Menologion (MENOLOGI) - Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. VIII, p. 419

Machine translation of the 1948–1954 Italian original. The original text is authoritative.

MENOLOGIA. - A Byzantine liturgical book containing in full the lives of the saints, arranged according to days and months, beginning with 1 September, the Byzantine New Year, to be read at the vigils of their feasts.

By order of Emperor Basilio II (976–1025), Simeone Metafraste (or Logothetes) composed his celebrated M., both by collecting and reworking earlier sources and by recasting new lives (PG 114–16); such was his influence that, after him, no similar collection was made, and the others, even more extensive, of the preceding seventh and eighth centuries were abandoned or supplanted.

The term M. is sometimes applied to synaxaria, or collections of saints’ lives in abbreviated and compendious form; among these, numerous as they are, is the so-called M. of Emperor Basilio II of the Vatican Library, famous for the richness of its miniatures (ed. Pio Franchi de' Cavalieri, Torino 1907).

(photo Pont. Comm. arch. sacra)
MENSA - M. degli olii presso la tomba di S. Cornelio. Roma, cimitero di S. Calliato.

È un errore confondere con il M. le notizie agiografiche brevissime in forma di calendario o martirologio, o persino gli indici delle lezioni scritturali assegnate per ciascun giorno dell'Ufficio.

BIBL.: A. Ehrhard, Die Legendenammlung des Symeon Metaphrastes, in Festschrift des deutsch. Campo Santo in Rom, Friburgo 1896, pp. 46-82; A. Ehrhard, Les Ménologies grecs, in Analecta Bollandiana, 16 (1897), pp. 311-29; 17 (1898), pp. 448-52; H. Delchaye, Propylaeum ad Acta SS. Nov., Bruxelles 1902, pp. IV-VLVII Sgg.; H. Leclercq, Ménologie, in DACL, XI, coll. 419-30; H. Engberding, Menologium, in LThK, VII, col. 87; P. Oppenheim, De libris liturgicis, Torino-Roma 1940, p. 155.

Pietro Siffrin