Confessionalization and/as Knowledge Transfer in Eastern Christianity

Although the Confessionalization paradigm was developed within the context of Early Modern Studies stressing aspects of confession- and state-building in Post-Reformation Europe, a growing tendency in recent scholarship attempts to expand the paradigm on a global scale. The Ottoman Empire seems to be a prominent case in this discussion on the applicability of the paradigm in different historical contexts, involving all three main religions (Muslims, Jews and Christians) in efforts of determining their confessional identities. Having in mind that projects aiming to the standardization of the Eastern Christian confession were initiated throughout the Greek Orthodox 17th century, this workshop focuses on the potential of the Confessionalization paradigm for the purposes of a History of Knowledge regarding the clerical milieus of the Eastern Church, i.e. on the multiple processes of knowledge transfer that emerged, were designed or materialized, interweaved or clashed in the context and as a result of the challenges summarized under the heading of Confessionalization. Key questions will concern Confessionalization as opening up a field of inter-confessional communication and conflict, negotiation and modification of knowledge; interpersonal networks and networks of books, genres and discourses in motion; materialities and medialities of transfer; accommodation strategies and institution-building processes in Eastern Christianity; the role of confessionally motivated negation both as an obstacle and as a form of knowledge transfer, fluent confessional identities and trans-confessional discourses in clerical milieus.