Treatments of Caucasian history routinely pinpoint the Third Council of Duin, held under Armenian auspices in 607, as the moment when the communion of the Armenian and Eastern Georgian Churches was permanently shattered. But in this ambitious monograph, Nikoloz Aleksidze aims to exorcise the “spectre” of the Armeno-Georgian schism that “haunts Caucasian scholarship and its conceptualization” (151). Aleksidze's learned investigation traces the dynamic making of memories across time and space and seeks to demote it as a turning point in Caucasian history. All the while, the author employs Georgian and Armenian sources in the original languages, a rare bilingual approach that widens the regional horizon.

Aleksidze identifies three principal layers of memories about the Schism stretching across 1500 years: the purported Schism itself in the late sixth and early seventh centuries; its calculated molding into a sharp turning point in the tenth and eleventh centuries; and its nationalization in the nineteenth century. Curiously, all three of Aleksidze's phases are associated with profound turning points in Caucasian history. There is much we do not know about the initial period, and the author sidesteps any attempt to establish a nuanced history for it (cf. Nina Garsoïan's magisterial L’église arménienne et le grand schisme d'Orient, CSCO 574; Subsidia,  100 [Peeters, 1999]). Instead, Aleksidze spotlights the fashioning and manipulation of subsequent memories. This leads to the second span, the crux of this volume, which coincides with the rise of the Armenian and Georgian Bagratids culminating in a pan-Caucasian empire based in Georgia. The last period corresponds to the nationalist movements forming in the later Russian Empire. Aleksidze presents fascinating, albeit uneven, material for the national age, when memories were embedded in competing ethnocentric master narratives.

This important book exhibits two overarching strengths. The first is its undergirding methodology. Surviving Caucasian sources from late antiquity are few and exist in later manuscripts prone to manipulation. However, pliable memories of that time reveal much about the self-identifications of the medieval Armenian and Georgian Churches. Memories of—and deliberate attempts to forget—the schism were living traditions forged by various constituencies across space and time. As Aleksidze acknowledges, memories of the schism were at least as much about the present (and, I would add, a desired future) as they were about the past. A second strength is Aleksidze's argument for the importance of Uxtanēs. Active in the tenth century, when Georgian political and ecclesiastical authority was expanding throughout the isthmus, the Armenian Uxtanēs transformed the schism into a watershed event. According to Uxtanēs, a profound Christian pan-Caucasian unity had been shattered thanks to poor decisions, intransigence, and a lapse into heresy on the Georgian side, especially the katholikos Kwrion (Kyrion). Aleksidze challenges the tendency to regard Uxtanēs's polemical tract as a regurgitation of the earlier Armenian compendium, titled The Book of Letters. Indeed, the entire monograph might have been framed around Uxtanēs.

Aleksidze's grand exploration occupies just over two hundred pages. The compactness often pays dividends, yet this venture would have benefitted from deeper contextualization. Sometimes wanting is a surgical examination of extant sources and their patchy manuscript traditions. The rich, yet acutely biased, Book of Letters, our chief near-contemporaneous source, cries out for even more scrutiny. Such considerations arouse other questions. Might Armenian and Georgian traditions predating the sixth century have been subsequently and comprehensively adjusted as memories of the schism evolved? Aleksidze's discussion of the tradition of Saint Shushanik, martyred in the late fifth century, is highly suggestive. In terms of historical context, a comparison with the evolving memories of 1054 would have enhanced Aleksidze's arguments and perhaps revealed a stronger Byzantine angle on the Caucasian schism. Further, the long seventh century may be even more important that the author acknowledges. At this time, we detect an unprecedented but selective and pragmatic “Byzantinization” of Eastern Georgian ecclesiastical institutions. This transpired as local prelates began to assert autonomy as never before (this, in my view, was the chief cause of ecclesiastical discord across Caucasia); as cenobitic monasticism flourished; as the Armenian and Eastern Georgian monarchies languished in abeyance; as the Sasanian Empire collapsed; and as Iran and parts of Caucasia were integrated into the dār al-Islām. Iran and the Persianate world, including connections to the Church of the East, play a miniscule role in Aleksidze's investigation despite the fact that late antique Caucasia, even after Christianization, was socially and culturally embedded in that enterprise.

A particularly striking revelation is why Georgian authors generally ignored the schism until the Bagratid “Golden Age” and even beyond. The Schism is absent, for example, from the components of Kʻartʻlis cʻxovreba, the so-called Georgian Chronicles. Duin III and Katholikos Kwrion are entirely absent in its pages. The chief exception to this deafening Georgian silence is a concise eleventh-century polemic by Katholikos Arsen Sapʻareli. This tract was composed toward the apex of Georgian Bagratid power and answered the kinds of complaints advanced by Uxtanēs.

The unity and disunity of premodern Caucasia is a favorite scholarly topic. Aleksidze's explanation of why surviving Armenian sources insist on a Christian Caucasian unity before the supposed schism demands attention. Some aspects of this image are certainly imaginative, ideological, and medieval in origin. But as Cyril Toumanoff (Studies in Christian Caucasian History [Georgetown University Press, 1963]) demonstrated long ago, there was an elemental social and cross-cultural unity across Caucasia that antedated late antiquity. Rivalries, confrontation, and open conflict among Christian Caucasian communities existed before the Schism. But on either side of the Schism, the history of Caucasia was defined first and foremost by its cross-cultural nature.

The Narrative of the Caucasian Schism is a book worth reading. Aleksidze's case study in the invention and elasticity of tradition thoughtfully explores the evolution of competing narratives (plural), “memories,” of the (supposed) events leading to the schism in the sixth and seventh centuries. In addition, this tome persuasively establishes the importance of Uxtanēs and his re-sculpting of received memories in the tenth century. Ultimately, Aleksidze has forced the spectre of the Schism into corporeal form and has defanged it, exposing its longterm ideological momentum. But to accomplish this he relies heavily upon yet other historiographically entrenched turning points. While the sixth and seventh centuries remain an important transition in Caucasian history for the time being, Aleksidze correctly warns against envisioning Duin III itself as a sharp pivot, a council he doubts ever happened.