The Byzantine Rite: A Short History

Robert Taft was a Jesuit liturgical scholar who spent his career specifically on the history of the Byzantine rite, publishing a multi-volume history of the Byzantine eucharistic liturgy alongside this shorter synthesis, so this record rests on decades of the author's own sustained, checkable scholarship on exactly this rite rather than on a general historian's survey touching it in passing. Its authority is that specialization: what it states about the structure and vocabulary of the eastern eucharistic rite reflects the same textual and historical method Taft used across his full body of work on the subject. This record has not independently traced later scholarly response to Taft's specific claims since 1992. Use it for the structure and vocabulary of the Byzantine eucharistic rite as this history documents it; a claim about a specific Eastern Catholic or Orthodox church's own current liturgical practice needs a source for that church directly.