Liturgie, Bibliotheken und Bildung

Liturgy, Libraries and Learning: The Evidence from Byzantine Euchologia is based on an exploration of manuscripts in medieval Greek that contain liturgical texts for the use of priests (euchologion means literally book of prayers). Of particular interest are the small prayers for particular occasions (occasional prayers), such as a boys first day in school, a womans difficulties in childbirth, the blessing of bee hives, or the harvesting of grapes. This rich material allows new insights into the life of women, men and children across all levels of Byzantine society and their daily concerns. Of the manuscripts that were copied between ca. 850 and ca. 1650, about 2000 to 3000 survive; they contain about 600 different prayer texts. Since 2015, the Vienna Euchologia Project at the Austrian Academy of Sciences been engaged in the systematic exploration of this rich and previously understudied material. Liturgy, Libraries and Learning constitutes Phase II of the Vienna Euchologia Project, conceptualized in three phases. The long-term goal is twofold: the creation of a Census of Manuscripts that contain the small prayers, and the construction of a Database of Prayers that links each individual prayer text to the manuscripts in which it is contained. Both these goals will be advanced by the entire project team, including national cooperation partners. Moreover, three focused studies by dedicated project staff will make this material accessible for further research and demonstrate its interest for the cultural history of scholarship and learning in Byzantium. (1) An important step will be the establishment of a taxonomy of the ca. 300 euchologion manuscripts that can be anchored in place and time. This will result in the creation of a matrix upon which other manuscripts that lack information of their time and place of copying can be grafted. (2) A separate study will be dedicated to the euchologia that have been preserved in monastery libraries across the centuries, in order to gain more information about their use and ownership in the middle ages. This will significantly add to our understanding of the creation of the earliest libraries in Europe. (3) The prayer texts that relate to schooling will be compared with teaching texts that were generated in institutions of higher learning. Professors sometimes created teaching texts in the form of prayers, or used existing prayers as teaching texts. This will contribute to a deeper understanding of the intertwining of religion and erudition in medieval Byzantium. Liturgy, Libraries and Learning hopes to advance the study of Byzantine euchologia with a special focus on the contexts in which the manuscripts and the prayers they contain were created and used. This promises new insights into the history of monastic libraries and the history of education in Byzantium.