medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
On 7. May 351, as reported in a letter to the emperor Constantius II usually attributed to St. Cyril of Jerusalem, the person to whom it was regularly ascribed in late antiquity, a luminous image of the Holy Cross appeared over Mt. Golgotha, reaching as far as the Mount of Olives and seen not by a few but rather by the whole city. According to Cyril (or, if one is so inclined, to pseudo-Cyril), the image was brighter than the sun and lasted for several hours. The fifth-century ecclesiastical historians Socrates and Sozomen add that the apparition led many to convert to Christianity. This holy event is celebrated on 7. May in the originally tenth-century Synaxary of Constantinople, in other medieval Greek liturgical calendars, and in the modern Greek Orthodox church.
The Appearance of the Holy Cross over Jerusalem as depicted (at upper right in the panel at lower right) in an earlier fourteenth-century pictorial menologion from
Thessaloniki (betw. 1322 and 1340; Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Gr. th. f. 1, fol. 38v):
http://image.ox.ac.uk/images/bodleian/msgrthf1/38v.jpg
Best,
John Dillon
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