An Analysis of Childbed Prayers in Byzantine Prayerbooks

The aim of the proposed project is to unlock the potential of childbed prayers preserved in Byzantine prayerbooks (Euchologion, Pl. Euchologia) in regard to questions of gender and purity by means of discourse analysis. These little used textual sources offer new perspectives to the construction of gender identity in Byzantium, as they focus on an aspect of the life of most Byzantine women usually ignored by other sources: the forty days from birth to churching, in which the woman was considered to be impure. They are normative texts, meaning that they do not depict the lives and experiences of real Byzantine women. But they may have an impact, and they offer identities, which the recipients might adopt or project upon others. The proposed project aims to study prayers related to the liminal state of childbed in order to explore the representation of women and the conceptualisation of gender and purity in the ecclesiastical discourse. In the hitherto most authoritative edition of the Euchologion, provided by Jacques Goar in 1647, thirteen prayers on the following childbed-related topics are included: for the woman on the day of parturition, for the midwives who assisted her, for the woman on the fifteenth or twentieth day after she has given birth, for the naming of the child on the eighth day, for the churching of mother and child on the fortieth day and for the woman after a miscarriage. Further prayers remain unpublished. My research will be based both on published and hitherto unpublished texts, which I will study in a theoretical framework provided by sociolinguistics and social studies, especially concerning gender, purity and ritual. Through a search for childbed prayers in manuscripts and the systematic registration of their variants I aim to establish a textual basis for the further analysis of the prayers. This work can be considered as preliminary to an edition of these prayers at a later stage, as it will exceed the parameters of the proposed project. The discourse analysis will include the study of the language register of the prayers in its literary and social context, as well as the analysis of their wording with regard to questions related to gender and purity. I will explore intertextual relations with both other prayers on related topics (purity, women, household etc.) and selected texts beyond prayerbooks. The study of childbed prayers will be put in the context of research done in the study of gender, family and religious life in Byzantium.

The aim of the proposed project was to unlock the potential of childbed prayers preserved in Byzantine prayerbooks (Euchologion, Pl. Euchologia) in regard to questions of gender and ritual expertise by means of discourse analysis. These little used textual sources offer new perspectives to the construction of gender identity in Byzantium, as they focus on an aspect of the life of most Byzantine women usually ignored by other sources: the forty days from birth to churching, in which the woman was considered to be impure. The project constituted the first systematic analysis of prayers on childbed in view of questions of ritual purity, motherhood, and health and healing. I demonstrated that the prayers on childbed, more than prayers on other occasions, appropriate elements from non-liturgical ("magical") ritual textual traditions. This raises questions on the interaction of liturgy and "magic", as well as on (gendered) ritual expertise regarding birth and childbed, and domestic space in general. These questions were dealt with in several articles. The largest part of these texts is unedited or inadequately edited. The hitherto most authoritative edition of the Euchologion, provided by Jacques Goar in 1647, includes some common text versions without information on manuscript tradition, chronology, and provenance. The fluid character of the tradition is ignored. In this project, ca. 400 manuscripts were examined in situ, partially together with the team of the Vienna Euchologia Project. Of these, 70 proved to include a total of 270 prayers on childbed: for the woman on the day of birth, for the midwives who assisted her, for the woman on the fifteenth or twentieth day after she has given birth, for the naming of the child on the eighth day, for the churching of mother and child on the fortieth day and for the woman after a miscarriage. The manuscripts were recorded and the large part of the prayers transcribed. Thoughts on the presentation of this material demonstrated the limits of the printed edition: the prayers have an open / fluid tradition, and the edition does not seek to reconstruct an Urtext. Further challenges regard the distinction between a version of a text and a new text, and the analysis of the complex intertextual relations. These considerations lead to a methodology of digital archiving and analysis of these prayers, which was tested in a pilot digital edition of eleven prayers.