Occasional Prayers Concerning Sickness & Healing in Bohairic Euchologia

Abstract

Prayer texts from late antiquity and the medieval period attest to the prevalence of practices related to healing, both those promoted as official ritual and those denounced by Church authorities as competing magical practices. These healing practices often, consisted of prayers pronounced by clerics empowered for such ministry (e. g. priests and bishops) to bless substances like oil or water or to otherwise invoke divine grace for the healing of individuals. Such practices took place either in church or in a domestic setting, though in many cases were designed for individual use on a particular sick person. The present article provides texts, translations, and commentary on a group of seven such prayers related to sickness and health found in manuscripts of the Bohairic Coptic Euchologion as part of a broader analysis of the manuscript tradition of the Bohairic Euchologion and the prayer practices of medieval Copts that it reflects.