Melkite Euchologia as Sources for Liturgical Byzantinization

Liturgical Byzantinization has been studied largely through the eucharistic liturgies, lectionaries, and liturgical calendars. Medieval Melkite euchologia—attested in Syriac, Arabic, and Christian Palestinian Aramaic manuscripts across eight centuries—remain comparatively unexamined as a witness to the same process. This paper tests Byzantinization against three prayer concerns from Melkite pastoral life: the blessing of the Nile waters, the rite of brother-making, and the readmission of Christians who reverted after converting to Islam. Each responds to Constantinopolitan liturgical norms on different terms, and Byzantinization proves not to be a single, uniform process but one that can operate—or fail to operate—at distinct levels of a rite: its occasioning concern, its ritual frame, its prayer content, its text. Read together, the three cases argue for the significance of Melkite euchologia manuscripts not as confirmation of an already-established story of liturgical conformity, but as a body of evidence that complicates it.