Studies in Armenian Literature and Christianity

This is a collection of 19 articles written over the last 30 years - they represent Thomson's work in Armenian studies. The essays deal with the origins of Armenian Christian literature and the development of an individual literary culture. Original and translated texts are addressed.

Professor Thomson deals here with the origins of Armenian Christian literature and its development as an individual literary culture. At the same time, these studies make available to students of Patristics and Byzantine history some of the wealth of information preserved in the Armenian sources. One set of articles, focusing on the question of origins, looks at the influence and use made of Christian Syriac and Greek writings, both theological and historical, as well as those of late classical antiquity. Others examine how the Armenians viewed themselves in their ambiguous position between Byzantium and Iran, and how those views were expressed in their historical writing. A key theme, as the author would see it, is the formulation of a ’received tradition’, and the ways in which later writers interacted with it and used it, removed from its original context, to create their own images of Armenian individuality.