Religious studies have long discussed the comparative notion of 'holy' beyond religious, cultural, and linguistic boundaries. In this book, Thomas Jurczyk conducts a diachronic comparison of the meaning and application of two notions and their related word fields that are commonly associated with a broader comparative notion of holy, namely the Ancient Armenian term 'surb' and its related words and the English word field associated with 'holy'. To compare these two semantic fields, his methodological approach operates on the principle of distributional semantics and applies, among others, tools and methods from the field of corpus linguistics.

Thomas Jurczyk (Dr.), born in 1985, studied history and religious studies in Bochum. He finished his Ph.D. in September 2020. Since 2014, he has worked as a research assistant at the 'Center for Religious Studies' (CERES) at Ruhr-Universität Bochum. His principal areas of interest are Greco-Roman religions, early Christianity, an/iconism, and the application of computational methods and tools.