The project “The Proceedings of the Ecumenical Councils from Oral Utterance to Manuscript Edition as Evidence for Late Antique Persuasion and Self-Representation Techniques” conducted an in-depth study of the Acts of the Ecumenical Councils from a perspective of cultural history.
The Acts of the Ecumenical Councils of Late Antiquity include (purportedly) verbatim minutes of the proceedings, a formal framework, and copies of relevant documents which were either (allegedly) read out during the proceedings or which were later attached to the Acts proper.
Despite this unusual wealth of documentary evidence, the daunting nature of the Acts demanding multidisciplinary competency, their complex structure with a matryoshka-like nesting of proceedings from different dates, and the stereotype that their contents bear only on Christological niceties have deterred generations of historians from studying them.
The little research that existed had not always been based on sound principles: the recorded proceedings of the sessions had too often naively been accepted as verbatim minutes.
Yet even a superficial reading quickly reveals widespread editorial interference. We must accept that in many cases the Acts will teach us less about the actual debates than about the editors who shaped their presentation.
This does not depreciate the Acts’ evidence: on the contrary, they are first-rate material for the rhetoric of persuasion and self-representation. It is possible, in fact, to take the investigation to a deeper level and examine the manner in which the oral proceedings were put into writing: several passages in the Acts comment upon the process of note-taking and the work of the shorthand writers. Thus, the main objective of the proposed research project was to trace the destinies of the Acts’ texts, from the oral utterance to the manuscript texts we have today.
The results could be summarized as follows: first, by developing a rigorous approach based on linguistic methods, we could ascertain that in many places, the Acts demonstrably present little modified stenographed minutes. While some tinkering did happen, they were no wholesale forgeries. Second, this being said, one cannot but notice that large sections are missing and have surely been removed on purpose. Third, as much as we perceive large-scaling minuting as a late antique practice, this is probably just a distorted impression caused by the accidents of transmission. Our research showed that minuting was key in Early Imperial times, too. Fourth, the wealth of information provided by the Acts for countless future research enterprises could be evidenced. Fifth, from a technical viewpoint, the IT component of this project was outstandingly successful and provided the scholarly community with tools for correcting scanned texts and searching through them.
