medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Today (22. April) is the feast day of:
1) Soter, pope (d. 174?). According to the _Liber Pontificalis_, today's less well known saint of the Regno was born into a family of Greek origin at today's Fondi (LT) in southern Lazio. As bishop of Rome he succeeded yesterday's St. Anicetus. He is credited with instituting Easter as an annual feast in the Eternal City. St. Dionysius of Corinth in his letter of thanks to the church of Rome expressly recalls the holy bishop S.'s expansion of traditional Roman organized charity to the poor and needy of other churches. Later tradition regarded S. as a martyr.
2) Leonides of Alexandria (d. 201 or 202). L., a wealthy and pious family man of considerable standing in his community, was one of the many Egyptian Christians martyred under Septimius Severus. We know about him because Eusebius opens the sixth book of his _Historia Ecclesiastica_ with a detailed discussion of L.'s eldest son (of seven), the theologian Origen, whom E. says L. carefully educated in Holy Writ. Baronio's choice of today for L.'s commemoration in the RM reflects Greek celebration of the martyr Leonidas of Corinth on this day.
3) Caius, pope (d. 296). C. (also Gaius) is said to have come from Salona in Dalmatia. He became pope in 283. He was buried in the cemetery of Callistus in the large crypt (near the Crypt of the Popes) now named for him. Legendarily, C. is said to have been related to the emperor Diocletian and to have established on the site of his own house the church of his very legendary niece, the martyred St. Susanna (this church seems actually to have begun as a _titulus_ named after some C. and to have received its dedication to S. only in the year 590). Under the presbytery of today's much rebuilt Santa Susanna one may see remains of the paleochristian church. A sarcophagus discovered has been found to contain fragments of painted plaster, one of which is shown here:
http://tinyurl.com/23y7uy
The female saints to either side of the BVM are variously identified.
An English-language description of C.'s crypt in the cemetery of Callistus is here:
http://www.catacombe.roma.it/en/sangaio.html
In 1631 C.'s relics were translated to Santa Susanna.
4) Agapitus I, pope (d. 536). The son of a Roman priest, A. was archdeacon of Rome before being elected pope in early June of 535. In February of the following year king Theodahad sent him on a diplomatic mission to the emperor Justinian in Constantinople. The aged A. spent the rest of his brief pontificate in the Roman capital. Though he failed to dissuade Justinian from his plan of overthrowing the Gothic kingdom, he did convince him that his patriarch of Constantinople, Anthimus, was really a monophysite. J. removed Anthimus and replaced him with a successor whom A. then consecrated. J. also tendered to A., who approved it, a written statement of his own faith.
A. died on this day, still in Constantinople. Later in the same year his body was brought back to Rome and interred in St. Peter's. Pope St. Gregory I's devotion to A.'s memory established this pope as a saint of the Roman church.
5) Opportuna (d. ca. 770). O. (Opportune) was a sister of bishop St. Chrodegang (Godegrand) of Séez and abbess of the nearby monastery of Almenèches in Lower Normandy. Her late ninth-century Vita et Miracula by bishop Adalhelm of Séez (BHL 6339) notes her severely ascetic lifestyle, her mildness in reproving others, her deep sorrow at her brother's murder, and some of her many miracles (for which O. has obtained the sobriquet "wonder-worker of Normandy"). The same author's _Liber miraculorum_ of O. (BHL 6340) informs us that her cult had spread to Paris, where at the time of his writing a church was already dedicated to her. This extract from an edition of 1864 of Butler's _Lives of the Saints_ will give an idea of the later spread of O.'s cult and of the distribution of her relics:
http://www.ewtn.com/library/MARY/OPPORTUN.htm
The abbey at Almenèches (Orne) was destroyed by raiders in the tenth century and refounded in 1066. There were further destructions in the twelfth and fourteenth centuries. The present église (abbatiale) Ste-Opportune has an earlier sixteenth-century "gothic" transept and nave and a seventeenth-century choir. There's a view here:
http://www.paysdemortree.fr/article.php4?id_article=25
At Paris, O.'s cult was centered on the later Carolingian church and eleventh(?)-/twelfth-century monastery named for her along the Rive Droite at what is now Place Place Sainte-Opportune, home of a recently reconstructed Métro entrance (to the Châtelet station) designed by the early twentieth-century architect Hector Guimard. See (views expandable):
http://tinyurl.com/25cafx
6) Meingoz of Weingarten (Bl.; d. ca. 1200). M. (Megingoz, Megingosus) was abbot of the Benedictine abbey of Weingarten in southern Swabia from ca. 1188 until his death. He expanded the abbey church and other buildings and enriched his house with many new possessions. Some of the wealth so obtained was put to use in the abbey's scriptorium. Roughly contemporary products of the latter include the illustrated _Welfenchronik_ (late twelfth-century; Fulda, Landesbibliothek, Ms. D. 11) and the sumptuous Berthold Sacramentary (ca. 1215; New York, Morgan Library, Ms. M. 710).
A view of the _Welfenchronik_'s portrait of Frederick Barbarossa between his sons Henry VI and Frederick of Swabia:
http://tinyurl.com/2zjkhx
A nicely expandable view of the binding of the Berthold Sacramentary:
http://tinyurl.com/2yodkg
A couple of (deliberately) not awfully clear views of pages from a recent facsimile of the Berthold Sacramentary:
http://tinyurl.com/2jaas7
http://tinyurl.com/32m449
Reproduced here is a sketch of the abbey as it appeared in the early sixteenth century:
http://tinyurl.com/393bzw
Best,
John Dillon
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