medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Today (11. November) is also the feast day of:
1) Menas of Egypt (d. c. 300). Despite his early veneration, nothing is known of the historical M. (also Mennas), a saint of Egypt. His Lives, which make him a soldier in the Roman army who was beheaded in the Great Persecution, are late and untrustworthy. From his association with camels in his iconography it has been inferred that he was a camel driver. M.'s shrine at his tomb at today's Mariut in lower Egypt was a major pilgrimage site in late antiquity and the nucleus of a city, Abu Mina, whose extensive remains were excavated in the last century.
An illustrated site on Abu Mina is here:
http://www.stmina-monastery.org/abu_mena.htm
A 6th-cent. pyxis in the British Museum showing scenes of M.'s
martyrdom is illustrated here:
http://www.usask.ca/antiquities/Collection/Pyxis.html
And a pilgrim flask that will have contained water from M.'s holy well
at Abu Mina is shown here:
http://www.ucc.ie/milmart/mns1l.jpg
An illustrated piece from Al-Ahram in 2002 on the history, archaeology, and imperiled present state of the complex at Abu Mina is here:
http://www.stmina-monastery.org/stmenas_ahramweekly594.pdf
The site is also dealt with in Terry Wilfong's chapter, "Christian Monasticism and Pilgrimage in Northern Egypt," in Roger Bagnall and Dominic Rathbone, eds., _Egypt from Alexander to the Early Christians: An Archaeological and Historical Guide_ (Los Angeles/London: Getty Publications/British Museum Press, 2004).
Some hagiographic texts on M. are available in English translation here:
http://www.ucc.ie/milmart/Menas.html
And an illustrated touristic piece on M.'s church in Cairo is here:
http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/churchmenas.htm
2) Martin of Tours (d. 397). According to his student and biographer Sulpicius Severus, M. was a Pannonian who entered the Roman army at the age of fifteen and who was discharged at the age of twenty, two years after his baptism. Still according to Sulpicius, whose Vita of M. (BHL 5610, 5610b) is greatly influenced by Athanasius' of St. Anthony, M. then visited Poitiers, whose St. Hilary ordained him exorcist and later founded a monastery headed by him. M. was elected bishop of Tours in 370/71. In that office he is said to have continued to practice an ascetic lifestyle, to have been a thaumaturge, and to have prescribed for his clergy a monastic education.
Early witnesses to M.'s cult include Sts. Paulinus of Nola, Gregory of Tours, and Venantius Fortunatus as well as the poet Paulinus of Petricordia, the author of a metrical Vita of M. (BHL 5617) in six books.
The cathedral of Mainz is dedicated to M. An illustrated, English-language account of the present structure, consecrated in 1036, is here:
http://tinyurl.com/34djwz
And two illustrated, German-language ones are here:
http://tinyurl.com/2k8c3c
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainzer_Dom
Best,
John Dillon
(Menas of Egypt lightly revised from an older post)
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