medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Dear Meg,
A good place to begin might be Giorgio Otranto's portion of Pierre
Bouet, Giorgio Otranto, André Vauchez, eds., _Culte et pèlerinages à
Saint Michel en Occident: les trois monts dédiés à l'archange_,
Collection de l'Ecole française de Rome, no. 316 (Rome: Ecole française
de Rome, 2003), which brings together lots of useful bibliography on the
Santuario di San Michele on the Gargano peninsula.
As Otranto knows (and as Vauchez probably does too), the subtitle of
this book is a misnomer: the number of mountains dedicated to the
archangel is rather more than three. M.'s cult appealed both to
Lombards and to Greeks; consequently there are Michaelsmounts all over
southern Italy (including some in Lombard/"Roman" border areas of
coastal Campania, e.g., Monte Sant'Angelo near Pozzuoli and Monte
Sant'Angelo in the Monti Lattari overlooking Castellammare di Stabia and
Sorrento). A number are named for small rupestrian shrines of eremitic
origin that are not known to have been sacred in antiquity. Nor are all
of these dedications that old: the military aspect of M.'s veneration
led to the erection of chapels to the archangel at newly created
garrison posts (some of which, for obvious reasons, are on very high
ground) in the Norman-Swabian period and perhaps even later. In such
cases, even if there's evidence for a pre-existing Italic or Roman
shrine at the same locality, claiming unbroken continuity as a worship
site could be something of a stretch.
A well known example of an elevated St. Michael dedication where the
elevation istelf is not named for the archangel is Sant'Angelo in
Formis, located near Capua on a spur of Monte Tifata. The Benedictine
foundation here replaced a disused temple of Diana (actual remains of
the latter exist, so in this instance we're not just dealing with a
hagiographic topos). A similar Diana/Michael transition is suspected
but not proven in the case of the church of Sant'Angelo at Vastogirardi
(IS) in Molise, where the underlying pre-Christian temple was excavated
in the early 1970s.
Best,
John Dillon
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