medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Today (20. June) is also the feast day of:
John of Matera (d. 1139). Today's less well known saint of the Regno,
the founder of the Pulsanese Benedictine congregation, was born in what
was then the southwestern Apulian town of Matera (annexed in the
seventeenth century to Basilicata, it is now the capital of one of that
region's two provinces). His Vita is thought to have been the work of
the third abbot of his congregation's mother house, Santa Maria di
Pulsano on the Gargano peninsula; not altogether surprisingly, it
presents him as a gifted, model leader of a reformed, quasi-eremitic
monastic community that combined personal austerity with public service
in the form of preaching and good works. He is said to have formed his
vocation while still a youth and to have entered religion at a monastery
(identified by modern scholars as Basilian) at Taranto, where he was put
to work tending sheep at at an outlying locale. His experience here was
not happy; out of sympathy with the monks because of their fine dining an
d comforted by an inner Voice miraculously asserting that God was with
him, he lit out on a passing boat for parts west. Perhaps too he was
insufficiently bilingual, for the places he next went to, Calabria and
Sicily, were recently conquered venues of Latin immigration and we are
never told of any contact he may have had with people identified as Greeks.
For about a decade J., sustained at times by his inner Voice, moved
around as a hermit and preacher in the deep south and in Campania, where
enemies got him imprisoned for a crime of which he was innocent, thus
paving the way for his Petrine release from prison, and where he later
joined another latter-day apostle, St. William of Vercelli, in an
eremitic community on a mountain near today's Bagnoli Irpino (AV). From
here he moved back to Apulia, where he preached for a while at Bari and
then went north to the sanctuary of St. Michael on the Gargano and in
about 1129 founded his monastery at Pulsano. During his later career J.
also acquired a reputation as a thaumaturge. His congregation, which
spread quickly in the twelfth century both in the south and in Tuscany,
initiated his cult shortly after his death. Though Alexander III's
confirmation in 1177 of the congregation and its possessions is silent
about him, J. appears in martyrologies from the twelfth century on ward
as well as in various Offices. He is listed for today in the new RM and
is solemnly celebrated on this date in the archdiocese of Matera-Irsina.
An altar in Matera's cathedral, which has had J.'s remains since 1830,
is dedicated
to him. An illustrated, Italian-language page on that late
thirteenth-century building is here:
http://www.sassiweb.it/duomo/
Two multi-page sets of views of the monastery of Santa Maria di Pulsano
are here:
http://www.mondimedievali.net/Edifici/Puglia/Foggia/Pulsano.htm
http://www.manfredoniaeventi.it/archeologia/pulsano/index.htm
Best,
John Dillon
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