The Mother Mary and the archangel: a Ge'ez liturgical manuscript

[Ge'ez prayers to Michael and Mary]. [Ge'ez prayer book].

€ 6,500.00

A manuscript prayer book in Ge'ez, the ancient liturgical language of the Orthodox Church of Ethiopia and Eritrea, illustrated with seventeen full-page miniatures. The first half of these particularly feature the doings of the Virgin Mary, the Christ child in her lap or on her back, then progress to the life of Jesus, to the Passion and the Resurrection, along with several angels. The text itself appears to be particularly devoted to prayers to the archangel Michael, whose feast day is on the fifteenth of every month in the Ethiopian calendar, and some of the miniatures perhaps show miracles performed by Mary or Michael in popular exegesis.

The Ge'ez manuscript tradition is one of the oldest in the Christian world. With Christianity introduced to the region in the 4th century, the earliest attested Ge'ez Gospels are dated (with some debate) to the 6th century; it is in Ge'ez that the tradition of writing Christian holy books by hand has persisted the furthest into the modern age, long after it had been abandoned by most of the Christian world.