ABSTRACT
For the Byzantine child, growing up was marked and eected through a series of ritual acts, through which the child was gradually drawn into the full web of adult
1* Preliminary versions of this paper were presented in Oxford in 2005, and in 2006 at the Dumbarton Oaks Symposium, ‘Becoming Byzantine: Children and Childhood in Byzantium’. It is a pilot study for a larger project on the rites of passage in Eastern Orthodox religious culture. Particular thanks are due to Elizabeth Bolman, Michael Jereys, Eunice Maguire, Yannis Papadoyannakis, Martyn Percy, and Robert Taft, S.J., for generous sharing of references and expertise.
