International congress of byzantine studies belgrade, 22 27 august 2016

Carl Stephen Dixon
University of Nottingham, Nottingham, United Kingdom; 
[e-mail]
Innovation, Intrigue and Intertextuality: 
The Paulicians and Byzantine Heresiology
Byzantine heresiology is commonly conceived of as a superficial and derivative genre, which is 
often of little interest even to scholars of Byzantine religiosity. In her article How to Read Heresiology, 
Averil Cameron made a concerted effort to rehabilitate the genre, but even she considered the 
Byzantine sources of the Paulician and Bogomil heresies to be unoriginal and superficial. Using 
the example of texts concerning the Paulicians, the following paper seeks to contribute to her 
rehabilitation of the genre by arguing that even these supposedly uninteresting sources are nuanced 
and innovative. Numerological and onomastic references throughout these texts create links across 
the corpus as a whole, as well as linking the constituent parts of individual texts. These intertextual 
and intratextual links are invaluable in that they provide evidence for showing us how Byzantines 
read, wrote and received heresiological texts, as well as in demonstrating that these texts possess a 
level of literary sophistication with which the genre of heresiology is not usually credited.
In presenting this argument, I will primarily employ Peter of Sicily’s History of the Paulicians, 
one of the most complex and misunderstood Byzantine heresiological texts. The authenticity of 
the History has been fiercely disputed, but it is at least recognised that the work is valuable for 
preserving an authentic Paulician account of their history. Existing historiography has argued that 
Peter has left this source largely intact, but a close reading of the text reveals that he has appropriated 
and reworked numerological and onomastic references from the original Paulician exemplar in 
order to denigrate the Paulicians and symbolically link them with earlier heresies. A closely related 
text – the Contra Manichaeos of Pseudo-Photios – shows that contemporary authors developed 
these meanings and reworked them for their own purposes, which in this case is best explained by 
an attempt to undermine the authority of the History and the extreme punishment it advocates for 
Paulicians. Thus, by looking at the sources of the heresy as a whole, we can see that these contain 
nuanced literary readings and are framed in regard to contemporary religio-political disputes.

---

799