A Memory of Violence

“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