Patriarch John XI Bekkos: Texts, Contexts and Reception

The polemical writings of Patriarch John XI Bekkos provide a compelling example of the complexity of this kind of literary production. The twenty preserved works of this renowned pro-union polemicist – all of which have been integrated into the RAP database – are multifaceted in their content (being not merely dogmatic treatises, but also valuable historical testimonies), in their authorial and compositional features (which can be inferred from the many programmatic passages and the surviving double redactions of three treatises), and in the mechanisms governing their manuscript transmission, since certain texts were copied far more frequently than others, and some material was reused (or even repurposed) by later polemicists. The complexity of these writings and of their manuscript tradition should not be regarded as a limitation, but rather as evidence of the vitality and highly dynamic nature of these texts – as alive as the religious debates that produced them.