This book presents the results of a research project undertaken by a team of thirteen young scholars from Europe and North America. Our aim was to gather a group of colleagues from diverse disciplinary backgrounds studying similar phenomena in a variety of cultures. From the outset, we wanted to focus our research on the transmission of intellectual traditions between cultures in both the Medieval and early Modern periods (up to the seventeenth century). We defined the scope of our team research very broadly in order to encompass periods and regions which are usually studied separately; thus, we have chosen to begin with Late Antiquity, the final phase of the Graeco-Roman civilisation, as the point of departure for Medieval cultures. At the other end, we decided to study both the Renaissance and its seventeenth-century aftermath in Europe. For our geographical scope – which turned out to be a key determinant of disciplinary boundaries in the scholarship – we aimed to unite such cultural zones as the Middle East (both Christian and Muslim), the Caucasus, the Latin West and, finally, Central Europe, in particular the microcosms of late Medieval and Renaissance Poland, as well as Germany and Hungary.

What began as a project on a single phenomenon – that is, intellectual traditions and their movements between cultures – soon revealed itself to be a topic that was much broader and more difficult to define, namely intercultural contact and cultural change in the Medieval and early Modern periods.

Introduction

Any scholar of antiquity who reads that most famous of texts created within the late antique East Syriac School of Nisibis – its Statutes, or literally, the Canons – is struck by the similarity of its institutions to those of a Graeco-Roman philosophical community. This initially surprising analogy, together with the grand scale of the school's educational project – providing students with intellectual skills ranging from basic literacy to Aristotelian logic and, finally, enabling them to interpret the Scriptures within the East Syriac exegetical tradition – has led many scholars to call this school the ‘first university of Christianity’, or even simply the ‘first university’. Although such seemingly anachronistic qualifications may not do justice to the School's actual character and wider significance, it remains true that we can demonstrate substantial parallels in a scholarly community's organisation and self-definition between the School of Nisibis and other educational centres that existed in the Graeco-Roman Mediterranean during the same period.

In modern scholarship, there is a long tradition devoted to this fascinating connection. Recently, in the concluding pages of his monograph on the School of Nisibis, Adam Becker suggested that one may consider the parallels between the Nisibis community and the late antique philosophical schools to be of a very general character, and cannot be attributed to any real contact or influence.