medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Today (14. December) is 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;
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 early ninth-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 St. Antoninus of Sorrento (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
(Last year's post, lightly revised)
*** 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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