Maintained by:
Cynthia M. Vakareliyska (vakarel@uoregon.edu)
and David J. Birnbaum (djbpitt@gmail.com)
Last modified:
2023-07-21T18:21:14+0000
About this site: http://menology.obdurodon.org/about.php
The most recent version is accessible at http://dev.obdurodon.org:8080/exist/apps/menology/index.
Medieval Eastern Orthodox calendars of saints are extremely diverse in their commemorations for most calendar days of the year because the Eastern Orthodox Church had no canonization or beatification process. Thus local monasteries and priests were free to assign saints, including locally venerated saints, to whichever calendar date they deemed appropriate. The lack of consistency among calendars, the sheer number of calendars, and the fact that most medieval Slavic calendars of saints are unpublished have made it notoriously difficult to access and organize the data from such a large corpus, and to identify many of the saints who appear in calendars on more minor feast days. It is for this reason that a typology of medieval Slavic calendar traditions has not yet been developed.
The free-use database and search program at this site are intended to ameliorate this situation by providing a large corpus of medieval Slavic and Greek calendars of saints that can be searched according to specific attributes of the manuscripts themselves and the commemorations they contain. The goal is to provide scholars with a large but manageable corpus of data for comparative study of calendar traditions, determination of the relationships between and among calendars, and analysis of any individual calendar.