medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Today (25. February) is the feast day of:
1) Caesarius of Nazianzus (d. 369). A member of a very saintly family, C. studied at Alexandria and then returned home to practice medicine. He was so successful that he was called into government service and served at Constantinople as imperial physician under Constantius II and Julian. Members of his family persuaded him to resign his post under Julian but C. returned to service under Jovian and Valens. In 368, while serving as quaestor for Bithynia, he narrowly escaped death in an earthquake. Thus reminded that his life could be brief, C. left the imperial service and became a penitent. He had given his fortune to the poor when in the following year he died prematurely.
We know about C. from his funeral oration by his brother, St. Gregory of Nazianzus. He is today's saint of the day in the diocese of Locri-Gerace.
2) Walburga (d. 779). The sister of Sts. Willibald and Wunibald, W. left England for Germany to assist St. Boniface in his missions. She settled in at Tauberbischofsheim in the northeast of today's Baden-Württemberg and moved on to Heidenheim in Bavaria, where she was put in charge of the sisters at a double convent founded by Willibald. Later she ruled the entire establishment (both sexes).
W, is the patron saint of the abbey of Sankt Walburg in Eichstätt (Bayern). A handy, English-language introduction to the continued veneration of her remains within the diocese of Eichstätt (where her own monastery of Heidenheim was located) is here:
http://www.bistum-eichstaett.de/abtei-st-walburg/in_englisch.html
And here are some views of her church in the Belgian city of Oudenaarde:
http://www.trabel.com/oudenaarde/oudenaarde-walburga.htm
http://tinyurl.com/2co9ur
http://stijn.linearecta.be/images/Oudenaarde.jpg
http://www.beiaard.org/steden_ouden.html
http://tinyurl.com/2bz324
http://tinyurl.com/yw5jon
3) Gerland of Agrigento (d. 1100). G. was the first Latin bishop of Agrigento (prior to 1927, Girgenti) after the Norman-led reconquest of Sicily. Our only good source for him, Geoffrey Malaterra, Roger I's late eleventh-century biographer writing in Catania, calls G. "Gerlandum quendam, natione Allobrogum" ("a certain Gerland, of the Savoyard [or perh. "French"] nation"). Potted lives of the saints uncritically repeat a late medieval claim that he was a relative of the Hautevilles and often perpetuate an unproven early modern conjecture identifying him with his contemporary Gerland of Besançon, the author of a treatise on the computus. G. is today's saint of the day in the ecclesiastical region of Sicily.
Agrigento's cathedral is said to have been dedicated to G. since the fourteenth century. Built and rebuilt from the late eleventh century to the later fourteenth (with rededications in 1315 and 1354) and again in the later seventeenth century, and heavily redecorated within during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it has little medieval to show apart from a couple of windows surviving from the original structure and its unfinished fifteenth-century belltower. A front view is here:
http://sicilyweb.com/foto/198/198-02-57-25-9145.jpg
and a side view of the belltower is here:
http://fujiso3.hp.infoseek.co.jp/sc5hp/psc533.html
Detail thereof:
http://sicilyweb.com/foto/2/2-10-21-34-4027.jpg
Best,
John Dillon
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