“Betwixt and Between”: Rites of Passage and the Problem of Method in Late Antique Liturgical History
Join us for a lecture in Miller Hall by Gabriel Radle.
The study of late antique liturgy straddles two long-established scholarly domains. Histories of early Christian worship have traditionally focused on the first three or four centuries of Christianity, while the study of medieval liturgy has been shaped largely by surviving prayer books, which become substantially richer only from the seventh and eighth centuries onward. Yet many of the rites first documented in the early medieval manuscripts took shape within the social and religious transformations of late antiquity. Focusing on Christian rites surrounding children’s first haircuts, this lecture asks how later manuscripts can help us reconstruct the ways in which liturgy participated in the religious negotiation of childhood among families and clergy of late antiquity. It does so by reading the earliest Greek and Latin manuscript evidence of children's haircuts alongside inherited ritual practices of the classical Mediterranean. Rites of passage, themselves concerned with persons “betwixt and between” social states, thus offer a particularly revealing test case for rethinking the chronological boundaries that have often inadvertently made late antiquity marginal to both the study of early and medieval liturgy.
Free and open to the public.
This event is part of the ISM Liturgy Symposium Series.
Contact: Katya Vetrov
Speaker bio:
Gabriel Radle specializes in early and medieval Christian liturgy, with a particular focus on the Mediterranean world. His research contextualizes the historical practice of Christianity through the comparative reading of liturgical manuscripts across traditions and by engaging these sources with visual and material culture, hagiography, homiletic literature, and legal documents, both canonical and civil.
His recent monograph, Marriage in Byzantium: Christian Liturgical Rites from Betrothal to Consummation (Cambridge University Press), examines the Christianization process whereby Greco-Roman wedding rituals were gradually altered into formal liturgical rites. This work brings together a large corpus of unedited manuscripts in order to trace the variety of rituals that constituted the Byzantine nuptial process from the imperial palace to the village house and unpack their social and theological contexts.
Radle’s current monograph project expands upon this intersection of ritual, Christianization and family life by investigating a different genre of late antique and medieval liturgy, namely a series of rites of passage practiced by Byzantine and Latin communities for stages of infancy, childhood and adolescence.
Among his other publications are articles and chapters dedicated to eucharistic texts, liturgical posture, prayer books on Sinai, marriage in the medieval West, lay ritual practice, and the unique religious history of Southern Italy, as well as four co-edited books on Eastern Christian liturgy. Radle has lectured internationally and held research fellowships at Yale’s Institute of Sacred Music, Dumbarton Oaks (Harvard University), the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Princeton University, the Institute for Advanced Study, and the University of Regensburg (Alexander von Humboldt Foundation fellow). Prior to coming to Yale, Radle was the Rev. John A. O’Brien Assistant Professor of Liturgical Studies at the University of Notre Dame, where he also served as Director of Graduate Studies for the university’s sacred music program.