Grant Supported Research

An Electronic Database and Typology of Medieval Slavic Eastern Orthodox Calendars of Sants" (ACLS Digital Innovation Fellowship, 2008-09)
Cynthia M. Vakareliyska (PI)
Holly Lakey (Graduate Assistant)

The project consists of the collection of data and initiation of an on-line collation of medieval Slavic calendars of saints, together with Byzantine Greek calendars and medieval Latin martyrologies.  The data currently in the collation was collected over three years, through first-hand examination and handcopying of portions of 122 mostly unpublished 11th- through 14th-cen. manuscripts kept in archives in Bulgaria, Russia, and England.  Included in  he project is the first-hand examination of various genres of medieval Slavic calendars of saints in archives in Sofia and Moscow.

An electronic collation and search program has been long needed by Slavic medievalists, Byzantinists, Church historians, and others who work with Eastern Orthodox saints and calendars, both because most medieval Slavic calendars of saints are unpublished, and because of the enormous substantive diversity from manuscript to manuscript in their saints' listings for any given celandar date except the high church holidays.  The reason for this lack of consistency is that the medieval Orthodox Church had no beatificaiton or canonization procedure.  Thus, the decision to recognize an individual as a saint, and to assign a calendar date to each recognized saint, varied wildly according to chronological era, country, and local tradition.  Moreover, manuscripts containing calendars travelled from country to country, so that more Russian calendars are actually Bulgarian or Serbian in origin, and vice versa, and the earliest Slavic calendars were also heavily influenced by archaic Greek calendars and Latin martyrologies.  Hence, in order to analyse any one Slavic calendar for its substantive value, and often to identify some of the saints it lists for specific dates, one needs to compare it to a large and unwieldly corpus of other calendar texts from Bulgarian, Serbian, East Slavic, Greek, Latin, and other traditions.  These obstacles seriously hinder recognition of any general patterns in correspondences and discrepancies within a sizable corpus of menologies.  Indeed, they probably are are the primary reason why - with the exception of Archbishop Sergij Spasskij's Complete Menology of the East (1001, 1002) and Loseva's 2001 book on Russian calendars alone - no general typology or collation of Slavic menology traditions has been undertaken in the literature before now.

Unfamiliar or ambigious sants' listings in each individual calendar will be identified through library research.  The calendar will then by XML-encoded and posted on-line together with an electronic search program developed for this project by Prof. David Birnbaum at the University of Pittsburgh.

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