Little is left that testifies to the life of the Church of the East in
the sixteenth to early nineteenth centuries. What we have, are
manuscripts written by mostly clerical scribes for mostly clerical
readers. There is much that suggests, however, that these texts
functioned in a much wider circle than merely that of the learned.


This study takes the scribal production of texts, from the Holy
Scriptures to the first traces of popular writing, as its main source to
analyze the major changes that took place in the Church of the East in
the period. The most important of these was the introduction of Western
Catholicism, which ultimately led to the creation of two separate
hierarchies, today's Chaldean Church and the Assyrian Church of the
East. How this community dealt with these monumental changes, how that
affected everything from the production of texts to the fabric of
society as a whole, and how that contributes to our understanding of
this Church's modern day off-shoots, is the topic of this study.