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Claudia Rapp , Brother-Making in Late Antiquity and Byzantium: Monks, Laymen, and Christian Ritual . Oxford : Oxford University Press , 2016. Pp. 368.
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Liturgical books are the largest group of Greek textual sources for the Byzantine period. Other types of extant Byzantine manuscripts, such as novels, poetry, or law, largely represent the patrimony of educated families and economically stable monastic communities. On the other hand, every Byzantine church, from a wealthy chapel in the capital to a humble village monastery, required liturgical books in order to carry out the Christian rituals of Byzantine religion. These sources therefore provide an unparalleled insight into Byzantine thought and practice at all social strata. Nevertheless, these manuscripts have primarily remained the scholarly domain of liturgiologists and musicologists, and while their relevance for Byzantine social history has been upheld by leading scholars in these fields, such as Robert F. Taft, seldom have Byzantinists uninitiated into the field of Liturgiewissenschaft ventured to tread the vast terrain of unpublished Byzantine liturgical manuscripts.
With the present volume, Claudia Rapp has done just that. Not only does she bring liturgical manuscripts to the forefront of her discussion of Byzantine social history, she does this in order to unravel what remains one of the most elusive rituals of Byzantine prayer books, namely, the rite for adelphopoiesis or "brother-making." In many ways, her study represents the culmination of scholarly inquiry into ritual brotherhood that has ensued since the publication of the 1994 monograph by the late Yale professor John Boswell, Same-Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe. There, Boswell articulated his theory that adelphopoiesis represented a sort of medieval, ecclesiastically-sponsored same-sex marriage ceremony. In accordance with other scholars who have written on the topic, Rapp rejects Boswell's claim. Instead, she brings together a wealth of sources from the late antique and medieval Eastern Mediterranean world in order to situate the origins and practice of adelphopoiesis within the context of ascetic spirituality and monastic living. More than a story about the development of one liturgical rite over time, Rapp's engagement with multiple source types from different regions and time periods contributes a great deal to our knowledge about the history of monasticism and kinship networks in the Byzantine world.
At the centre of Rapp's book is...