Syriac and its Users in the Early Modern World, c.1500-1750, Christ Church, Oxford, March 15, 2018

The vast majority of scholarship on Syriac has focused on Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Yet Syriac continued to be used, as a liturgical, literary and living language, across the early modern period and beyond. Guides to Syriac literature sometimes give the impression that new textual production had effectively ceased by 1500. But new texts did continue to be produced, both in ‘literary’ genres, such as hymnography and poetry, and in other forms equally valuable to historians, including professions of faith, inscriptions, and letters. The majority of the churches and communities which still at this time used Syriac in some contexts, including the Maronite and Melkite churches, and, in particular, the Syrian Orthodox and East Syrian churches, were located within the Ottoman Empire or on its eastern frontiers. The story of early modern Syriac is thus closely tied to the history of Christianity within Ottoman society. Yet Syriac had a global reach. Perhaps the most under-studied body of Syriac sources in the world is the material from the ‘St Thomas Christians’, the Syriac-using Christian communities of India. And it was in this period, in the context of the Renaissance, Reformation and Counter-Reformation, that Syriac began to be a subject of scholarly study and (polemically-motivated) theological interest in western Europe. Contacts between European and eastern Christianity increased across the early modern period, with far-reaching consequences, including the splintering of many eastern churches into pro-Catholic and traditionalist parties. Other, less easily traceable, changes may also relate to these contacts, including the increasing turn towards Arabic as the dominant eastern Christian literary language, and, in the Church of the East, the first written use of the vernacular Neo-Aramaic. The evolving uses and role of Syriac are thus closely tied to questions of societal change, global connectivity, and religious and community identities.

This workshop will explore themes relating to Syriac and the communities who used it in the period from c.1500 to c.1750.

Pre-registration by February 26 is required.