Christianity and the Church loomed enormously large in Byzantium, to an extent that cannot be overstated. The Byzantine liturgical and religious practices found expression in all realms of Byzantine life. The wide range of liturgical rites, from birth to death, from morning to evening, and throughout the liturgical year, is preserved in many different kinds of manuscripts. Of particular interest for the religious practices of the common people are Euchologia (liturgical books for the use of priests), as they often contain prayers and rites for situations in everyday life, from women experiencing a difficult birth to ritual brotherhood or the repairing of fishnets. These are being studied by the Vienna Euchologia Project. This RT unites scholars from different fields of research and language traditions with the goal to take a comparative look at Byzantine prayer traditions beyond Byzantium: beyond the Greek language, beyond the territories of the Byzantine Empire and the reach of its Church, or beyond prayer books. For every speaker, the point of departure will be so far under-researched manuscript material. We will point out parallels, differences/idiosyncrasies and novelties in prayer traditions which developed in several cultural regions such as Southern Italy, Egypt, Syria, Georgia, and the Slavonic-language area. Our main goal is to achieve a clearer picture of the impact of Byzantine prayer traditions through time and space of the Byzantine Empire and beyond.
The dogmatic controversies of the 5th and 6th centuries divided Egyptian Christianity into two competing jurisdictions and gradually isolated the non-Chalcedonian Copts from broader Byzantine Christianity. Later in the 7th century and beyond, a distinctly Coptic Christian ecclesial identity and worship tradition developed, increasingly dependent on the ritual authority of the Coptic papacy residing in…
The rigid theological divides that characterized the Byzantine and early Islamic eras often obscure a fluid, shared spiritual reality among Syriac-speaking Christians. This paper investigates the transmission and content of prayer traditions across the major Syriac confessions—including the Church of the East, the Syriac Orthodox Church, and the Melkite and Maronite communities—from the ninth to…
Vaticanus graecus 1070 is a bilingual codex and presents the Psalter in Greek and Latin. We know that it was accomplished on 5 August 1291 by a certain Romanos, abbot of the Monastery of Saint Benedict of Ullano in Calabria. This paper aims to highlight some features in this manuscript that point to its origins…
The conversion of the Southern Slavs in the Balkans in the mid-ninth century resulted in the introduction of Byzantine liturgical practices, as the corpus of liturgical books translated from Greek into Slavonic, particularly the euchologion, reveals. Among its diverse contents, the euchologion preserves a substantial body of funeral texts, which have remained largely neglected in…