| dc.description.abstract | This thesis aims to establish the nature of the historiography of the Paulicians in particular historical periods. Paulicianism was a heterodox movement followed by a mixture of various ethnic peoples from the seventh to tenth-centuries in Byzantine Asia Minor. Our knowledge concerning their history depends on what their opponents gave us. Therefore, it is almost impossible to write an objective history of the Paulicians.
In the first part, the two most widely used works in the historiography of the Paulicians, the History of Peter of Sicily and the Key of Truth, will be analysed. The reason for this is that these two sources, both epistemically and ideologically, have been at the centre of the historiographies of the Paulicians to be analysed in the remaining chapters of the thesis. However, at this point, the debates regarding the authenticity of the sources will also be addressed. In recent years, there have been serious contributions to these debates. However, the central role of the Paulicians portrayed in these two sources in the historiographies of the following centuries necessitated the exclusion of Armenian and Greek sources that provide information on the Paulicians. The second chapter explores the character, motives, and place of the historiography of the Paulicians in the eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. Therefore, this chapter describes how Gibbon’s philosophy, and the worldviews of his age shaped his historiography of the Paulicians. The philosophy of the French and English Enlightenment will be investigated with Gibbon and his successors. The idea of Natural Religion, Deism, and the quest for the Historical Jesus will be evaluated in tandem with views of the Paulicians.
The third chapter demonstrates the relationship between the Kizilbash/Alevi groups and the Paulicians, which also surveys how politics and the efforts of missionaries in Asia Minor worked together in terms of the historiography of the Paulicians. This is investigated from the end of the nineteenth-century to the 1940s. The geographical, historical, religious and cultural affinities between these two unorthodox groups will be evaluated in the light of the extant sources. In the fourth chapter, the reasons and results for the perceptions of Protestant scholars and theologians about the Kizilbash and Paulicians are compared with Turkish historians’ works on the same subject. The fifth chapter focuses on the reasons for the importance of the 1950s and 1960s for the study of dissent groups such as the Paulicians, Bogomils, and Cathars in academia. Two factors of these years are important for our case: One is a result of Cold War conditions and the rise of the study of dualism until the end of the 1970s, especially in the US, and the second is the counterculture movements of the 1960-70s with postmodernism and Romanticism. Research related to Bogomilism, particularly in the Balkans, and their relationship with the new geopolitical conditions of the post-WWII world order. Modern scholarship of the Paulicians is still relatively rare and problematic. This thesis aims to provide a humble aid for filling that gap. | en_GB |
