Have you heard of the Messalians? Come and discover the Messalian movement with Louis Chevillard, “missionnaire” of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, on Thursday 23 April 2026 at 18:00.
Long viewed through the lens of heresiology, it is through a close examination of the sources that the speaker invites us today to explore the origins and developments of this little-known movement.
What, then, were the historical realities, the polemical receptions, and the doctrinal elaborations associated with this movement?
By bringing together textual testimonies, manuscript traditions, and historiographical reconstructions, Louis Chevillard invites us to revisit a complex dossier, where issues of classification, interpretation, and the memory of spiritual movements in Late Antiquity are all at stake.
This lecture will thus offer an in-depth reflection on the processes by which certain religious currents move from the status of marginal practice to that of a heresiological category, thereby revealing, in a negative way, the intellectual and ecclesial mechanisms by which orthodoxy is defined.
Louis Chevillard is the recipient of a research grant for his stay at the ÉBAF. You can discover here the opportunities for scholarships to study in Jerusalem.