Firstly, the project set out to reconstitute a ‘lost archive’ of Eastern Christianity, and it analysed for the first time a vast corpus of recently discovered sources. Using new digital resources in conjunction with published catalogues of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, the team charted the literary production of Eastern Christianity in Arabic, Syriac, and Karshuni from 1500 to 1750. Over the five years of the project, nearly a dozen members of a team comprising both Research Associates and Research Assistants completed records for over 3,000 manuscripts in. The launch of the Stories of Survival online database is scheduled for January 2021.
The second objective of the project was to write a ‘connected history’ of early modern Eastern Christianity in a global framework, one that links individuals, texts, and contexts within a transnational framework stretching across Europe, the Ottoman Empire, Russia, India, and the Americas. The combined efforts of the research team has resulted in no fewer than 16 publications related directly to the three research questions (e.g. 1 book, 15 articles). Stretching across archives and sources in Arabic, Syriac, Karshuni, Latin, German, French, Spanish, Italian, and English, the publications offer for the first time a truly global vision of the horizons of Eastern Christianity in the early modern period.
Third, the project has contributed a sophisticated methodology to the study of early modern global history, particularly in its refinement of current approaches of ‘global microhistory’. Of particular importance is the project’s output on Global History and Microhistory, published in 2019 as a supplement volume for the journal Past and Present. The entire volume is available online in open access form, and it has become the ‘go-to’ volume for a wide range of international scholars looking for new models of combining microhistory and global history.
Finally, the project has opened new avenues for further research into the study of Eastern Christianity, mobility and early modern globalization. By recovering lost sources and discovering new ones, the project expanded the horizons of Eastern Christian Studies, enabling it to extend into new studies of religious, cultural, and literary history. The global context of the project will also provide a foundation for scholars to develop more focused, national histories of Eastern Christianity in close consultation with local, provincial, and national archives. Finally, the project’s focus on the Eastern Christian diaspora will enable scholars to engage in a more explicitly comparative study, for example, by comparing Eastern Christians to better documented communities such as Jews, Greeks, and Muslims in the early modern world. In this way, the project will also contribute to the growing and dynamic literature on the study of early modern toleration, difference, and mobility.
