Periodic Reporting for period 4 - FLOS (Florilegia Syriaca. The Intercultural Dissemination of Greek Christian Thought in Syriac and Arabic in the First Millennium CE) Reporting period: 2022-09-01 to 2023-08-31 Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project Syriac, a variety of Aramaic, appeared in northern Mesopotamia in the first century CE, and produced a vast literature, which was the expression of a mostly Christian culture. FLOS focused on the transformations of early Greek Christian thought in Syriac and, through Syriac, in Arabic in the first millennium CE. The aim was to analyze how the transmission of Greek Christian texts interacted with the various forms assumed by Syriac Christianity under Islamic rule. From the middle of the 7th century, Syriac Christians were confronted with the political and religious power of Islam and they increasingly had to justify their beliefs in order to valorize and preserve their cultural heritage. One way to do this was to look at the past. In the first centuries CE, Greek Christian authors had developed an articulated theological reflection, and they came to be called "Church fathers", to emphasize their role as theological authorities. Between the 4th and 8th centuries, Syriac Christians translated the writings of the "fathers" into Syriac and also produced anthologies of selected extracts from them. We call these anthologies "florilegia", collections of the "finest flowers" of Greek Christian literature. They are preserved in unique parchment manuscripts produced between 700 and 1000 CE and preserved in London and Birmingham. Under Muslim rule, Syriac Christians used these collections to outline their own theological identity, using them as an intellectual first-aid kit against the threats their religious identity was undergoing. The result of the research is twofold: we have produced born-digital critical editions of the most important florilegia, and we provided the editions with rich metadata that allow the user to understand their history and construction strategies. This is a pioneering result in two respects: because digital philology had never been applied to Syriac texts and is still rare in Eastern Christian studies; and because through these editions Syriac florilegia have been valorized for the first time as 'intellectual projects' that changed the history of Christian culture in the Medieval Middle East. Four large florilegia can now be consulted at www.florilegiasyriaca.eu.The second purpose of the project was to understand how the religious education that Christians gained from these florilegia had an impact on the actual cultural debate. Between the 7th and the 10th centuries many Syriac Christian authors wrote theological works, often for the purpose of controversy with other Christian competitors or with Muslims; they wrote in Syriac, but also more and more often in Arabic. Our question was: did these authors use the florilegia? Did they construct their arguments with themes drawn from them? In many published or forthcoming studies, the FLOS team was able to demonstrate that this was actually the case. We also showed that our comprehension of the debates between Christians and Muslims in the early Abbasid age is strongly improved if we understand that Syriac and Arab Christians relied not only on pure dialectics to dispute with Muslims, but also on their own theological tradition, which they received especially in the form of florilegia. Our research can thus increase historical awareness for the understanding of our present. Studying the intellectual history of a Christian culture that was the first to face Islam and to equip itself for this confrontation is tantamount to realizing how the Middle East has been the place of a cultural and religious plurality that today is little perceived and threatened. Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far The main result are certainly the born-digital editions of the Syriac florilegia published online by FLOS, which required an intensive collaborative work that encompassed the whole duration of the project. Though each project member had their own specific tasks, everyone actively contributed to a common discussion on the philological and linguistic issues raised by the edition of the four florilegia that are now online. A whole equipe of scholars in digital humanities was also involved to implement the digital editions and the website where they eventually appeared. Another major result was the mapping of the use of patristic sources in Christian Arabic writers of the 8th-10th century. We observed that these authors used the Syriac florilegia studied by FLOS: they either quoted entire blocks of patristic excerpts in the same order as in the florilegia (Abu Ra’ita, d. ca. 830), or did not quote them but modelled their arguments on the florilegia (Yaḥyā Ibn ʿAdī, d. 974, a major Christian Arabic thinker active in Baghdad). These writers used the patristic authorities to address themes discussed in contemporary Islamic theology: they resorted to old theological authorities also to confront rival strains in Mesopotamian Christianity. The fact that Arabic writers used florilegia written in Syriac attests that linguistic diversity was not an obstacle to the circulation of patristic knowledge in the early ‘Abbasid world. A third important result is that we completed a full corpus analysis of the language of our florilegia, which will also be soon available online. Thereby we have set up an all-round methodology (philological, linguistic, and digital) for the study of florilegia.The results of our work were disseminated worldwide, e.g. at the Universidad Panamericana in Mexico City (2019), at the Patristic Conference in Oxford (2019), at the International Congress of Byzantine Studies (Venice 2022) and the International Syriac and Christian Arabic Symposia (Paris 2022), at Brown (2019) and Yale Universities (2023), but also by involving external experts in two highly successful workshops (Venice, 2020 and 2023) and in two cycles of online lectures during the pandemic (now on Youtube). Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far) The publication of Syriac florilegia in born-digital critical editions is a breakthrough as it has decidedly introduced digital philology into the thriving field of Eastern Christian Studies, where digital philology is almost inexistent. The website was perceived by audiences with different specializations as a leap forward in the application of digital humanities to the edition of early Christian texts overall. The flexibility of the tools implemented by FLOS makes it a model for future research. In particular, a search tool that enables the users to display each patristic excerpt alongside its occurrences in Greek, Syriac, Arabic, Latin, Armenian, and Ethiopic, enhances the study of the multilingual metamorphoses of Greek Christian thought in Eastern Christianity and is a powerful advancement towards the connection of different scholarly fields. By showing how concretely Syriac and Christian Arabic authors used their own theological tradition when engaging in interreligious polemics, FLOS’ novel approach is radically changing our consideration of how Christians positioned themselves in the intellectual exchanges of the Islamicate world. Moreover, our workshops of 2020 and 2023 were the first attempts at a distinctively Christian phenomenology of compilatory practices as creative endeavours. FLOS’ broadening of the perspective to the whole Christian ecumene had never been attempted before. These workshops, and the volumes resulting from them, will be a blueprint for any investigation not only on Christian florilegia, but also on the intellectual relationship Christians of different ages had with their tradition. flos-image_en.jpg
