medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Yesterday (10. June) was the feast day of:
1) Getulius (??). G. is a martyr of the Sabina (essentially today's Rieti province of eastern Lazio) buried at approximately the thirtieth milestone from Rome on the Via Salaria. Not having been a martyr of Rome or its environs, he is absent from the usual testimonia for genuine martyrs of the Eternal City. By the beginning of the eighth century a basilica at/over his grave had come into possession of the monastery of Farfa. By 1060 his remains had been translated to the abbey church at Farfa, where they are attested through the sixteenth century.
At some time from the sixth to the eighth century G. acquired a legendary Passio (BHL3524-25) which gives him companions (other saints from various places in south central Lazio), makes him the husband of St. Symphorosa of Tibur/Tivoli, has him martyred at approximately the thirtieth milestone on the Via Salaria, and has Symphorosa bury him on his Sabine property. G. entered the historical martyrologies with Ado, whose account of him (somewhat abbreviated by Usuard) is based on this Passio and retains the companions (Cerealis, Amantius, and Primitivus).
Symphorosa has her own Passio (BHL 7971), in which G. is buried on the Via Tiburtina along with S. and her seven martyred sons. Pope Steven III (752-57) had the putative relics of the entire family translated from Tivoli and interred in his newly built Roman church known today as Sant'Angelo in Pescheria.
By the tenth century yet another enterprising hagiographer plagiarized G.'s Passio, using it as the base for a Passio (BHL 9028) of St. Zoticus of Rome and companions (different except for Amantius, G.'s supposed brother). In the sixteenth century, if not earlier, it was thought on the basis of the similarity between these Passiones that Zoticus and Gaetulius were really one and the same person recorded under different names. The sarcophagus into which the relics said to be of the Symphorosan family were placed for safekeeping at Sant'Angelo in Pescheria identifies its contents as (in part): _corpora SS. Martyrum Simforosae, viri sui Zotici (Getulii) et Filiorum ejus_ ("the bodies of the holy martyrs Symphorosa, of her husband Zoticus (Getulius), and of her sons").
The frequently restored Sant'Angelo in Pescheria was built into the remains of Augustus' Porticus Octaviae (near the Tiber Island and the Theater of Marcellus), which latter, when the church was built, was serving as Rome's fish market. Herewith a few exterior views of the church (does anyone have views of the early medieval crypt or of the remains of early medieval painting in the left apse?):
http://www.romasegreta.it/s.angelo/porticodiottavia.htm
http://tinyurl.com/38kml8
The dome visible in the background of the first view belongs to Santa Maria in Campitelli.
G.'s cult traveled from Farfa down to Teramo in today's Abruzzo, where in the early middle ages a church was dedicated to him. This was rebuilt in earlier twelfth century only to fall victim to the burning of the city by the Norman count of Loritello in the 1150s. Here's a view of what survives:
http://tinyurl.com/2ny36f
2) Maximus of Aveia (d. 250 or 251, supposedly). Today's less well known saint of the Regno is the historic dedicatee of the cathedral of L'Aquila in today's Abruzzo. Last year's post on him is here:
http://tinyurl.com/yowj8u
3) Landericus of Paris (d. ca. 657). L. (in French, Landry) is the traditional twenty-eighth bishop of Paris and the traditional founder of an hospital whose present-day descendant, still on the Île de la Cité, is that city's Hotel-Dieu. He had a great reputation for charity. An originally medieval church dedicated to L., also on the Île de la Cité, was demolished in 1829. At some point L.'s remains were removed to Paris' church of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, where they were venerated from 1171 to 1793.
4) Oliva of Palermo (??). O. has a cult with pictorial remains at Palermo and at Alcamo that may be as old as the thirteenth century and with church dedications to her across northern Sicily of which the earliest documented is one in Palermo in 1310. She has a legendary Passio (BHL 6329), preserved in a fifteenth-century witness to the originally twelfth-century Gallo-Sicilian lectionary. This makes her a Sicilian girl of noble birth who was exiled to Tunis, where she cured two blind people, was exposed to beasts in a wilderness, converted and baptized some hunters who came upon her, was arrested by the local ruler, underwent hideous tortures without injury, and finally was decapitated. Some Christians stole her body, returned it to Sicily, and had it buried in or near Palermo.
A version of that story in which O.'s relics were said to be still in Tunis was current in 1402 when king Martin I asked the caliph of Tunis for their return (another version, from 1470, has O. buried under Tunis' Mosque of the Olive).
Here are a couple of views of O.'s earliest known representation, an icon once in Palermo's Chiesa della Martorana and now in its Diocesan Museum:
http://tinyurl.com/29ky99
http://tinyurl.com/yqqfqk
In 1981 O. was removed from the general calendar of the ecclesiastical region of Sicily. An optional Memorial is authorized for the city of Palermo. You can read her Office in Italian here:
http://tinyurl.com/2pphgt
Best,
John Dillon
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