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)

ID Call: HORIZON-MSCA-2022-PF-01 MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships

Sapienza's role in the project: Host Institution

Supervisor: Alberto Camplani

Fellow: Annunziata Di Rienzo

Department: History, Anthropology, Religion, Arts and Performing Arts 

Project start date​​​​​​​: 01/10/2023

Project end date​​​​​​​: 30/09/2026

Abstract:

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). Through the edition of unpublished documents and the analysis of sources, the project aims at investigating both the problem of the reliability of sources and the circumstances and reasons of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? 
Deserving even more in-depth considerations are the motivations that lead some representatives of the Church of Iran to involve the West in the resolution of internal controversies on the Patriarchal authority, as in the case of a fake epistolary attributed to the 4th century Seleucian patriarch Papa Bar Aggai, that is, eight letters exchanged with exponents of the Western political and religious panorama (among them, e.g., Helena mother of Constantine), of which a critical edition will be prepared.
The project is carried out in cooperation with Marquette University (Milwaukee, WI)