This volume examines the potential of the confessionalization concept for the purposes of a
history of knowledge regarding the clerical milieus of the early modern Greek Orthodox Church.
Its point of departure is an understanding of confessionalization processes as an epistemic
challenge that opened up a field of inter-confessional communication. On the one hand
communication born out of this epistemic challenge - and Orthodoxy's need to articulate novel
authoritative positions in order to respond - resulted in epistemic movements that shaped
confessional boundaries intellectual profiles and academic curricula. In this sense
confessionalization functioned as knowledge transfer. On the other hand confessionalization
may be perceived as the very context of an unfolding communication process that triggered
knowledge mobility in a wide range of epistemic fields beyond the strictly theological:
confessionalization and knowledge transfer. The volume comprises studies on conflict
negotiation and modification of knowledge on interpersonal networks and networks of books on
genres and discourses in motion on materialities and medialities of knowledge transfer on
accommodation strategies and institution-building processes in the Greek Orthodox Church and
last but not least on fluent confessional identities and trans-confessional discourses in
clerical milieus.
