developments took place in this scholarly area, with a new understanding of the concepts as rhetorical representations. This article argues that even in modern research, orthodoxy and heresy are typically associated with value judgment, and that ancient Christian cat­egorizations of "orthodox" and "heretic", and of the heretics them­selves, have continued to determine the way in which we read the sources today. Giving an example of heresiology produced by Jerome of Stridon during the Origenist controversy, it is suggested that in order to avoid essential­izing the rhetorical constructions of the heresiologists, a greater attention to their strategies as well as to their context is needed.

The Curia at an Impasse

Although Gradi’s evaluation concluded that the documents on Giovanni were forgeries, when the Congregations of the Index and the Inquisition were asked to provide a final deliberation on Giovanni’s case, they reached an impasse. This chapter explains the nature of this impasse through the conflict of opinion between Stefano Gradi and Ludovico Marracci, another learned Catholic intellectual tasked by the Curia to examine the documents concerning Giovanni’s case. The debate between Gradi and Marracci shows that the case of Giovanni’s alleged sanctity uncovered fundamental and uncomfortable questions. How much can the truth of doctrine depend on the truth of the facts before theology loses its ontological autonomy and becomes simply a branch of ecclesiastical history or philological criticism? How much can the truth of doctrine ignore the truth of the facts without being engulfed in the same fiction from which it is supposed to keep its distance?