medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Today (30. April) is the feast day of:
1) Quirinus of Rome, venerated at Neuss (??). Q. is a martyr of the cemetery of Praetextatus on the Appian Way, where his probable epitaph by pope St. Damasus, making him out to have been a soldier, has been recovered in a very fragmentary state (ICVR, no. 13874). The very legendary Passio of pope St. Alexander, Eventius, and Theodulus (BHL 266; not earlier than the sixth century) makes him a military tribune and the father of St. Balbina, has him decapitated on 30. March, and records his burial in the cemetery of Praetextatus. His grave there in a large underground opening is recorded in the seventh-century pilgrim itineraries for Rome. Ado, Usuard, and the RM until the its latest revision (2001) listed Q. under the Passio's date of 30. March.
The new RM follows instead an entry in the (pseudo-)Hieronymian Martyrology listing for today a confessor Q. of the same cemetery. In many German dioceses this was already Q.'s feast day in the later Middle Ages. With the promulgation of the RM, the archdiocese of Köln redesignated today as the feast of Q.'s (supposed) translation to Neuss (see below) and kept it as Q.'s local feast day.
Around the year 1000 there was a church dedicated to a St. Q. at today's Neuss am Rhein in Nordrhein-Westfalen. Later medieval texts purvey a story that in 1050 pope St. Leo IX gave Q.'s remains to the then abbess of a Benedictine monastery for women at Neuss (supposedly founded in 825 and later known as the Qurinusstift, it transformed itself in the twelfth century into a house of noble canonesses). Henceforth Neuss had a military martyr to go with others in the region (e.g., Gereon at Köln, Cassius and Florentius at Bonn, Victor at Xanten). Q.'s cult spread widely in Germany and the Low Countries, where he was credited with protecting Neuss during the Burgundian siege of 1474/75 and where from the late fifteenth century through the seventeenth he was invoked as one of God's Four Holy Marshals.
A German-language page on Q.'s former Stiftskirche at Neuss, the Quirinus-Münster, is here (expandable views):
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quirinus-M%C3%BCnster
2) Pomponius (d. 6th cent.). Today's less well known saint of the Regno is listed for today in Naples' early
ninth-century Marble Calendar. According to the late ninth- and early tenth-century Neapolitan ecclesiastical chronicler John the Deacon, P. was the city's twenty-first bishop. He is credited with having built Naples' church of Santa Maria Maggiore, known since early modern times as the Pietrasanta. This occupies the site of an ancient temple, pieces of which may still be seen in its seventeenth-century rebuilding by Cosimo Fanzago. In Neapolitan legend, the ruined temple was by night the haunt of demons, the chief of whom (in one version) assumed the form
of a giant boar and greatly terrified nearby residents with its sinister grunting. The BVM, ever keen on noise abatement in urban areas, appeared to P. in a dream vision and instructed him to erect a church on the ruins. This he did, dedicating the building to her, and the demons troubled the area no more.
P.'s late antique church is gone, but its much later belltower (10th-12th century) survives and is the oldest such structure in the city. A distance view is here:
http://www.danpiz.net/napoli/monumenti/grecoromana/4.htm
The marbles and even the original brick in the base are spolia. But higher up, in the later portions, this is not so:
http://www.hotelneapolis.com/img/albergo/3.jpg
3) Erkenwald (d. 693). E. (Earconwald) was the the brother of St. Æthelburh of Barking abbey, which he founded for her. He also founded the abbey of Chertsey and was its abbot from ca. 664 until his death. In 675 or 676 St. Theodore of Canterbury made him bishop of London. Bede tells us that bits of wood from the litter in which E. was carried when ill worked miracles. E.'s feast on this day is attested in later Anglo-Saxon calendars. In 1148 he was translated to a shrine east of the high altar of St. Paul's; shortly thereafter, a collection of his miracles appeared. From then until the Reformation he was London's principal patron saint. In the Middle English alliterative poem _Saint Erkenwald_ (late fourteenth-century) E. obtains salvation for a just pagan judge.
Here's mediocre reproduction of Wenceslas Hollar's engraving of E.'s shrine in Old St. Paul's:
http://tinyurl.com/yugg85
There's a much crisper one on this page:
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/16531/16531-h/16531-h.htm
Some expandable views of Chertsey Abbey's early fourteenth-century breviary (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Lat. liturg. e. 6), with E.'s feasts in April and in May:
http://tinyurl.com/22mx2g
http://tinyurl.com/2hjcm4
4) Ventura of Spello (d. not long before 1265). V. is a poorly documented saint of today's Spello (PG) in Umbria. An Hospitaller of St. John of Jerusalem, he established at his native Spello a hospital with a church dedicated to the Holy Cross. He was buried in the church, which is now named for him. Miracles were reported at his tomb and in 1346 a miraculous apparition of a second cross over that on Spello's municipal fortress signalled the end of a local armed conflict. V.'s very plain tomb is still in the church of San Ventura; his remains underwent recognitions in 1625 and again in 1778.
Here's a view of a fresco in Spello's church of San Ventura:
http://tinyurl.com/2rda4k
Best,
John Dillon
(Pomponius lightly revised from last year's post)
Best,
John Dillon
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