Introduction Explore the collection

Introduction

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among calendars, the sheer number of calendars, and the fact that most medieval Slavic calendars of saints are unpublished have made it notoriously difficult to access and organize the data from such a large corpus, and to identify many of the saints who appear in calendars on more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 open-access 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.

For a detailed description of the project data, interface, and applications see About this site.

Explore the collection

There are five ways to interact with the collection:

List all saint, saint set, and event names

Search for a saint, saint set, or event by name

Read a single manuscript: Click on

link after a manuscript name

View the underlying XML for a single manuscript: Click on

link after a manuscript name

Compare two or more manuscripts: Select manuscript names and, optionally, dates or other other features and then click the Perform comparison button