Philip Wood is British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellow, Corpus Christi College, Oxford.

• Introduction


• 1: Classification in a Christian Empire


• 2: Controlling the Barbarians: The First Syrian Hagiographic Collection


• 3: Theories of Nations and the World of Late Antiquity


• 4: Edessa and Beyond: The Reception of the Doctrina Addai in the Fifth and Sixth Centuries


• 5: The Julian Romance


• 6: Creating Boundaries in the Miaphysite Movement


• 7: A Miaphysite Commonwealth


• Conclusions

An examination of how, at the close of the Roman Empire, Christianity influenced the political and social philosophy of the peoples of the Near East, laying the groundwork for the blending of religious and ethnic identity that we see in the Middle East today.