Eastern Christianity: The First Thousand Years

Undergraduate / Graduate

This course introduces students to Eastern Christianity from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages. We will start with contextualizing Eastern Christianity's diverse, global, and multilingual trajectories. We will then turn to review select themes of Eastern Christian history. We will cover the shaping of orthodoxy in the Byzantine world in the contexts of both inter-religious debates and intra-Christian concerns over heresy. We will explore the Christological Controversies of Late Antiquity, which continue to fracture Eastern Christianity until this very day. We will review the rise of Islam, its divergent Eastern Christian responses, and its broader theological, social, and cultural implications on medieval Middle Eastern religions. The translation movements under the ʿAbbasids will occupy us next and will further reveal the contributions of Eastern Christians to the intellectual and religious landscapes of the medieval Middle East. We will conclude with Eastern Christianity's position in the Middle Eastern world between the Crusades and the Mongol conquests, historical developments whose reverberations can still be felt in the present-day world where many Eastern Christian communities are spread across an increasingly global diaspora.