medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Dear all,
I'm travelling for a few days, during which time my access to e-mail will be aleatory and brief. So here's tomorrow's Saints of the Day. The one for 9. November follows in separate post.
--JD
Tomorrow (8. November) is the feast day of:
1) The Four Crowned Martyrs (?). This is a group of martyrs about whom nothing is known. Their cult is ancient but all accounts of them are plainly legendary. Their church on the Caelian in Rome is built over the remains of a basilica of fourth or fifth century. The latter was presumably the _Titulus Aemilianae_ known from this vicinity from at least the year 499; excavations in its apse in 1882 yielded two fragments of an inscription in Philocalian letters (used in the fourth century under pope St. Damasus) referring to the suffering of martyrdom by a person or persons whose identity has not been preserved. Reference to the church as the _Titulus sanctorum quattuor coronatum_ is first attested from 595. It was rebuilt in the ninth century, was badly damaged in the eleventh during Guiscard's sack of Rome, was constructed anew in twelfth, and received significant modifications in the thirteenth and the fifteenth.
Various accounts of the present church and monastery are here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santi_Quattro_Coronati
http://www.santiquattrocoronati.org/index_enn.htm
http://www.romasegreta.it/celio/ss.quattrocoronati.htm
http://tinyurl.com/3dx28v
Views (cosmatesque floor; cloister; chapel of San Silvestro):
http://www.giovannirinaldi.it/page/rome/santiquattro/
2) John Duns Scotus, O. F. M. (Bl.; d. 1308). The theologian later known as the Subtle Doctor was ordained priest at Northampton in 1291. Trained at Oxford, he lectured at Paris and, from 1307, at Köln. His cult was confirmed in 1993. He reposes in Köln's thirteenth-century Minoritenkirche Mariae Empfängnis (i.e., Franciscan Church of the Immaculate Conception), formerly a church for foreign teachers and students. A couple of views of this structure:
http://www.andreaonline.de/koelle/cologne/minoritenkirche.jpg
http://www.orgelsite.nl/kerken44/keulen95Y.jpg
And here's a link to his entry in the _Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy_:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/duns-scotus/
3) All the saints of the diocese of Bologna (various dates). Okay, so this is not a medieval feast (it was introduced into the Bolognese diocesan calendar in 1964). But it does provide an opportunity for a few words about Bologna's cathedral of San Pietro. Now a seventeenth-century building with a late sixteenth-century crypt and an eighteenth-century facade, it had late antique, tenth-, and twelfth-century predecessors. Of these, the last at least was very richly decorated and featured an ornamental porch added in 1220. The cathedral is flanked by an early thirteenth-century rectangular belltower built around and over an originally tenth-century circular predecessor. Here's a view:
http://www.bologna.chiesacattolica.it/cattedrale/immagini/212.jpg
And here are two formerly stylophore lions from the aforementioned porch, now doing duty as bearers of holy water fonts:
http://tinyurl.com/ygnt38
From 13. December 2003 through 12. April 2004 Bologna's Museo Civico Medievale mounted an exhibition focusing on sculpture surviving both from the cathedral that burned in 1141 and from its replacement reconsecrated in 1184. Entitled "La cattedrale scolpita. Il romanico in San Pietro a Bologna", this was the subject of an extensive catalogue of the same name edited by Massimo Medica and Silvia Battistini and published in Ferrara by Edisai in 2003. Here are two visuals from announcements of the exhibition:
http://tinyurl.com/yneuxc
http://tinyurl.com/yht5sw
Some of the most striking pieces are carved stones that were re-used in the interior construction of the present belltower, where they were discovered during restoration work in 1999. But the exhibition included other treasures, such as the two wooden statues (of the BVM and of St. John) that flank the cathedral's wooden crucifix shown here:
http://tinyurl.com/yexh97
In the exhibition these figures had a somewhat different appearance:
http://tinyurl.com/yklbsv
Best,
John Dillon
(last year's posts lightly revised)
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