Isaac of Antioch

Book excerpt: This volume offers a critical edition and annotated translation of twenty metrical homilies attributed to Isaac of Antioch, a late fifth-century CE Syriac poet. The works in this collection, the majority of which are examples of the Syriac rebuke genre, are aimed at the moral reformation of the Syrian Christian community. The introduction, which provides the first detailed study of the manuscript tradition of the corpus as a whole, identifies four different Isaacs whose writings were intermingled already in late antiquity and develops criteria for distinguishing among their works. Scholars and students of church history will find this a valuable resource for the study of Syriac poetry and homiletics, Christian ideas of moral reform, and late antique monastic and lay devotional culture.