medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Today (25. June) is the feast day of:
1) Febronia of Nisibis (d. ca. 304, supposedly). The virgin martyr F. is the subject of a legendary Passio in Syriac that is at least as old as the seventh century. This makes her a religious who refused to flee her monastery during the Great Persecution and who was arrested, tortured at great length, and finally decapitated at Nisibis (today's Nusaybin in southeastern Turkey's Mardin province). Nisibis was the seat of a Syrian Christian diocese (Nestorian from the later fifth century onward) for most of late antiquity and throughout the Middle Ages.
F.'s cult seems to have begun at Nisibis. Her Passio, formed on Greek models, was translated into Greek and spread throughout the Greek-speaking world, including parts of southern Italy and ultimately eastern Sicily, where her cult, attested at Messina from the twelfth century, has been important at Patti (ME) and at Palagonia (CT) since at least the fourteenth century. (F.'s rupestrian church at Palagonia goes back to the seventh century but we don't know when it was first dedicated to her.). Early medieval versions of F.'s Passio exist in many other languages, including Latin. The Celestinians carried her cult from southern Italy to France.
In 1997 the remains of a monastery, seemingly active from the fifth-/sixth-century to the very early fifteenth, were uncovered at Tuneinir in eastern Syria. Shown on this page
http://users.stlcc.edu/mfuller/Area10reliquary.html
is a tooth-shaped reliquary from this site thought to have held a relic of F. (one of whose teeth figures prominently in her Passio).
2) Maximus of Turin (d. 5th cent.). The first recorded bishop of Turin, M. is known principally for a collection of over a hundred mostly brief sermons, not all of which may really be his. The date of his death is uncertain: Gennadius of Marseille sets his _floruit_ at 423. Attempts to identify him with the M. who was at synods of Milan in 451 and Rome in 465 are not altogether convincing. M.'s legendary Vita (BHL 5858; not earlier than the twelfth century) attests to his cult but tells us nothing useful about him. M. is one of Turin's principal patron saints. Here's a view of his depiction in that city's oldest surviving collection of statutes, the fourteenth-century Codice della Catena:
http://tinyurl.com/2dgfo4
3) Prosper of Aquitaine (d. ca. 465). P. was a disciple of St. Augustine who wrote prolifically on behalf of his master's positions on grace and predestination. He was also a Christian poet and the first continuator of St. Jerome's _Chronicle_. We last hear of him from the year 463. A late ninth-century fresco in the lower church of San Clemente at Rome depicting a tonsured S. Prosperius is thought to be of this P.
4) Prosper of Reggio (d. 5th or 6th cent.). The undated P. figures in the traditional lists of the early bishops of Reggio in Emilia. He is the subject of two tenth-century sermons (BHL 1013. 1014) that focus on his pastoral virtues and that tell us that at the beginning of the eighth century bishop Thomas rebuilt the church of St. Apollinaris in which P. had been buried and rededicated that church to P. In the later tenth century P.'s relics were translated to the city's then cathedral. They are said to now repose under the main altar of Reggio's present early sixteenth-century cathedral (1514-23) dedicated to him.
5) Adalbert of Egmond (d. 8th cent.). According to his late tenth-century Vita by Rupert of Mettlach (BHL 33), A. was an Englishman who accompanied St. Willibrord to the Low Countries and who evangelized in Frisia. A deacon, he founded a church at Egmond in today's Noord-Holland. Both Rupert's Vita and a later one (BHL 34-36) composed at the abbey of Egmond -- which considers A. its founder -- attribute miracles to him. A.'s cult is attested in the dioceses of Utrecht and and of Gand/Ghent from the tenth century onward and was furthered by various counts of Holland.
Here's A. (in the illustration at lower right) as depicted in the later tenth-century illuminated pages added to the Egmond Gospels (Den Haag, KB, 76 F 1, fol. 215r):
http://www.keesn.nl/sources/en4_egm_pics.htm
An English-language account of this book is here:
http://www.thewords.com/gallery/gospel.htm
This page from the abbey has a views of a sixteenth-century depiction of A. and of the abbey chapel where his relics (now in Hallem/Haarlem) were once interred:
http://www.abdijvanegmond.nl/patroon.html
6) William of Montevergine (d. 1142). According to his late twelfth century Vita (BHL 8924) by John of Nusco, today's less well known saint of the Regno (also W. of Vercelli) was already a penitent at the age of fourteen, when, with iron bands constricting his body, he set off from his north Italian home for Compostela. Most of his life was spent in southern Italy. Alternately a hermit and a monastic founder, he was active chiefly in Irpinia (approximately today's Avellino province of Campania), where the abbey of Montevergine traces its origin to a community he directed on its mountain.
W. got down into Basilicata as well, where he founded a church at Monte Pierno near today's San Fele (PZ). This received a double monastery that became a dependency of the abbey of the Goleto (see next paragraph). Today it is the heart of the Sanctuary of the Blessed Virgin of Pierno, honoring a wooden statue of the BVM that W. is said to have miraculously found here. The church, rebuilt in the late twelfth century by master Sarolus of Muro Lucano (famous for his work on the cathedral of Rapolla) under the Goleto's then abbess Agnes, is one of Basilicata's few notable specimens of "romanesque" architecture.
Exterior views (expandable):
http://www.basilicata.cc/paesi_taddeo/t_676/p_monum/676_02.htm
Interior views (expandable):
http://www.basilicata.cc/paesi_taddeo/t_676/p_monum/676_02_2.htm
W. died at the double monastery of the Goleto (near Sant'Angelo dei Lombardi in southern Campania). Another of his foundations, this was essentially a house for women with a small attached community of males who were there to perform sacraments and to provide spiritual direction. Dedicated to the Holy Savior ("the Goleto" is a toponym), the monastery flourished until the middle of the fourteenth century and was closed in the early sixteenth (the last abbess died in 1515). The property reverted to Montevergine, which promptly reopened it as a small, male institution. Late in the same century the monastery began to grow again. Its early modern prosperity, nineteenth-century abandonment, and recent restoration are beyond the remit of this list.
Some views of the abbey of the Goleto (now called that of St. William) before and after restoration are here:
http://www.goleto.it/storia.htm
More are included in the virtual tour accessible here:
http://www.goleto.it/home.htm
(Click on "visita l'abbazia").
The Chapel of St. Luke was the upper part of the abbey's church in the later Middle Ages. Two interior views are here:
http://www.goleto.it/images/storia06.GIF
and here:
http://www.goleto.it/images/visita5_big.GIF
This church's lower part was originally the funerary chapel of the "romanesque" basilica of the Holy Savior. W. remained here until 1807, when he was removed to Montevergine. His relics now reside in the crypt of that abbey's church.
Best,
John Dillon
(William of Montevergine revised from earlier posts)
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