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Radu Mustață

• In the attempt to unravel the religious entanglements of the Syrian Christians from Malabar and the literary networks of this Christian community in the early modern times, the present article focuses: (1) on collections of Syriac Catholic sermons from Malabar composed by the Catholic missionaries in order to create a new Syriac Catholic literary culture since the second half of the sixteenth century; and (2) on the later Western Syriac redaction and reception of this corpus. Consisting both of putative translations/adaptations from Latin and original creations, the manuscript evidence of such literary compositions bears witness to several successive redactions of Syriac texts from Malabar in the early modern times. It shows how this type of theological compositions became a shared literary genre, being appropriated by two rival factions of the Malabar Syrian Christians, namely \(\it Paḻayakūṟ\) and \(\it Putaṉkūṟ\), throughout their complicated ecclesiastical history, from the second half of the sixteenth century up to the beginning of the eighteenth century, and beyond. The study of these collections of sermons across confessional boundaries testifies to the religious entanglements between the two rival groups, and brings further evidence that the reorientation of the \(\it Putaṉkūṟ\) from the Syro-Catholic tradition from Malabar, based on both Eastern Syriac and European traditions and sources, towards the Western Syriac tradition was a gradual and slow process.