medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Today (3. June) is also the feast day of:
Conus of Diano (d. early 13th cent.). Today's less well known saint from
the Regno is the Benedictine monk Conus, patron of Teggiano (SA) in the
Vallo di Diano. According to an undated but seemingly late medieval brief
Life of C. (BHL 1943; published in the _Acta Sanctorum_ "ex vetusta
membrana Dianensi"), C. was born to a noble family in the _terra Diani_,
that is, in the small city of Diano (Teggiano's medieval and modern name
prior to 1862) and its outlying possessions. A prenatal omen presaged his
sanctity. When C. was barely eight years old, by divine influence he began
to engage in forms of self-denial and self-mortification and unbeknownst to
his parents soon entered a nearby Benedictine abbey at Cadossa. Here he
eagerly accepted instruction in grammar and in logic and at the same time
overcame his abbot's doubts about his fitness for monastic life. One day
C. was observed by his parents (they are said to have been on the premises
in order to get wood) and chose to evade them by hiding in a burning oven;
when found by the abbot, who had gone searching for him, he emerged
completely unscathed. One (other) day, while the monks were dining, a
voice from above called to C., announcing that he would be called by God
that night. During that night he did indeed pass away. The following day
the monks buried him; later, the "Italicum regnum" having been convulsed by
war, the monks abandoned the abbey and fled in fear to safer places. Then
people of Padula (another town in the Vallo di Diano) arrived to sneak
away with C.'s body, but the people of Diano also went to Cadossa, drove
off their rivals, and upon entering the abbey were greeted by a great
fragrance emanating from C.'s tomb. When the tomb was opened, C.'s body
was discovered to be incorrupt and was brought back to Diano and buried in
the town's principal church in the year 1261.
Thus far the Life. Guesswork has given us a traditional birthdate for
Conus in the late twelfth century; the absence of adult miracles has caused
him to be represented as youthful. The story seems to have two parts: an
_exemplum virtutis_ for youth, especially young postulants, and an
aitiology of why C. is buried in Diano's Santa Maria Maggiore (the town's
principal church since the later thirteenth century) and not in a
possession of the great Carthusian abbey of San Lorenzo near Padula. The
latter, founded in 1306, took over the monastery at Cadossa at some point
in the fourteenth century and by the middle of the fifteenth century was
embroiled in a territorial dispute with neighboring Sassano, part of the
_terra Diani_ in its late medieval form (Diano itself plus the five
_casali_ represented in Diano's heraldic arms as rays streaming from a
single star). So the Life is probably from the first half of the fifteenth
century. It was polished up humanistically for a printed version in 1595
and has served as the base for various early modern and modern Lives, which
latter have added such entertaining miracles as C.'s preventing Santa Maria
Maggiore's belltower from collapsing in 1300 and his heroic defense of
Diano's castle when in 1497 king Federigo (the last Aragonese king of
mostly mainland Sicily, _vulgo_ "the kingdom of Naples") was besieging it
in order to secure the capitulation of its lord, Antonello Sanseverino, the
prince of Salerno and leader of a baronial revolt that probably had a lot
to do with Spain's decision to conquer the kingdom a few years later. (Not
that the Dianesi see it that way: Antonello Sanseverino is their local
hero.) C. has been credited with saving Diano/Teggiano several times
since. His cult was confirmed in 1871.
Although the most populous town in the Vallo di Diano today is Sala
Consilina, in the later Middle Ages that honor went to Diano, which was in
effect a capital of the feudal state controlled by the Sanseverino counts
of Marsico. A guided tour (in Italian) of medieval Diano/Teggiano is here:
http://www.prolocoteggiano.it/proloco/storia/
and its page on Santa Maria Maggiore is here:
http://www.prolocoteggiano.it/proloco/storia/14.htm
(note that this is now a cathedral: the diocese, now joined with that of
Policastro to the southwest, was created in 1850).
A slightly larger version of the last page's photograph of the pulpit
(dated 1271) by Melchiorre da Montalbano is here:
http://www.teggianoantiquaria.it/luogo/internochiesa.jpg
Some fragments of Diano's late medieval provincial splendor can be seen in
the Diocesan Museum:
http://www.museodiffusodelparco.it/musei/teggiano/teggiano%20foto%20main1.htm
Best,
John Dillon
(last year's post, lightly revised)
PS: "Conus" (Italian: "Cono") is an unusual name; C.'s hagiographers have
expended some perverse ingenuity in explaining it symbolically. But it's
not all that mysterious. As a latinization of "Cono", it could represent
either a diminutive of "Conrado" or a form of Greek "Conon" (demotic:
"Cono"). The area had a Greek-speaking population in the tenth and
eleventh centuries (and the neighboring Cilento sheltered a Greek
linguistic island that died out only in the early twentieth century), so
the latter origin is not out of the question: in the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries an inherited Greek name could still be part of the local
onomastic repertoire. We have only a handful of notarial documents from
Teggiano prior to the fourteenth century: "Cono" appears in none of them,
though it does from 1349 onward, probably reflecting the influence of the
saint's cult.
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