The Churches of the East possess a sometimes bewildering array of Eucharistic prayers. Essays on Early Eastern Eucharistic Prayer offers a guide to the exploration of the principal prayers, and presents in a simple and succinct manner the current scholarship on the origins, development, and relationship of these particular prayers to other ancient prayers.

As well as summarizing the state of research and suggesting directions for future study, these essays explain the history of these prayers, their relationship to one another, and reveal how and why early Christian prayers developed as they did. In this way Essays on Early Eastern Eucharistic Prayers produces a clear picture of the way early Eucharistic prayers emerged and grew in the Eastern Churches.

Essays on Early Eastern Eucharistic Prayers serves as a companion to - and provides an extended commentary on the texts of early eastern Eucharistic prayers that are published in R. C. D. Jasper and G. J. Cuming's Prayers of the Eucharist: Early and Reformed. Essays on Early Eastern Eucharistic Prayers also offers more detail than is available in the introductions to either text or in other general histories of liturgy or early liturgical practice.

Articles and their contributors include Introduction: The Evolution of Early Anaphoras," by Paul F. Bradshaw; "The Anaphora of the Apostles Addai and Mari," by Stephen B.Wilson; "The Strasbourg Papyrus," by Walter D. Ray; "The Anaphora of St. Mark: A Study in Development," by G. J.Cuming; "The Archaic Nature of the Sanctus, Institution Narrative, and Epiclesis of the Logos in the Anaphora Ascribed to Sarapion of Thmuis," by Maxwell E. Johnson; "The Basilian Anaphoras," by D. Richard Stuckwisch; "The Anaphora of the Mystagogical Catecheses of Cyril of Jerusalem," by Kent J. Burreson; "The Anaphora of St. James," by John D. Witvliet; "The Anaphora of the Eighth Book of the Apostolic Constitutions," by Raphael Graves; and "St. John Chrysostom and the Byzantine Anaphora That Bears His Name," by Robert F. Taft, S.J. Includes an index.

Pal F. Bradshaw is professor of liturgy at the University of Notre Dame and was vice-principal of Ripon College, Cuddesdon, Oxford, England. He is the author of Liturgy in Dialogue and Early Christian Worship published by The Liturgical Press.