medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
At 07:29 PM 6/15/2004 -0700, Phyllis wrote:
>Today (16. June) is the feast day of:
>
>Ceccard of Luna (d. c. 860) Ceccard was bishop of Luna in Tuscany.
>Not a very popular bishop. In fact, when he rebuked the inhabitants
>of Massa-Carrara for immorality they got together and killed him.
The reason given above for Ceccard's (Latin: Ceccardus and, esp. in the
_Acta Sanctorum_, Cechardus) martyrdom goes back to the early
seventeenth-century hagiographer Filippo Ferrari, who claims to have
derived it from C.'s lections and office at Luni, as ancient and early
medieval Luna is now called. The Bollandists, unable to find Ferrari's
source, thought him more likely to be the bishop said to have been slain
in the destructive ninth-century raid by Norsemen, now dated to ca. 860,
when Luna had dwindled to being only a very small town. Most relatively
recently written accounts of Ceccardo that I've seen follow that line of
thought; cf., e.g., Casimiro Bonfigli, "Ceccardo, vescovo di Luni, santo,
martire," in the _Bibliotheca Sanctorum_, vol. 3 (1963), cols. 1061-63.
All of this, though, is highly speculative. Unless Ferrari's liturgical
texts from Luni have come to light and proven to be older, our earliest
source for C. is an inscription on the Renaissance altar in Carrara's
cathedral containing his remains; this calls him a bishop of Luni and
martyr and dates his death to the year 600. As we know that in 600 the
bishop of Luna was someone named Venantius, and as Ceccardus is a Lombard
name, unlikely in a bishop of a town that was still Byzantine (Luna stayed
East Roman until the early 640s), the date on the inscription is
erroneous. The altar may have replaced some earlier inscription, but we
have no proof of that. C. is the patron saint of Carrara, for whose marble
works (much older than the town itself) Luna was anciently the port. He is
said to have been canonized ca. 1630 by a decree of Urban VIII.
Some photographs of Carrara's cathedral of St. Andrew:
http://www.massacarrara-live.it/sitoininglese/carrarabuildingsduomo.php
http://www.rivieratoscana.com/it/ct/riviera/carrara.asp
http://giove.cnuce.cnr.it/servlets/DuomoEng?Finestra=semprechiusa
And some interior shots are here:
http://www.enel.it/eventi/lucearte/toscana/santandrea.asp
Best,
John Dillon
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