Scribes and Scriptures

The Church of the East in the Eastern Ottoman Provinces (1500-1850)

By (author) H.L. Murre-Van den Berg

Book cover: Scribes and Scriptures

Extent: 413 pages

Publisher: Peeters Publishers

Subjects: Religious Studies

Series: Eastern Christian Studies

Series volume number: 21

Language: English

Paperback (Published)

(August 2015)

ISBN: 9789042930797

Price: $103.00

Out of stock

Little is left that testifies to the life of the Church of the East in the sixteenth to early nineteenth centuries. What we have, are manuscripts written by mostly clerical scribes for mostly clerical readers. There is much that suggests, however, that these texts functioned in a much wider circle than merely that of the learned. This study takes the scribal production of texts, from the Holy Scriptures to the first traces of popular writing, as its main source to analyze the major changes that took place in the Church of the East in the period.


Little is left that testifies to the life of the Church of the East in the sixteenth to early nineteenth centuries. What we have, are manuscripts written by mostly clerical scribes for mostly clerical readers. There is much that suggests, however, that these texts functioned in a much wider circle than merely that of the learned. This study takes the scribal production of texts, from the Holy Scriptures to the first traces of popular writing, as its main source to analyze the major changes that took place in the Church of the East in the period. The most important of these was the introduction of Western Catholicism, which ultimately led to the creation of two separate hierarchies, today’s Chaldean Church and the Assyrian Church of the East. How this community dealt with these monumental changes, how that affected everything from the production of texts to the fabric of society as a whole, and how that contributes to our understanding of this Church’s modern day off-shoots, is the topic of this study.

  • By (author) H.L. Murre-Van den Berg