medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Yesterday (30. October) was also the feast day of:
1) Zenobius and Zenobia (d. 303, supposedly). Absent from the early martyrologies and with no surviving record of an early cult, Z. and Z. are the subjects of a legendary Passio that exists in premetaphrastic and metaphrastic versions (BHG 1884, 1885). This makes Zenobius a holy and theologically learned bishop of Aegea in Cilicia (today's Ayas in Turkey's Adana province) who performed numerous cures in Christ's name and who accepted no money for these services. Arrested and tried at the outset of the Diocletianic persecution, he was subjected to numerous ineffective tortures before finally being decapitated. Zenobius' sister Zenobia delivered herself voluntarily to the authorities; she shared both her brother's sufferings and his demise. Thus far their Passio.
Assuming that Z. and Z. are not just fictional _personae_ of an edifying tale, they could be local martyrs the details of whose sufferings failed, as was often the case, to outlast them and who later were provided with a suitable story drawing in part on the reported activity in Aegea of the likewise healing siblings Cosmas and Damian. Or one could be a local martyr and the other an opposite-sex counterpart created by their hagiographer for narrative interest and appeal to a broader audience. In Eastern-rite synaxaries and calendars Z. and Z. have appeared under today (and thus shortly before Cosmas and Damian, commemorated on 1. November in the Synaxary of Constantinople) since at least the tenth century. They entered the RM under cardinal Baronio and left it in the revision of 2001.
The martyrdom of Z. and Z. as depicted in the late tenth- or very early eleventh-century so-called Menologion of Basil II (Città del Vaticano, BAV, Vat. gr. 1613):
http://tinyurl.com/279bm3f
The martyrdom of Z. and Z. as depicted in the earlier fourteenth-century frescoes (betw. 1335 and 1350) in the narthex of the church of the Holy Ascension at the Visoki Dečani monastery near Peć in, depending on one's view of the matter, either the Republic of Kosovo or Serbia's province of Kosovo and Metohija:
http://tinyurl.com/2emem2p
Best,
John Dillon
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