“Painting Sanctified Time: Oxford’s Bildmenologion and the Temporality of Devotion”

A pivotal moment in the creation of Byzantine time came in the ninth century, when a widespread project established the liturgical calendar by means of manuscripts known as menologia and synaxaria. This paper considers one particular manuscript from the fourteenth-century known as the Bildmenologion, or Picture Menologion (Oxford MS gr. th. f.1), made for the aristocrat Demetrios Palaiologos (d. 1343?) and its structuring of time. An unusual manuscript, the pocket-sizedBildmenologion contains no narrative text and instead offers its handler a suite of 103 miniatures divided into 368 individual scenes of saints arranged according to the liturgical year. While textual and hagiographic analyses have dominated studies of menologia, the absence of this material in the Bildmenologion provides an opportunity to consider time from a purely visual perspective. How does the extensive use of imagery adhere to and transform the calendar genre? What are the temporal implications of allowing these figures with their own places in history to hold the same space at the same time? And, crucially, how does this accumulation of time affect the present? This paper grapples with these questions, using imagery to move beyond hagiographic narratives and create new relationships to time.