Peter Kawerau's work is a foundational contribution to the study of Syriac Orthodox Christianity between the eleventh and the early fourteenth centuries. The work remains surprisingly relevant despite its publication almost 70 years ago and the increasing scholarly strides in the field for the past couple of decades. Scholars and interested students of the medieval Middle East, eastern Christian traditions, and the medieval period more broadly would therefore benefit from the publication of Kawerau's work in English translation offered in this volume.
Available now in a sturdy, hardback edition from Gorgias Press, the volume presents a concise and highly legible study of a richly documented confessional community whose marginalization in both medieval and Middle Eastern scholarship has been increasingly amended in recent years. Patrick Conlin's precise translation, which is based on the second edition of Kawerau's work (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1960), reduces the possibility of imposing interpretations of Kawerau's words by offering a literal, yet highly intelligible rendering of the original German. The most notable translation decision undertaken by Conlin was to update some terms that carry a rather heavy historical baggage with potentially polemical and, at times, normative implications. In line with more recent scholarship in the field, terms such as the “Syriac Orthodox Church” and “Church of the East” replace the “Jacobites” and “Nestorians” (respectively) from Kawerau's original work.
Together with its appendices’ lists and tables, the volume would be particularly useful for introducing students to the medieval history of Syriac Orthodox Christianity. However, a more thorough copyediting of the volume could have corrected some minor technical errors throughout the footnotes and bibliography (where we find unnecessary capitalizations of publication titles, irrespective of language), as well as in the rendering of some personal names (e.g., Hidemi Takahashi's name in the Translator's Preface and an inconsistent use of -os and -us suffixes throughout). It should also be mentioned that the volume lacks an index, which impedes a more serious scholarly engagement with its content. For a useful index of Kawerau's work, we still depend on its second edition from 1960.
