medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Today (14. December) is also the feast day of:
Agnellus of Naples (d. ca. 596). All our sources for the life and
doings of today's less well known saint of the Regno are late. At some
point between 767 and 780 bishop Stephen II of Naples erected at the
site of a former monastery of saint Agnellus on the city's acropolis
(late medieval and modern Caponapoli) the monastery dedicated to saint
Gaudiosus that was long a fixture in the city's ecclesiastical
landscape. Peter the Subdeacon's tenth-century _Libellus miraculorum
sancti Agnelli_*** tells us that Gaudiosus (the fifth-century G. of
Abitina; "saints of the day", 27. October) had founded a monastery here
of which Agnellus later became abbot; whether this locally residing
Agnellus was an actual historical person or instead an extrapolation
from the name of the defunct monastery where bishop Stephen founded his
is an open question. Gaudiosus appears in the tenth-century Marble
Calendar of Naples; Agnellus does not.
Despite Peter's _Libellus_, which is really about A.'s cures and is a
nice miracle collection giving us some flavor of early medieval city
life, it was not until several more centuries had passed before A.'s
cult really took off in Naples, though it is probable that the monastery
of saint Agnellus near Sorrento that features prominently in the ninth-
or tenth-century Life of saint Antoninus of Sorrento ("saints of the
day", 14. February) was at least by then thought to honor the Neapolitan
abbot of this name. In the later Middle Ages and into the early modern
period A. was one of Naples' more important civic saints; his name
survives in his church (built in 1517) and its adjoining little piazza
of Sant'Aniello a Caponapoli:
http://www.danpiz.net/napoli/monumenti/grecoromana/3.htm
Today's Sant'Agnello (NA), just east of Sorrento, is named after the
monastery whose medieval village it originally was. It has a very
pleasing church dedicated to A., but this is a baroque structure and as
such beyond the remit of this list.
Best,
John Dillon
*** Edited by Antonio Vuolo as _Una testimonianza agiografica
napoletana: il ’Libellus miraculorum s. Agnelli’ (sec. X)_ (Napoli:
Edizioni scientifiche italiane, 1987).
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