Cynthia Vakareliyska, University of Oregon (vakarel@oregon.uoregon.edu)
David J. Birnbaum, University of Pittsburgh (djbpitt+@pitt.edu)
Kevork Horissian, University of Oregon
Heather Pankl, University of Oregon
Amber Van Cleave, University of Oregon
Medieval Slavic menologies are extremely diverse in their listings of saints, and in their textual formulae, making it difficult to analyze individual manuscripts. No general typology of medieval Slavic menologies has yet been established, because the data has been simply too vast and unmanageable to organize: not only is there an enormous number of unpublished manuscripts available, but development of a typology requires comparison and analysis of the entries in each manuscript for each of the 366 days of the year (including leap year). Now that computer tools are available for processing and collating medieval Slavic texts, however, it is possible to set up a computer program for automatic classification and on-screen comparison of menology texts according to their listings of individual saints, and their textual formulae (i.e., the exact wording of the descriptions in the listings). The program will permit searches according to a wide variety of criteria, including searches by saint's name, calendar date, chronological period, country of origin, and precise textual formula. At this stage, the project is limited to saints' listings and does not include lections and other liturgical instructions.
The corpus consists of the listings of saints from over 125 mostly unpublished medieval Serbian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Bosnian, and Russian menologies from archives in Russia, Bulgaria and England, and from the microfilm collection of the Hilandar Center for Medieval Slavic Manuscripts at The Ohio State University.
The results of the computer analysis of the text corpus will form the basis for a general typology of medieval Slavic menologies in monograph form. Once this general study is completed, both the corpus of menology texts and the computer search program will be put on the Internet, so that scholars worldwide will have free access to the collation for comparative study of individual manuscripts. In many cases this should avoid the expense of travel abroad to archives and reduplication of efforts in gathering the unpublished manuscript texts that already appear in the computer corpus. Once on the Internet, the corpus can be refined and expanded as other scholars contribute additional data and corrections to it; contributors will be credited as co-editors. It is hoped that eventually the scope of the corpus will be expanded beyond Slavic to include menologies from the Byzantine, Roman, Coptic, Armenian, Georgian, and other traditions.
In progress.
In progress.