Introduction: A New History of Middle Eastern Christians

Summary

Until the early 1990s, Eastern Christianity was virtually absent as an object of academic research, except for the history of its most ancient periods. Over the past two decades, however, a growing body of scholarship has been produced, on both the early modern and modern history of Middle Eastern Christians, with the social sciences investigating their contemporary features. Such an outburst of interest is due to a public opinion generally more informed about the social and political reality of the Middle East, in a period dramatically difficult for local Christians, as well as the interest of social scientists in minority studies. The first two sections of the Introduction will briefly sketch the origins of the current denominational diversity within Middle Eastern Christianity and the development of this ‘new sub-field’ of research, with a focus on the early modern age. The third section will take into particular consideration the contribution made by the historian Bernard Heyberger to this renewal of studies and to the opening of new research paths on the connected history of Middle Eastern Christians between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. His ground-breaking work has spanned many disciplines (history, anthropology, art history), thanks to a method that has applied microhistorical analysis to the global mobility of people, texts and objects. Far from being limited to a single area study, his approach has produced many important contributions to the social and cultural history of early modern Catholicism tout court. In order to allow the international public to access his work, we will outline his intellectual path and discuss his most important publications, while also providing a comprehensive bibliography of his writings at the end of the volume.

1. middle eastern christianity: a brief historical overview

To understand the living conditions of the Christian inhabitants of the Middle East in the Ottoman period, it is necessary to briefly present the various communities. We are dealing with a plurality of different Churches, which are the result of a complex history marked by two main historical sequences. At first, between the fifth and seventh centuries, the faithful began to divide into groups along fracture lines that echoed political rivalries, linguistic and cultural differences, or divergent theological opinions, both within and outside of the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire.