Eastern Crossroads

Juan Pedro Monferrer-Sala is Professor in Semitic Studies in the Faculty of Arts, University of Crdoba. He has published studies of religious texts from early Islam and Christian-Arabic materials. He is currently working on the edition and study of Christian-Arabic manuscripts.

• This volume contains papers from the First International Congress on Eastern Christianity held in Crdoba, Spain, November 2005. The encounter of medieval Christian writers with several linguistic traditions through the Middle Ages produced one of the most important branches of Middle Eastern literature. This encounter not only changed the nature of the respective writings throughout time, but also influenced considerably the development of the legacies transmitted by the writers and the scholars of various Eastern Christian churches. During the centuries of Christian presence in the Near East, Christian works flourished in different languages over an extraordinary variety of literary fields - history, science, philosophy, translations, poetry, and law. Consequently, the rich textual history developed by the churches in Middle Eastern lands and beyond is of great importance in describing the genealogy of Christian legacy. Most of the contributions in this volume deal with subjects of several specialisations: ecclesiastical history, theology, exegesis, as well as literature, secular history, cultural contacts, manuscript tradition and transmission, and linguistics. One of the most important political changes in the Middle Ages was the rise of Islam and the subsequent arrival of Islamic power, and these events are reflected ideologically in many of the contributions. Collectively, the studies gathered in the present volume constitute surveys of particular areas of Christiana and they investigate several issues in the transmission of Christian culture, mainly in Arabic, Greek and Syriac, but also in Latin.