Anointing the Sick in the First Millennium CE: A Sourcebook: A Source Book

For nearly two thousand years, Christians have anointed the sick with oil and prayed for their healing, following the instruction of the Letter of James. Yet the history of that practice is scattered across church orders, liturgical books, conciliar decrees, and pastoral writings in several languages, and much of it has never been easy for students or clergy to find in one place. In Anointing the Sick: A Sourcebook, Alistair C. Stewart gathers the essential texts into a single volume, tracing the rite from its earliest witnesses through the medieval rites for the sick and the dying, the Council of Trent, and the reforms of the twentieth century.

Each source is presented in English with a concise introduction that sets it in its historical and liturgical context. Readers can follow how prayers over the oil took shape, how an anointing for healing came to be tied to the deathbed and named Extreme Unction in the Western church, and how the Second Vatican Council's renewed Anointing of the Sick recovered the rite's older emphasis on healing and strength. The texts are left to speak in their own voices, and the result is a clear, reliable record of a practice whose meaning has been debated as often as it has been observed.

Designed with the classroom in mind, Anointing the Sick is an indispensable resource for students and teachers of liturgy, sacramental theology, and church history, and for pastors, chaplains, and all who minister to the sick and want to understand the tradition they inherit.