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Despite their centrality to the history of Christianity in the
East, Syriac Christians have generally been excluded from modern
accounts of the faith. Originating from Mesopotamia, Syriac
Christians quickly spread across Eurasia, from Turkey to China,
developing a distinctive and influential form of Christianity that
connected empires. These early Christians wrote in the language of
Syriac, the lingua franca of the late ancient Middle East, and a
dialect of Aramaic, the language of Jesus. Collecting key
foundational Syriac texts from the second to the fourteenth
centuries, this anthology provides unique access to one of the most
intriguing, but least known, branches of the Christian tradition.
From constructing new buildings to describing rival-controlled
areas as morally and physically dangerous, leaders in late
antiquity fundamentally shaped their physical environment and thus
the events that unfolded within it. Controlling Contested Places
maps the city of Antioch (Antakya, Turkey) through the
topographically sensitive vocabulary of cultural geography,
demonstrating the critical role played by physical and rhetorical
spatial contests during the tumultuous fourth century. Paying close
attention to the manipulation of physical places, Christine
Shepardson exposes some of the powerful forces that structured the
development of religious orthodoxy and orthopraxy in the late Roman
Empire. Theological claims and political support were not the only
significant factors in determining which Christian communities
gained authority around the Empire. Rather, Antioch's urban and
rural places, far from being an inert backdrop against which events
transpired, were ever-shifting sites of, and tools for, the
negotiation of power, authority, and religious identity. This book
traces the ways in which leaders like John Chrysostom, Theodoret,
and Libanius encouraged their audiences to modify their daily
behaviors and transform their interpretation of the world (and
landscape) around them. Shepardson argues that examples from
Antioch were echoed around the Mediterranean world, and similar
types of physical and rhetorical manipulations continue to shape
the politics of identity and perceptions of religious orthodoxy to
this day.
Despite their centrality to the history of Christianity in the
East, Syriac Christians have generally been excluded from modern
accounts of the faith. Originating from Mesopotamia, Syriac
Christians quickly spread across Eurasia, from Turkey to China,
developing a distinctive and influential form of Christianity that
connected empires. These early Christians wrote in the language of
Syriac, the lingua franca of the late ancient Middle East, and a
dialect of Aramaic, the language of Jesus. Collecting key
foundational Syriac texts from the second to the fourteenth
centuries, this anthology provides unique access to one of the most
intriguing, but least known, branches of the Christian tradition.
From constructing new buildings to describing rival-controlled
areas as morally and physically dangerous, leaders in late
antiquity fundamentally shaped their physical environment and thus
the events that unfolded within it. Controlling Contested Places
maps the city of Antioch (Antakya, Turkey) through the
topographically sensitive vocabulary of cultural geography,
demonstrating the critical role played by physical and rhetorical
spatial contests during the tumultuous fourth century. Paying close
attention to the manipulation of physical places, Christine
Shepardson exposes some of the powerful forces that structured the
development of religious orthodoxy and orthopraxy in the late Roman
Empire. Theological claims and political support were not the only
significant factors in determining which Christian communities
gained authority around the Empire. Rather, Antioch's urban and
rural places, far from being an inert backdrop against which events
transpired, were ever-shifting sites of, and tools for, the
negotiation of power, authority, and religious identity. This book
traces the ways in which leaders like John Chrysostom, Theodoret,
and Libanius encouraged their audiences to modify their daily
behaviors and transform their interpretation of the world (and
landscape) around them. Shepardson argues that examples from
Antioch were echoed around the Mediterranean world, and similar
types of physical and rhetorical manipulations continue to shape
the politics of identity and perceptions of religious orthodoxy to
this day.
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