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.

List of Figures and Tables

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

List of Contributors

Introduction - Prayer, Worship, and Ritual Practice

Brouria Bitton-Ashkelony and Derek Krueger

Chapter 1 - Theories of Prayer in Late Antiquity: Doubts and Practices from Maximos of Tyre to Isaac of Nineveh

Brouria Bitton-Ashkelony

Chapter 2 - Prayer and the Body according to Isaac of Nineveh

Sabino Chialà

Chapter 3 - Psalms and Prayer in Syriac Monasticism: Clues from Psalter Prefaces and their Greek Sources

Columba Stewart

Chapter 4 - Expressions of Prayer in Late Antique Inscriptions in the Provinces of Palaestina and Arabia

Leah Di Segni

Chapter 5 - Renovation and the Early Byzantine Church: Staging Past and Prayer

Ann Marie Yasin

Chapter 6 - The Power of the Eucharist in Early Medieval Syria: Grant for Salvation or Magical Medication?

Volker Menze

Chapter 7 - The Transmission of Liturgical Joy in Byzantine Hymns for Easter

Derek Krueger

Chapter 8 - Greek Kanons and the Syrian Orthodox Liturgy

Jack Tannous

Chapter 9 - Various Orthodoxies: Feasts of the Incarnation of Christ in Jerusalem during the First Christian Millennium

Daniel Galadza

Chapter 10 - The Therapy for Grief and the Practice of Incubation in Early Medieval Palestine: The Evidence of the Syriac Story of a Woman from Jerusalem

Sergey Minov

Chapter 11 - Apocalyptic Poems in Christian and Jewish Liturgy in Late Antiquity

Hillel I. Newman

Bibliography

Index

Brouria Bitton-Ashkelony is Associate Professor and Martin Buber Chair in Comparative Religion, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.

Derek Krueger is the Joe Rosenthal Excellence Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, USA.