medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Today (22. December) is the feast day of:
Sts. Chaeremon and many other martyrs, Ischyrion, and the Thirty Martyrs of Rome (a.k.a. Martyrs of the Via Labicana) as well as Bl. Jutta of Sponheim, all noticed here:
http://tinyurl.com/2cxqwl
It is also the feast day of:
Flavian of Rome (?). Recorded in none of the martyrologies, F. is a figure in the legendary Passio of St. Bibiana (BHL 1322-1323), where he appears as the husband of St. Dafrosa (4. January) and the father of Sts. Bibiana (2. December) and Demetria (21. June). In this tale he is a City Prefect of Rome who under Julian the Apostate (for western martyrs, a good indicator of fiction) publicly confesses his Christianity, is arrested, degraded, branded as a slave, and condemned to forced labor at a place north of the city where he soon dies of maltreatment.
Although Civitavecchia (RM) and Acquapendente (VT) have also claimed the honor, the commonly accepted place of F.'s passing is Montefiascone (VT) in northeastern Lazio, where his cult is attested from the ninth century onward. Montefiascone's extramural chiesa di San Flaviano, where F.'s presumed relics still repose, has been rebuilt and added to several times but in its present form is largely an earlier twelfth-century basilican church with radiating chapels, over which an upper church facing in the opposite direction was created in the fourteenth century (facade dated 1369 and surmounted by a sixteenth-century balcony). Herewith some views:
Exterior:
http://tinyurl.com/ysks5b
http://www.bucacce.it/img_bucacce/montefiascone1.jpg
http://tinyurl.com/2gh66e
Interior:
http://tinyurl.com/2f2hwp
http://www.montefiascone1.it/montefiascone103.htm
Detail (capital with acanthus leaves; the eleventh-century date given here is probably erroneous):
http://tinyurl.com/yo2dab
Frescoes (views not awfully good; pope variously identified as Urban IV or Urban V):
http://www.provincia.vt.it/ivbook/ivb_036.htm
http://www.romeartlover.it/Montefi6.jpg
Best,
John Dillon
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