Richard Price: Conciliar Acts: A genre or a category?

The German critical edition of the acts of the seven ecumenical councils (Berlin, 1914-2016) is now complete, and the time has come for this body of material to be considered as a whole. But first of all, the acts of each council need to be examined individually – to determine their author and method of compilation, their fullness as a record of the debates and of the accompanying documentation, their reliability, indeed their truthfulness, their purpose, and their intended circulation. Too many modern accounts of these councils have treated the acts as a simple documentary record, akin to the official records of modern parliamentary debates.  This paper will briefly set out the distinctive features of a selection of these sets of acts, to illustrate the considerable range of variation. This raises a general question: do the various conciliar acts constitute a genre, with established rules and patterns, or a mere category made up of texts of greatly varying character and differing purposes?