(31) This is confirmed by a fourteenth-century menaion (32) for May, where the service for the Repose of St Nicholas was written under the date 9 May (the day of the Transfer of the relics of St.
A great help in the creation of new services was a General Menaion, which was widely used at this time and provided common services to the saints according to their rank.
Besides writing criticism, journalism and other polemical texts, religio-philosophical treatises, and strongly moralizing fiction, in the last decades of his life Tolstoy wrote a number of adult textbooks he called "life-teachings." These booklets comprise a multi-volume corpus of texts and serve as the Tolstoyan, modern, secular alternative to analogous ecclesiastical writings, such as the composite Great
Menaion Reader (HeTbM-MMHeu).
In the introduction to the Festal Menaion, the editors assure the readers that "Mary's link with her Son, her place within the saving and redemptive mission of Christ, is never for one moment forgotten." (58) While Christ's paradigmatic work remains in the background, many of the hymns confidently attribute salvation to Mary alone with no explicit or even implicit mention of Christ.
The editors of the Festal Menaion stressed this point in explicating the meaning of the feast of Mary's Birth: "Mary is venerated because of the Child that she bore: Mother and Son are not to be separated, but Mariology is to be understood as an extension of Christology." (80) One needs only to examine the Apolytikion, or chief hymn from the feast to see this point poignantly illustrated:
On the one hand, certainly she would have been known to be a deaconess since that information was contained in the
menaion and synaxarion (171) accounts of her life (she must have been familiar to the monks for them to have commemorated her on the wall of the church, although she might have been included because a relative of the founder or other monk shared the same name).
Mother Mary and Archimandrite Kallistos Ware, The Festal
Menaion, St.
(2) For the hymns discussed in this article, I have used The Festal
Menaion (trans.
The multivolume
Menaion published by the Moscow Patriarchate in the twentieth century (Moscow, 1978-88) contains some of these locally composed services and hymns.