06 — Sources
The documentary basis for St. Ketevan — unusually rich for a neo-martyr, and drawn from three worlds. This section sets out, first, the whole source-picture (§3.5): the Georgian, Persian-context, Armenian, and European witnesses, how they relate, and what each can bear; and second, the European witnesses in detail — Pietro Della Valle, the Augustinian and Carmelite missionary reports, and the seventeenth-century European reception of the martyrdom, above all Andreas Gryphius’s tragedy Catharina von Georgien.
Tradition: Georgian Orthodox
This section is the collection’s source-critical heart, complementing the martyrdom’s attestation file (§03) with a fuller inventory and a focused treatment of the European material that makes Ketevan’s case so remarkable. Per METHODOLOGY §3.5, the aim is to lay out the sources as dated artifacts, to show how the Georgian, Latin, and Armenian lines relate (and where they share a common root), and to distinguish what the record can and cannot establish — while making the most of the genuine strength that this cross-cultural documentation represents.
The two files treat, first, the sources for her life as a whole — the inventory and its layering; and second, the European witnesses in particular — Della Valle, the missionary orders, and the European literary reception, including the Gryphius tragedy that made the Georgian queen a figure of German baroque drama.
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| the-sources-for-her-life.md | The §3.5 source inventory: the Georgian tradition (Teimuraz’s poem, the Church’s hagiography), the Persian-context and Armenian sources (Arakel of Tabriz), and the European reports; how they relate and where they share a common eyewitness root; what the record can and cannot establish. |
| the-european-witnesses.md | The European witnesses in detail: Pietro Della Valle and his letters and Account of Georgia; the Portuguese Augustinian and the Carmelite missions in Persia; and the seventeenth-century European reception, centrally Andreas Gryphius’s Catharina von Georgien (written c. 1647–49, first performed 1651, published 1657). |
See Also
- Accounts and Attestation — the attestation of the martyrdom, complemented here
- The Dispersal of the Relics — the missionaries as relic-bearers
- The Xenia methodology (limit case) — the opposite pole of hagiographic attestation
References
- Teimuraz I of Kakheti. The Book and Passion of Queen Ketevan (1625).
- Della Valle, Pietro. An Account of Georgia (1627); the Lettere from Persia.
- Arakel of Tabriz (Davrizhetsi). Book of History (Armenian, completed 1662).
- Flannery, John M. The Mission of the Portuguese Augustinians to Persia and Beyond (1602–1747). Leiden: Brill, 2013.
- Gryphius, Andreas. Catharina von Georgien. Oder Bewährete Beständigkeit (1657).