Manuscripts do not Burn: On the Track of the Manuscripts of the Syrian Christians of India

Chaired by Kesavan Veluthat, formerly Professor of History, Delhi University, and Director, Institute for the Study of the Heritage of Coastal Kerala, Kodungallur.

In 1599, the Synod of Diamper ordered a long list of Syriac manuscripts belonging to Kerala's Syrian Christian community confiscated and burned. The prevailing view since has been that this destroyed their manuscript heritage entirely. This talk describes a survey, digitisation, and cataloguing project across the Syrian Christian archives, and what it revealed about how much of that heritage actually survived.

About the speaker: István Perczel works on Late Antique and early Christian philosophy and on Syriac Christianity, and led the digitisation and cataloguing of the Saint Thomas Christian manuscript collections of Kerala (the SRITE project).