Description: By looking at liturgy, performance, prayer, poetry, and the material culture of worship, this book forges a new conversation about the diversity of Christianities in the medieval eastern Mediterranean, centered on the history of practice. It studies prayer and worship in the variety of Christian communities that thrived from late antiquity to the middle ages: Byzantine Orthodoxy, Syrian Orthodoxy, and the Church of the East. Rather than focusing on doctrinal differences and analyzing divergent patterns of thought, the essays address common patterns of worship, individual and collective prayer, hymnography and liturgy, as well as the indigenous theories that undergirded Christian practices.
Review Quotes:
"... [the volume] offers a kaleidoscopic sense of the variety of work being done in this field by some of the most notable scholars of the current moment ... [if] one wants a sense of some of the high level, solidly executed work being done in the field of early Christian liturgical studies by European and American academics, this is an excellent source."
- Laura Lieber, Duke University, USA, Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2017"Prayer and worship in the present volume are theoretically approached as expressions of religious identity, inextricably linked to theological speculation and doctrinal formulation, engendered by the remarkable diversity of local traditions within the geographical span of Eastern Christianities.The contributors to the volume cover specific topics of interest, study influential personalities and spatial frameworks.[...] It is certain that this book has initiated a number of discussions that will be further advanced in the future."
-Niki Tsironi, Byzantina Symmeikta, ePublishingEKT