medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Yesterday (8. August) was also the feast day of:
Famian, venerated at Gallese (d. 1150). F., whose name while he was
alive appears to have been Quardus or Wardo (forms of Gerhard), was
born in Köln in around 1190. At the age of twenty-two he began
pilgrimages that took him to Italy and to Spain; in the latter country
he took up eremitical residence at the Cistercian monastery abbey of
Oseira. He died on his way to Rome at today's Gallese (VT) and was
buried in a grotto below the town. Miracles soon followed, a cult
sprang up, and a chapel was erected over his gravesite.
F.'s Latin appellation "Famianus" is said to derive from the fame
attaching to his post-mortem miracles and to have been bestowed upon
him by Adrian IV in the course of a canonization whose actual
occurrence is uncertain.** That fame was enough to cause Gallese to
convert his chapel into the pilgrimage church shown here (1285;
fifteenth-century portico; later modifications):
Exterior views:
http://www.latuscia.com/pic_comuni/big_gallese4.jpg
http://www.giuliadigallese.com/inglese/images/gallese1.jpg
http://www.giuliadigallese.com/inglese/images/gallese2.jpg
http://www.latuscia.com/pic_comuni/big_gallese1.jpg
http://www.comune.gallese.vt.it/images/15.jpg
http://www.lagodibolsena.org/images/album/altri_paesi/gallese/Basil.S.Fa
miano-pan.jpg
TinyURL for this: http://tinyurl.com/dwvv7
Crypt (with F.'s eighteenth-century sarcophagus):
http://www.latuscia.com/pic_comuni/big_gallese2.jpg
The Jesuit rhetorician Famiano Strada (Rome, 1572 - ibid., 1649), well
known to students of early modern literature for his poem on the
nightingale and probably notorious to medievalists for his part in
Urban VIII's revision of the hymns of the Roman breviary, appears to
have been named for F.
Best,
John Dillon
** For the uncertainty, see Goffredo Mariani, s.v. "Famiano (Famian),
venerato a Gallese, santo," in _Bibliotheca Sanctorum_, vol. 5 [1964],
cols. 449-50. Neither the saint (under any form of his name) nor
Gallese occurs either in cardinal Boso's Life of Adrian IV or in the
indexes to Horace K. Mann, _Nicholas Breakspear (Hadrian IV), A.D. 1154-
59: The Only English Pope_ (St. Louis, MO: B. Herder; London: Kegan
Paul [etc.], 1914) and to Brenda Bolton and Anne J. Duggan, eds.,
_Adrian IV The English Pope (1154-59): Studies and Texts_ (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2003).
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