A Syriac Patristic Florilegium Against Julian of Halicarnassus - (Eastern Christian Texts) by Guido Venturini (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

How is a florilegium constructed, and why does this peculiar type of literary work deserve to be studied? The huge anti-Julianist florilegium preserved in the Catenae Patrum of the British Library represents an exceptional repository of patristic testimonies transmitted in Syriac, some of which are lost in the Greek original and remained unpublished until now. After a methodological introduction, the volume presents the critical edition, English translation, and comment of an intriguing dogmatic florilegium, conceived by an enigmatic intellectual active at the end of the sixth century to refute Julian of Halicarnassus' doctrine on the incorruptibility of Christ's body before the resurrection. The critical edition aims to open new methodological horizons in the field of Syriac philology, as it integrates the stemmatic method with the historical study of the textual tradition, according to Giorgio Pasquali's fundamental teaching. For the first time, the most important piece of the anti-Julianist literature after the death of Severus of Antioch this work is translated into a modern language, giving new insights into the theological controversies that took place within the Miaphysite Church during the Byzantine period.

About the Author

Guido Venturini, Ph.D. (2019) at Sapienza University of Rome, specialized in Greek and Syriac philology, textual criticism, and Early Christian Literature. Since 2021, post-doctoral fellow at the University of Venice, team member of the ERC project FLOS. He has published critical editions and translations of Syriac texts, including the book La versione siriaca della Vita di Giovanni il Misericordioso in the CSCO Series (2020), and several scholarly articles.