Prayer and Worship in Eastern Christianities, 5th to 11th Centuries

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.