This Festschrift (celebration publication) on the occasion of Wolfgang Hage's eighty-fifth birthday, edited by Martin Tamcke and Egbert Schlarb, is a collection of original contributions covering the broad field of Eastern Christianity (“Eastern” as opposed to the Catholic and Protestant traditions). Wolfgang Hage is one of the leading figures of German-speaking scholarship on Eastern Christianity, set in the discipline of church history, which he expanded during his tenures in Marburg and Göttingen. It came to include the Oriental Orthodox, the Byzantine and the Catholic traditions in the Middle East, Eastern Africa, and Central Asia, all in their own right. As a result, the University of Göttingen offered courses on almost all Eastern Christian languages (Syriac, Gə’ez, Armenian, Georgian, and Christian Arabic).
The present Festschrift, edited by Martin Tamcke, another leading figure of the field, reflects the cultural and geographic diversity of Eastern Christianity Hage helped highlight. It collects original papers in German and English produced specifically for the Festschrift as well as in the context of two classes given at Göttingen on the topics of war and pilgrimage in 2018 and 2019.
The quality of the articles is very uneven. Some, however, offer marvelous insights that truly highlight the relevance of Eastern Christianity and its deep connections with Islamic Studies and Middle Eastern Studies, heir to the German-speaking scholarly tradition of working with primary sources in their original languages. For instance, the article by Stanislau Paulau on letters exchanged between imperial Russian officials and leaders of the Church of the East in the eighteenth century is fascinating as one of the Russian officials quoted referred to members of the Church as “Assyrians,” that is, several decades before the term was introduced, according to current scholarship, by Western missionaries and British archeologists in the second half of the nineteenth century. Another deficit, which is not specific to this Festschrift, is the absence of biographical notices on the authors.
