medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Absent from the early martyrologies and with no surviving record of their having enjoyed an early cult, Zenobius and Zenobia (d. 303 or 304, supposedly) 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 Aegae 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 Zenobius and Zenobia are not just fictional _personae_ of an edifying tale, they could be local martyrs the details of whose sufferings failed to outlast them --as was often the case -- and who later were provided with a suitable story drawing in part on the reported activity in Aegae of the likewise healing siblings Cosmas and Damian and/or on Eusebius of Caesarea's description of the the Antiochian martyr Zenobius of Sidon as "the best of physicians" (_Hist. eccl._ 8. 13. 4). Or one of this pair 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 Byzantine-rite synaxaries and calendars Zenobius and Zenobia have appeared either under today or under tomorrow (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 Roman Martyrology under Bl. Cesare Baronio in the late sixteenth century and left it in the revision of 2001.
Some period-pertinent images of the martyrdom of Zenobius and Zenobia:
a) as depicted in the late tenth- or very early eleventh-century so-called Menologion of Basil II (Città del Vaticano, BAV, Vat. gr. 1613, p. 150; reduced, brown-tone image):
http://tinyurl.com/279bm3f
b) as depicted (lower register in panel at lower left) in an earlier fourteenth-century pictorial menologion from Thessaloniki (betw. 1322 and 1340; Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Gr. th. f. 1, fol. 15r):
http://image.ox.ac.uk/images/bodleian/msgrthf1/15r.jpg
c) 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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