Oxford Forgotten Christianities Seminar, Oxford University via Zoom, Mondays in June 2021, 5:00–8:00 pm (BST)

For the purposes of this project, ‘Forgotten Christianities’ are defined as those Christian linguistic and ethnic self-defined groups which traditionally have been overlooked by mainstream academia including, Georgian, Syriac, Armenian, Ethiopic, Coptic, and Arabic Christianity. The “Forgotten Christianities” seminars will explore critical theories of identity formation, communal memory, and intellectual exchange in the history of the Eastern and Oriental Churches.

Each session will bring together doctoral students from various fields such as history, archaeology, theology, and the social sciences. Spanning Late Antiquity, the early Islamic era, and the Middle Ages, they will provide a diachronic and kaleidoscopic view of these historical communities and their self-representation. Participants are invited to engage critically with a range of theoretical frameworks and methodologies, such as postcolonial studies, memory studies, the history of ideas, and the development of cultural, religious, and social identity. Through exploring Christianities outside of Western Europe, the seminars aim to contribute to the paradigm shift which decentralises academic interest from a Eurocentric perspective, while showcasing the interconnectedness of societies.

Conveners: Bogdan Draghici (DPhil in Oriental Studies - Syriac, Wolfson College), Dan Gallaher (DPhil in History - Armenian/Byzantine Studies, Balliol College), Alexis Gorby (DPhil in Classical Archaeology, St John’s College).

Proposals by current DPhil/Ph.D. students and early career researchers for future sessions are welcome.

Seminars will be held on Zoom. Advance registration required.

Part I: Monday, June 7, 2021, 5:00–8:00 pm (BST)

Christianities on the Sixth-Century Red Sea: Kālēb of Aksūm and Abraha of Ḥimyar
Valentina Grasso, University of Cambridge, Faculty of Divinity

As in the case of the Eurasian steppe empires, Aksūm (in modern Ethiopia and Eritrea) and Ḥimyar (in modern Yemen and Saudi Arabia) largely relied on their trade. Due to their important role on the Red Sea trade routes, they never entirely constituted the ‘periphery’ during Late Antiquity. This paper focuses on the Christianities of Aksūm and Ḥimyar during the sixth century CE. More precisely, it examines the religious allegiances of the Aksūmite negus Kālēb (r. ca. 520-40) and the Himyarite king Abraha (r. ca. 535-65) and explores identity formation in their kingdoms, shedding light on the several stages involved in the Christianisation of these two regions and reconstructing the events that led to the collapse of Ḥimyar. I argue that Ethiopia’s and South Arabia’s religious frameworks played a major role in shaping the context in which the Qur’ān emerged. Moreover, the disappearance of Ḥimyar, in conjunction with the fall of the allied kingdoms of Jafnids and Naṣrids in North Arabia, led to a vacuum which facilitated the rise of Islam and Muḥammad’s movement, thereby preparing the ground for the establishment of the Muslim Empire.

The Making of a Monastic Academy: Intellectual and Ascetic-Mystical Education at the Monastery of Narek
Jesse Siragan Arlen, University of California, Los Angeles

In the ninth and tenth centuries, a new phase in Armenian monastic life began with the introduction of permanently endowed, large-scale cenobitic institutions. Founded by the leading dynasts of the period, they served a number of different purposes, from being spiritual centers of prayer to providing places of lodging along trade routes for travelers, wayfarers, and merchants, to being burial places for dynastic noble families, to housing relics and precious objects that made them centers of pilgrimage and generators of income. Of the hundreds of monasteries that dotted the medieval and early modern landscapes of the Armenian oikoumené, a very small number became major academies and centers of learning, with libraries and scriptoria for the copying and illuminating of manuscripts. These are some of the same ones whose names remain prominent to the present-day, in part because of the way in which they produced and housed men of learning and served as the principal transmitters of Armenian literary and artistic culture into the early modern period. Examples include Hałbatʿ and Sanahin, Tatʿew, and a few dozen others. Narekavankʿ was one of the earliest if not the very earliest such monastic academy to be established. As such, Anania of Narek’s impact as the first abbot and main founder of the monastery’s intellectual and spiritual program of education shaped not just the future generations at Narek — including Anania’s famous pupils Grigor and Uxtʿanēs — but also served as a model for the other major academies founded after it. This paper offers a reconstruction of the system of education and spiritual life established by Anania at Narekavankʿ, providing a look into one of the earliest of the major monastic academies that became the chief educational and cultural institutions in the Armenian oikoumené from the tenth to sixteenth centuries.