ForM · FORGED MEMORIES: the Church of Late Antique Iran and the West. The Textual Construction of a Relation with the Western Church and State Through Hagiographies, Epistles, Documents (4th-5th century)

FORGED MEMORIES: the Church of Late Antique Iran and the West. The Textual Construction of a Relation with the Western Church and State Through Hagiographies, Epistles, Documents (4th-5th century)

According to some sources of diverse typology and different historical reliability - hagiography, historiography, epistles, ecclesiastical documents -, the Church of the East, in some moments of its history, turned to the West searching for support and legitimation; this happened in particular during the 4th-5th century, when the Church of Iran bloomed as autonomous entity, although remaining expression of a religious minority, for a long time persecuted in the Sasanian empire. In these sources, "West" is to be understood as a complex entity, including both the Church located west of the Persian Empire (therefore also the one existing in the eastern Mediterranean), and the Roman political power, often represented through symbolic, even salvific, figures (Constantine, Helena). The ForM project investigates how the early Church of Late Antique Iran (the so-called “Church of the East”) ideologically represents its relations with the West – i.e., the Roman Empire and “Western Fathers”– through a series of literary devices, forgeries, and pseudepigraphy. Through the edition of unpublished documents and the analysis of sources, the project aims at investigating both the problem of the reliability of sources and the circumstances and reasons of this longed-for intervention of the Western Church and political power in both the dramatic circumstances of the persecution of Christians in the Sasanian Empire and the internal problems of the Church of East itself: to what extent and in what way does the ideological and literary re-elaboration affect the representation of this relation? What are the narrative devices adopted, and what is the role of some forged documents in that? The critical editions of eight unpublished letters attributed to Papa Bar Aggai - or addressed to him will be published. The editions will be available online, thus fostering the use of digital resources for critical editions of texts. Besides the editions, at least two articles will be published; the articles will be aimed at analyzing the devices used for an ideological representation of the relationship of the Church of Iran with the Roman West, and at investigating the historical circumstances that gave rise to the ideological representation, helpful in studying the history of the Church of Iran, hypothesizing a use of Western models to shape the ecclesiastical structures of the Church of East.

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