medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Yesterday (13. June) was the feast day of:
1) Felicula (??). Felicula is a poorly attested Roman martyr of the Via Ardeatina associated legendarily with St. Petronilla, a rather better attested martyr laid to rest in the same general area. Her Passio (BHL 2856) is part of the larger narration of the Passio of Sts. Nereus and Achilleus. It makes her Petronilla's foster-sister, arrested as a Christian, and has her spurn a high-ranking official (already rejected by P.) in order to preserve her virginity. In the Passio F., who of course also refuses to make pagan sacrifice, is then starved, undergoes torture, is executed by suffocation, and is buried at the seventh milestone from the city on the aforementioned Roman road.
2) Cetheus, also known as Peregrinus (d. ca. 600, supposedly). According to his Passio (BHL 1730 in different versions; the text in the _Acta Sanctorum_ is a composite), C. was bishop of Amiternum in what is now Abruzzo during the Lombard takeover. He defended a Lombard accused of having attempted to betray the town to the Romans, was judged complicitous by another Lombard who had seized power, and was executed by being drowned in the river Pescara. C.'s body, the stone with which he had been drowned still tied to his neck, washed up at what in the texts would appear to be Zadar, across the Adriatic in Croatia, but which is more likely to have been Aternum, the Roman-period predecessor of today's city of Pescara (PE) at the mouth of the homonymous river.
There the local bishop inferred from C.'s angelic countenance that he was a martyr, instituted a cult in his honor, and -- since C.'s real name was unknown --, called him Peregrinus ('Foreigner'). C. (in Italian, Cetteo) is Pescara's patron saint. That city's twentienth-century cathedral (consecrated in 1933) is dedicated to him and in 1977 relics of C. were translated here from Chieti (CH), the capital of the province to which the southern part of Pescara once belonged.
In or prior to 1263 the Passio's central story was attached to the cult of a St. Peregrinus said to have come from Syria. This P. was the dedicatee of an oratory at his reputed resting place on the grounds of the Benedictine abbey of Bominaco (formerly Momenaco) not far from L'Aquila (AQ) in the interior of Abruzzo and, perhaps not coincidentally for the present contents of the Passio, not far from where Roman-period Amiternum had been. In that year its abbot Theodinus rebuilt the oratory and presumably commissioned the first of the series of later thirteenth-century frescoes for which it is now famous; these include scenes from C.'s/P.'s Passio. The abbey itself was destroyed in the early fifteenth century. Its principal remains are the oratory of San Pellegrino and the church of Santa Maria Assunta. A brief sketch in English is here (the last two views are of the oratory):
http://abruzzo2000.com/abruzzo/laquila/bominaco.htm
The Abruzzo-Romanico site has a good page, with expandable views, on these two buildings:
http://tinyurl.com/l3lmr
An exterior view of the oratory of P.:
http://tinyurl.com/2mkugo
Four pages of expandable views of details from the oratory, mostly of the recent restored frescoes, are here:
http://tinyurl.com/hsvms
3) Anthony of Padua (d. 1231). A. belonged to a noble family of Lisbon. An Augustinian canon at that city's monastery of St. Vincent, he studied in Lisbon and in Coimbra and was ordained priest before transferring in about 1220 to the Franciscans. Upon entering his new order A. took the the saint's name by which he is known (previously he had been called Fernando or something similar). An exceptionally effective preacher, A. was first sent as a missionary to Morocco but soon returned to Europe on account of poor health. He preached against heresy in Milan and in southern France and in 1227 was appointed provincial for much of northern Italy, with his seat in Padua. Soon was lector for the Franciscans at Bologna as well.
Worn out by his efforts, A. resigned his offices in 1230. In 1231, shortly before his death at the age of thirty-six, he was preaching to great crowds at Padua. A.'s cult was immediate. He was canonized in 1232 and proclaimed a Doctor of the Church in 1946.
The polyglot home page of Padua's Basilica del Santo (i.e. of A.) is here (the virtual tour is informative but the illustrations are a bit on the small side):
http://www.basilicadelsanto.org/
Exterior views:
http://tinyurl.com/ysanaa
http://tinyurl.com/yobdbm
http://tinyurl.com/3x78o8
High altar (not awfully good views):
http://www.cbft.unipd.it/pdtour/pdpict/altare.jpg
http://tinyurl.com/ywhpy6
Best,
John Dillon
(Cetheus/Peregrinus lightly revised from last year's post)
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