I am pleased to announce the publication of another volume in our Middle Eastern Texts Initiative. On This Day (translated from the Armenian “Yaysmawurk‘”) is a compilation of stories about venerable Christians saints and martyrs from days gone by. The collection was part of the great and varied Armenian liturgical tradition from the turn of the first millennium. The first Yaysmawurk‘ was translated from an existing Greek liturgical collection (the Synaxarion, “where the lives are all collected”). Armenian Christians adopted traditional stories and added their own, ultimately creating multiple versions of the Synaxarion as the culmination of a long and steady development of what is today called the cult of the saints.The first volume of this project, spearheaded by Edward G. Matthews’ Jr., was published last year, containing the Synaxarion material for the month of January. This new volume adds February to the work. Can you guess what volume is in preparation to come next? Hint: when we are finished, there will be series of twelve Armenian-English editions—the first such editions ever published—one for each month of the year.These readings are ideal for personal devotional use or as a valuable resource for anyone interested in religious saints.On This Day is part of the Maxwell Institute’s Early Christian Texts series.See here for more information about the Synaxarion. 

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D. Morgan Davis has been affiliated with the Maxwell Institute’s Middle Eastern Texts Initiative since its launch in 1993 and became the project’s director in 2010. He holds a BA in Near Eastern Studies from Brigham Young University, an MA in history from the University of Texas at Austin, and a PhD (2005) in Arabic and Islamic studies from the University of Utah.