A New Source for Childbirth Prayers in the Byzantine Rite Aleksandr Andreev * Assistant Professor, St. Petersburg Theological Academy of the Russian Orthodox Church, St. Petersburg, Russia aleksandr.andreev@gmail.com Abstract: The author presents a list of all of the Greek and Slavonic Byzantine Rite prayers associated with childbirth that have been edited so far. Then, the author provides a description of a 16 th century manuscript Greek Euchologion preserved at the National Library of Russia (Rossijskaja Nactional naja Biblioteka, RNB) in St. ʹ Petersburg, shelfmark Greek 617. The manuscript’s contents are described, providing the rubrics and incipits of the prayers of Christian Initiation, marriage, adelphopoiesis, and the reception of the lapsed. A previously unedited prayer for a woman who has suffered a miscarriage and two previously unedited prayers for midwifes are edited and commented. The author concludes with some remarks about postpartum purification prayers in the late-Byzantine and post-Byzantine sources. Keywords: Byzantine Rite – Euchologion – Trebnik – Christian initiation – midwife – ritual impurity – baptism – Rhodes. Childbirth in pre-Modern society was the subject of religious regulations, moral taboos, and elaborate liturgical rituals associated with the beginning of life. Our understanding of the social aspects of the life of women in general and childbirth in particular in Byzantium and the Byzantine periphery has improved in recent years thanks to a number of important studies 1 . However, the liturgical rites associated with childbirth and infant baptism have remained inadequately studied because the history of the Byzantine Euchologion (the main liturgical book containing these texts) and of its translations into Slavonic and other languages of the Byzantine periphery is only now being written 2 . Understandably, scholars have largely focused on the early sources, and so the late medieval and early modern manuscripts have yet to be adequately analyzed and described. My purpose in this paper is to catalog the prayers following childbirth that have been edited so far in the existing studies of Greek and Slavonic manuscripts and to present the reader with a 16 th century Greek Euchologion * The research was carried out with the financial support of a grant from the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation in the form of subsidies as part of Project No. 075-15-2020-786 “History of Writing in European Civilization”. 1 For an introduction to these issues, see A. Laiou, Gender, Society and Economic Life in Byzantium, Brookfield, 1992; eadem, Mariage, amour et parenté à Byzance aux XI e –XIII e s., Paris, 1992; on the Slavic world, see E. Levin, Sex and Society in the World of the Orthodox Slavs, 900–1700, Ithaca, 1989. 2 The Greek sources are studied by M. Arranz, “Les sacrements de l’ancien Euchologe constantinopolitain (1): Étude préliminaire des sources,” Orientalia Christiana Periodica, 48 (1982), pp. 284–335; idem, “Les sacrements de l’ancien Euchologe constantinopolitain (3): II: Admission dans l’Église des enfants des familles chrétiennes (‘premier catéchuménat’),” Orientalia Christiana Periodica, 49 (1983), pp. 284–302. For an overview of the Slavic sources, see T. I. Afanasyeva, “Baptismal Rites in the Oldest Slavic Euchologia from the 11th to the 14th Centuries,” in: »Neugeboren aus Wasser und Heiligem Geist« Kolner Kolloquium zur Initiatio Christiana, eds. H. Brakmann, T. Chronz, C. Sode (Jerusalemer Theologisches Forum, 37), Munster, 2020, pp. 396–409.