Regional Studies

Regional Studies

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The project will, for the first time, examine the cult of saints across the whole of Christendom: the Syriac-speaking world; Armenia and Georgia; Egypt; the Greek-speaking world of the eastern Mediterranean; and the Latin West. Many saints, and not just the biblical ones, successfully transcended the linguistic and theological divisions that crisscrossed the Christian world, and so did most practices associated with saints’ cult.

A central feature of the project is the treatment on an equal footing of evidence from all the churches of early Christendom for which we have good evidence (sadly there is insufficient early evidence from Ethiopia), and the project’s standardized database, with key passages presented in both their original language and in English translation, will for the first time make readily accessible the evidence for the cult of saints across all the languages and traditions of early Christianity.  However, as well as showing connections and similarities across Christendom, the project will highlight areas of difference, and areas of localism: saints who never reached out of their native region, and practices that were distinctive to the area that spawned them.  The interplay between local practice and international reach lie at the heart of the project.