medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Today (20. June) is the feast day of:
1) Alban of England (d. ca. 304?). A. is the fairly legendary English protomartyr first known from continental references of the fifth century (Prosper of Aquitaine. Constantius of Lyon). The earliest British account of him to survive is that of Gildas in the sixth century; this was shown (by Richard Sharpe in 2001) to have been based on a brief, legendary Passio that neither dates A.'s martyrdom nor locates it in any named town. In it, A. is a pagan who during a persecution takes the place of a hunted Christian and is publicly executed on 21. June at a walled town; accompanying miracles cause the presiding official to halt the persecution and the admiring multitude to become Christians. An interpolation (from after 445/46) records a visit by St. Germanus of Auxerre to A.'s martyrial basilica.
Gildas identifies A. as a man of Verulamium (now St Albans); Bede says A. was martyred there. The Passio's topography corresponds reasonably well with that of late antique Verulamium and of the abbey dedicated to A. that arose outside it. Verulamium's Roman wall has now been dated to the later third century. Later versions of the Passio give A.'s _dies natalis_ as 22. June. This was his principal feast day medievally.
A.'s putative relics were enshrined at his abbey at St Albans from the late eighth century until its suppression in the sixteenth. In the later tenth century relics said to be his were deposited in Köln's church of St. Pantaleon, which has them still (less a bone transferred to St Albans in 2002) in the late twelfth-century reliquary shown here:
http://www.pantaleon-koeln.de/Galerie/Kirche/alban.JPG
http://www.pantaleon-koeln.de/Galerie/Kirche/alban1.JPG
http://www.pantaleon-koeln.de/Galerie/Kirche/alban2.JPG
http://www.pantaleon-koeln.de/Galerie/Kirche/alban3.JPG
http://www.pantaleon-koeln.de/Galerie/Kirche/alban4.JPG
A few views of St Albans Abbey:
http://www.pbase.com/ohsharonho2/image/24304225
http://www.newgreens.demon.co.uk/sta2.jpg
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ishida/154612997/
http://tinyurl.com/3bn7ka
The Abbey's "Virtual Visit":
http://www.thegrid.org.uk/learning/re/virtual/cathedral/
One of a fifteenth-century pair of doors made for the Abbey:
http://tinyurl.com/ysvpsp
2) Methodius of Olympia (d. early 4th cent.?). Apart from his surviving writings, we have little reliable information about the theologian M. Jerome says (_De viribus illustribus_, 83) that he was bishop of Olympus in Lycia (today's village of Cirali in Turkey's Antalya province), that he was later bishop of Tyre, and that he was martyred at Euboean Chalcis in a recent persecution. The information about M.'s having been bishop of Tyre is unlikely to be correct. That about his having been bishop of Lycia, though repeated by the ecclesiastical historian Socrates, could also be false. But it is widely accepted as factual. The _De sectis_ attributed to Leontius of Byzantium calls M. bishop of Patara, a designation subsequently adopted for him in Byzantine synaxaries.
M.'s writings, which are largely in dialogue form, place him in the later third century. Assuming that he was indeed a martyr (this has lately been questioned), he is thus likely to have perished either in the Great Persecution or in the brief later one under Licinius (ca. 320). Learned and cultured, M. was for a long time viewed primarily as an opponent of Origen. Lloyd Patterson's _Methodius of Olympus: Divine Sovereignty, Human Freedom, and the Life of Christ_ (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1997) offers other reasons for taking him seriously.
3) Adalbert of Magdeburg (d. 981). A. was a monk at St. Maximin at Trier who also served in the chanceries of the archbishop of Köln and of the emperor Otto I. In 961 he was made a missionary bishop to Russian Slavs but returned from that hostile environment rather quickly. After a few more years at court he was named abbot of Weissenburg in Alsace, where he wrote a continuation of the Chronicle of Regino of Prüm. In 968 A. was made archbishop of Magdeburg with the understanding that he would missionize among the Sorbs (which he did). He was buried in his cathedral at Magdeburg.
4) John of Matera (d. 1139). Today's less well known saint of the Regno, the founder of the Pulsanese Benedictine congregation, was born in what was then the southwestern Apulian town of Matera. His Vita is thought to have been the work of the third abbot of his congregation's mother house, Santa Maria di Pulsano on the Gargano peninsula; not altogether surprisingly, it presents him as a gifted, model leader of a reformed, quasi-eremitic monastic community that combined personal austerity with public service in the form of preaching and good works.
J. is said to have formed his vocation while still a youth and to have entered religion at a monastery (identified by modern scholars as Basilian) at Taranto, where he was put to work tending sheep at at an outlying locale. His experience there was not happy. Out of sympathy with the monks because of their fine dining and comforted by an inner Voice miraculously asserting that God was with him, he lit out on a passing boat for parts west. Perhaps too he was insufficiently bilingual, for the places he next went to, Calabria and Sicily, were recently conquered venues of Latin immigration and we are never told of any contact he may have had with people identified as Greeks.
For about a decade J., sustained at times by his inner Voice, moved around as a hermit and preacher in the deep south and in Campania, where enemies got him imprisoned for a crime of which he was innocent, thus paving the way for his Petrine release from prison, and where he later joined another latter-day apostle, St. William of Vercelli, in an eremitic community on a mountain near today's Bagnoli Irpino (AV). From there he moved back to Apulia, where he preached for a while at Bari and then went north to the sanctuary of St. Michael on the Gargano and in about 1129 founded his monastery at Pulsano.
During his later career J. acquired a reputation as a thaumaturge. His congregation, which spread quickly in the twelfth century both in the south and in Tuscany, initiated his cult shortly after his death. Though Alexander III's
confirmation in 1177 of the congregation and its possessions is silent about him, J. appears in martyrologies from the twelfth century onward as well as in various Offices.
An altar in Matera's cathedral, which has had J.'s remains since 1830, is dedicated
to him. An illustrated, Italian-language page on that late thirteenth-century building is here:
http://www.sassiweb.it/duomo/
Two multi-page sets of views of the monastery of Santa Maria di Pulsano:
http://www.mondimedievali.net/Edifici/Puglia/Foggia/Pulsano.htm
http://www.manfredoniaeventi.it/archeologia/pulsano/index.htm
5) Benigna of Wroc³aw (d. 1241?). B. is a very poorly attested Cistercian saint. Said to have been a nun at Wroc³aw (perhaps better known to some in its German name form Breslau), she is believed to have suffered martyrdom to protect her faith and her virginity during an invasion of people described as Tatars. The mining town of Svatá Dobrotivá (St. Benigna) in the Czech Republic is said to be named for her.
Best,
John Dillon
(John of Matera lightly revised from last year's post)
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