Approximately 80 percent of the population of the Eastern Roman Empire in the Christian middle ages lived from agricultural activity in the countryside, but these people are underrepresented in the contemporary written accounts that focus on the imperial court, the privileged, and the educated. A largely untapped source to better understand the rural communities are the prayer books that were made for the use of priests. These euchologia contain short prayers that address various local concerns and events in the lifecycle of families, as they are being studied in the Vienna Euchologia Project. This lecture will present insights from the study of the manuscripts and the short prayers (including a recently published prayer for silk worms), which shed light on social and economic developments in Byzantine and post-Byzantine society.

Lecturer’s bio:

Claudia Rapp FBA is Professor of Byzantine Studies at the University of Vienna, Director of the Institute for Medieval Research at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and Co-Director of the Cluster of Excellence “EurAsian Transformations. Resources of the Past and Challenges of Diversity”. After obtaining her Doctorate at Oxford, she held appointments at Cornell University and the University of California, Los Angeles, before taking up her current position in Vienna in 2011. She has researched and published widely on the social and cultural history of Late Antiquity and Byzantium. Her work has been recognized, among others, with the Wittgenstein Award of the Austrian Research Fund and the Karl Christ Prize for Ancient History.