Occasional Prayers in Bohairic Coptic Euchologia

A Preliminary Overview and Inventory

Abstract

While the Bohairic Coptic Euchologion is a liturgical book primarily providing the prayer texts needed by the priest for the celebration of the Eucharist, its manuscripts often contain other contents. One of these possible additional texts is a group of stand-alone prayers written for various blessings in daily situations, such as before and after meals, blessing of oil, water, and prayers for the sick. This article is an initial survey of this small corpus of 17 prayers scattered throughout several Bohairic Euchologia manuscripts. The overview and inventory of these prayers given here paves the way towards the future publication, translation, as well as the textual and historical analysis of these prayers in future contributions on this previously unexplored theme in Bohairic liturgy.