Ashgate Publishing Blog

The Worlds of Eastern Christianity, 300–1500 is a new Variorum reference series. The first volume to be published came out in December: Doctrine and Debate in the East Christian World, 300–1500, edited by Averil Cameron and Robert Hoyland.

About the volume:

The reign of Constantine (306-37), the starting point for the series in which this volume appears, saw Christianity begin its journey from being just one of a number of competing cults to being the official religion of the Roman/Byzantine Empire.  The involvement of emperors had the, perhaps inevitable, result of a preoccupation with producing, promoting and enforcing a single agreed version of the Christian creed.  Under this pressure Christianity in the East fragmented into different sects, disagreeing over the nature of Christ, but also, in some measure, seeking to resist imperial interference and to elaborate Christianities more reflective of and sensitive to local concerns and cultures.

This volume presents an introduction to, and a selection of the key studies on, the ways in which and means by which these Eastern Christianities debated with one another and with their competitors: pagans, Jews, Muslims and Latin Christians.  It also includes the iconoclast controversy, which divided parts of the East Christian world in the seventh to ninth centuries, and devotes space both to the methodological tools that evolved in the process of debate and the promulgation of doctrine, and to the literary genres through which the debates were expressed.

About the editors: Professor Dame Averil Cameron is former Professor of Late Antique and Byzantine History and former Warden of Keble College, University of Oxford; Robert Hoyland is Professor of Islamic History at the University of Oxford.

About the series:

The Worlds of Eastern Christianity, 300–1500 series takes an inter-disciplinary approach towards the history of the East Christian communities of the Byzantine, Iranian and Islamic worlds during the period 300-1500.

Volumes in the series will cover the different East Christian cultural and linguistic communities, and will also consider themes that cut across usual cultural, confessional and linguistic divides.

Each volume brings together the most influential articles on the given topic and opens with an introduction by a leading expert in the field who discusses the key aspects and debates and frames new questions and directions for future research. It is intended that the series will act as a stimulus for new research into Eastern Christianity and as such be essential reading for all students and academics of Late Antiquity, Byzantium, Islam and Western Christendom.

Visit the website for more information about the series.