Menologia

Menologia are liturgical texts in Byzantine and Eastern Orthodox Christian usage that list saints and feast days. The term comes from the Greek menologion, meaning a monthly record or list of commemorations. A menologion typically presents a calendar arranged by day or month, with notices or brief hagiographies of the saints whose feasts occur on those dates, and sometimes accompanying readings or liturgical instructions for those days.

Manuscript and early printed forms of menologia vary in scope. Some cover the entire liturgical year, while others focus on particular feasts or monastic calendars. They are often illustrated and used in churches, monasteries, and private devotion. The menologion is related to other Byzantine hagiographical and liturgical works; it is distinct from, but connected to, the synaxarion, which usually offers shorter notices, and from the menaion, which contains the fixed services for each month of the year.

Notable examples include the Menologion of Basil II, an illuminated manuscript commissioned around the turn of the first millennium for Emperor Basil II. It includes richly illustrated lives of the saints commemorated throughout the year and serves as a key source for the study of Byzantine hagiography and liturgical practice.

In contemporary scholarship, the term is primarily used to describe historical or scholarly discussions of Byzantine liturgy and hagiography. In ordinary church use, commemorations are typically found within the menaion and related texts rather than in separate modern editions of a menologion.