medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
1. On Thursday, September 7, 2006, at 6:23 pm, I wrote:
> Benevento soon claimed (in a Translation account, BHL 4140) to
> have the bodies of its other native sons, F. and D., as well.
The view that Benevento had the bodies of its Sts. Festus and
Desiderius antedates Sico's raid by at least a century, as it is
already in Bede's Martyrology. Here we are told that, after the
martyrdom of Januarius and his comapnions, people of Misenum retrieved
the body of St. Sos(s)ius and gave it honorable burial in their
basilica, that people of Pozzuoli retrieved the bodies of Sts.
Proculus, Eutyches, and Acutius and buried these by a basilica of St.
Stephen, and that Beneventans gathered up the bodies of F. and D.
This account, which recurs in Ado and in Usuard, assigns particular
martyr-cult locales to the other companions but not to F. and D., whose
precise grave sites will have been unknown to its creator and whose
very removal to Benevento could be fictional. Since F. and D.'s cult
is already attested to by the (pseudo-)Hieronymian Martyrology, the
probability is that they are genuine martyrs. Either by the early
Middle Ages their cult had ceased to be active or else it was located
at a place to which the creator of this account had no access. Just
possibly, Benevento during the early years of Lombard expansion was
that isolated from the East Roman enclave around Naples.
It seems more likely, though, that Benevento's veneration of F. and D.
postdates by several centuries the late sixth- or seventh-century
development of the the Januarius legend and derives instead from these
saints' mention in the historical martyrologies. Though its earliest
witness is of the late twelfth or early thirteenth century, the
Beneventan Translation of J. (BHL 4120), in which the remains of F. and
D. are taken from a spot described only as being where they had been
placed by a (legendary) senator Cyphius, seems to have been written not
terribly long after J.'s early ninth-century translation to Benevento
(its view of prince Sico is unusually favorable and there are no
references to later miracles). The parallel Translation of F. and D.
(BHL 4126), surely older than its first witness (early thirteenth-
century), narrates the pagan senator Cyphius' translation of these
relics from Pozzuoli to Benevento. Both, I suspect, were written in
the reign of Sico's son, prince Sicard (d. 839), whose interest in
endowing his capital with relics can been seen in his translations from
Amalfi of St. Trophimena and from Salerno of the recently arrived St.
Bartholomew the Apostle.
2. Since yesterday's treatment of F. and D. was so short on visuals (I
had been hoping to show both a better view of D. as he appears in the
Catacombe di San Gennaro at Naples and the untonsured F. in the remains
of the twelfth-century Januarian portrait cycle in the church of
Sant'Aniello at Quindici [AV]), herewith some views of the lovely
church at Noli (SV) in Liguria dedicated to another saint of 7.
September, the Corsican martyr Paragorius, and restored in the
nineteenth century by the Portuguese architect Alfredo d'Andrade:
Some exterior views:
http://www.archeoge.arti.beniculturali.it/archeologia/noli.htm
http://www.oltreilviaggio.it/europa/italia/liguria/noli07.htm
http://www.thais.it/architettura/romanica/schede/scm_00077.htm
A somewhat blurry view of the upper parts of the belltower and of the
nave, showing a deep narrow window, is here:
http://tinyurl.com/crrem
Note the _bacini_ (decorative dishes of Islamic manufacture) in the
roundels:
http://tinyurl.com/8q4gg
An interior view:
http://www.thais.it/architettura/romanica/schede/scm_00078.htm
Two views of the crypt:
http://www.sapere.it/mm/geografia/objects/10436366.jpg
http://tinyurl.com/9cd4w
Best again,
John Dillon
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