medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Herewith, lightly revised from 2010, a notice of another saint of 4. December:
Sualo (d. 794). We know about the Englishman S. (also known as Sola and as Solus) from his Vita (BHL 7926) by Ermanric of Ellwangen, written between 839 and 842. According to Ermanric, who later became bishop of Passau, S. followed Boniface to Germany, was ordained priest by him, and settled down as a solitary (no pun intended) in the diocese of Eichstätt in a place that became known as Cella Solonis ("Solo's Cell") and to which title was given him by none other than Charlemagne himself. Ermanric adds that Sts. Willibald and Wynnebald gave property to S. after Boniface's death and that after S.'s death all of his property was given by Charlemagne to the abbey of Fulda. The latter's necrology records S.'s passing on 3. December.
Notable among the miracles attributed to S. by Ermanric is a plainly allegorical one in which at his bidding an ass on which he had been riding attacked and killed a wolf that was threatening sheep at their graze in a pasture with no shepherds present.
Cella Solonis is now Solnhofen (Lkr. Weißenburg-Gunzenhausen) in Bavaria. Perhaps better known as the town that Archaeopteryx made famous, it preserves the remains of a ninth-century church (the so-called Solabasilika) built over four predecessors going back to middle of the seventh century (the third church is thought to have been S.'s oratory). A German-language introduction to the site is here:
http://www.solnhofen.de/index.php?id=0,50\
The German Wikipedia page on Solnhofen has more to say on it:
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solnhofen
along with this view:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/03/Sola-Basilika_Solnhofen.jpg
and this plan:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b1/Sola-Basilika_Solnhofen_Grabungsbefund.jpg
The Solabasilika contains a fifteenth-century tomb (found to be empty when it was opened in 1828):
http://tinyurl.com/olru33q
Remains of four earlier tombs have been found at the site; one of these may have been the one into which S.'s allegedly intact remains were deposited by Fulda's prior at Cella Solonis shortly before the writing of S.'s Vita.
S. as depicted in the later eleventh-century Pontifical of Gundekar II (Diözesanarchiv Eichstätt, Codex B 4):
http://tinyurl.com/o6nlf2b
4. December is S.'s day of commemoration in Roman Martyrology. In the diocese of Eichstätt and in the cathedral of Fulda he is celebrated liturgically on 5. December. The occurrence of his feast at this time of the year reminds one of the adage that, in the Northern Hemisphere at least, one Sualo doth not a summer make.
Best,
John Dillon
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