Through the fifth and sixth centuries, major divisions rocked Christianity as different factions vied to make their teachings the doctrine of the Roman Empire’s imperial church. In the aftermath of the Council of Chalcedon in 451, miaphysite Christians, often targeted as heretics by the imperial church, confronted periodic violence and persecution. In this book, Christine Shepardson reshapes our understanding of late antiquity by centering Syriac Christianity in these complex and politicized doctrinal conflicts. Drawing on critical studies of violence and memory, she traces narratives of resistance and other rhetorical strategies by which miaphysite leaders radicalized their followers to endure physical deprivation and harm rather than abandon their church community.

About the Author

Christine Shepardson is Distinguished Professor in the Humanities in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She is author of Controlling Contested Places: Late Antique Antioch and the Spatial Politics of Religious Controversy and Anti-Judaism and Christian Orthodoxy: Ephrem’s Hymns in Fourth-Century Syria.

Reviews

“In the three-way split experienced by eastern Christianity in the fifth and sixth centuries, how did those who rejected the Council of Chalcedon understand their position? Making excellent use of studies on collective memory, Christine Shepardson illuminatingly illustrates how those spokesmen of the miaphysite cause whose sources survive in Syriac employed different narrative strategies to build up their understanding of the past.”––Sebastian P. Brock, Oxford University

“A Memory of Violence provides the first sustained treatment of the rhetorics of resistance that accompanied the development of miaphysite Christianity. Beautifully and clearly written, it is bound to become essential reading for all students of late antiquity.”––Maria Doerfler, Yale University

“Late antiquity was a time of tumultuous religious separation and re-formation for Syriac Christians in the eastern Roman Empire. Shepardson charts their course with elegant, insightful clarity, mindful that strategies of resistance held the seeds of endurance for the long history to follow.”––Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Brown University