2011, Bibel, Byzanz und Christlicher Orient: Festschrift für Stephen Gerö zur 65. Geburtstag (Leuven: Peeters), p. 291-314.
This study presents a text of considerable historical interest, found in two Indian manuscripts belonging to St Joseph's CMI Monastery, Mannanam in Kerala, Kottayam District, and written in Malayalam language, in Garshuni script, also containing transcriptions of original historical documents, partly in Syriac and partly in Malayalam Garshuni. It also gives a commented translation of the first part of the Church history from Saint Thomas to the early 18th century as well as a critical edition and a commented translation of one of the documents contained in the Church history, namely a letter by Mar Shem’on of Ada, an East Syrian bishop who arrived in India in 1701, was captured, kept in house custody in Surat, Gujarat, until he was taken to Kerala in order to consecrate Angelo Francisco, the first non-Padroado Latin bishop of India and to be deported to Pondicherry, where he died in 1720. Finally, the study also traces the adventurous life of this bishop.
See Full PDF See Full PDFThe Harp: A Review of Syriac and Oriental Ecumenical Studies, XXIV: 189-217
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Entangled Religions: Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of Religious Contact and Transfer
During the second half of the sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth centuries, the Syriac literary heritage of the Malabar Christians shifted from a standard East Syriac ("Nestorian") canon of texts to a Catholic post-Tridentine literary output in Syriac, a fusion of Western (Latin) and Middle Eastern (Syriac) sources and elements. The present article analyzes the literary networks of the community of the Malabar Christians, as expressed in the production of Syriac texts undertaken by the Catholic missionaries and arguably their Indian Syriacist pupils. The period under investigation is around the time of the Synod of Diamper (1599), a turning point in the ecclesiastical history of Malabar. The synod marked the Portuguese's attempt to impose Tridentine Catholicism on the Malabar Christians and ordered to correct their Syriac books according to Catholic Orthodoxy or burn them as heretical. My paper focuses on the relationship between (1) collections of sermons and (2) liturgical poetry, since these two are entangled literary genres. Occasionally Syriac sermons (translated from Latin or composed on the spot by Catholic missionaries) were replicated in liturgical poetry and show the chains of transmission of Syriac knowledge from Catholic teachers (especially Jesuits) to their Indian students. Such relationship between literary genres comes clearly to the fore in the case of prose compositions coming arguably from the Syriacising circles of Francisco Ros, the first European Bishop of the Malabar Christians (1601-1624), and newly discovered pieces of Syriac poetry which might have been written by his Indian disciple Alexander the Indian/Kadavil Chandy Kattanar (1588-1673). The groups of texts under discussion show the transfer of knowledge from both the Latin West and the Syriac-speaking Middle East that created a new theological literary culture for the Malabar Christians as an expression of the Jesuit missionary principle of accommodatio. Source analysis of such texts allows one to dive into various aspects of the ecclesiastical and confessional life of the Malabar Christians, and into the cross-cultural encounters between them and the Catholic missionaries.
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