medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Today (30. June) is also the day of remembrance of:
Cesare Baronio (venerable; d. 1607). A modern saint-in-waiting,
today's holy person from the Regno was born in 1538 at Sora in today's
Frosinone Province of Lazio but at the time part of the mostly mainland
kingdom of Sicily's Terra di Lavoro Province. His family's surname was
Barone or Baroni; this he latinized as Baronius. 'Baronio' is an
Italian back-translation from the Latin. B. read law first at Naples
and then at Rome, where he became a disciple of St. Philip Neri and was
already a deacon when he received his law degree. Ordination to the
priesthood followed shortly afterward.
At Neri's Oratory B. began his monumental history of the Christian
church, the _Annales ecclesiastici_, which he published volume-by-
volume from 1588 onward. Whereas this work addressed contemporary
theological and political issues, in B.'s hands (there were
continuations by others) its temporal coverage of events ended in 1198,
thereby making Baronio a medievalist of sorts. A good example of B.'s
intellectual involvement with matters of medieval religious history
would be his upholding the position of the Roman church of his day
against that of his temporal sovereign, the king of Spain (also the
king of both Sicilies), on the matter of legatine rights in insular
Sicily. This stand led to his declaration, made on theological rather
than textual grounds and no longer widely credited, that Urban II's
bull of 1098 conferring such rights on Roger I was a forgery; it also
generated official odium in Spain and may well have cost B., who had
been a cardinal since 1596, election to the papacy in both conclaves of
1605.
Even before the appearance of the the first volume of the _Annales
Ecclesiastici_, B. had made a name for himself as the leading figure
in the revision of the Roman Martyrology (the context in which he
appears most frequently on this list), bearing primary responsibility
for its editions from 1583 through 1589 and leaving further annotations
that were incorporated in the Vatican edition of 1630. Clement VIII
made him Vatican librarian. He was proclaimed Venerable by Benedict
XIV in 1745.
Two versions of a portrait of B.:
http://www.oratoriosanfilippo.org/baronio.html
http://bpun.unine.ch/icono/JPG02/POET4.251.jpg
An autograph draft (ca. 1600) of part of the _Annales ecclesiastici_:
http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/vatican/images/arch12.jpg
B. twice declined nomination as a cathedral canon at his native Sora;
later, he also declined to be named bishop of that town. Herewith a
view of the facade and belltower of Sora's cathedral of Santa Maria
Assunta (now a co-cathedral of the diocese of Sora - Aquino -
Pontecorvo), a thirteenth-century structure modified at several times
from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth and rebuilt in a
medievalizing fashion after a fire in 1916:
http://www.cattedralesora.it/Esterrno001a.htm
An Italian-language account of the medieval phases of this church is
here:
http://www.cattedralesora.it/TrasfChiesaNS002.htm
Best,
John Dillon
**********************************************************************
To join the list, send the message: join medieval-religion YOUR NAME
to: [log in to unmask]
To send a message to the list, address it to:
[log in to unmask]
To leave the list, send the message: leave medieval-religion
to: [log in to unmask]
In order to report problems or to contact the list's owners, write to:
[log in to unmask]
For further information, visit our web site:
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/medieval-religion.html
|