What I'm really trying to puzzle out is how these texts compare to older and still widely available Armenian works like Grigor of Narek's Book of Lamentations (Մատեան ողբերգութեան, c. 1000 CE). Initially, I thought the European works would be very different from the #Armenian ones, having been produced in a different cultural context. But I'm finding now that they're more similar than I'd assumed—at least, in the ways that would have been noticeable to the average Armenian reader around 1700. 9/
Yesterday, I finished my biography of Hohannēs. I've been collecting bits of information about him for three or four years, but I hadn't put those pieces together until about a week ago. The general trajectory of his life was this: Born in #Istanbul around 1635, became a celibate priest (vardapet) by 1660, studied at the short-lived Collegio Armeno in Rome then the #Jesuit Collège de la Trinité in #Lyon until 1671. 10/? @histodons
With the biography done, I'm now writing about Hohannēs's translation of Thomas a Kempis's The Imitation of Christ. It's been so interesting to read about how popular of a book this has been all over the world over the past 500 years. I've found that it's an anthology, really, the overall title being the incipit of the title of chapter 1: "De imitatione Christi et contemptu omnium vanitatum mundi." A more descriptive title would be "A Manual in Humility for Monastics." 12/?
Although Imitation was written in a totally different context (a European monastery in the 15th century), it's not as different from something like Grigor Narekatsi's Book of Lamentations (Մատեան ողբերգութեան) as I'd thought. They're both very humble and humbling works. They're quite complimentary, and, for that reason, they can't be categorized as simply Apstolic versus Catholic within an Ottoman-Armenian context—which is how I was thinking of them initially. 13/? @bookhistodons