medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Today (23. January) is the feast day of:
1) Emerentiana (?). E. (whose name seems really to have been Emerentianes) is a martyr of the great cemetery on the Via Nomentana, where she is cited in the seventh-century pilgrim itineraries for Rome and where in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries fragments of her epitaph were found. A fifth-century addition to the pseudo-Ambrosian Passio of St. Agnes makes her A.'s foster sister, stoned to death by pagans at A.'s funeral and buried alongside her. According to a report in the Annals of Xanten, E.'s body was translated in 851 to Saxony. In 1123 an altar was dedicated to her at A.'s reputed place of execution in what now is Rome's Piazza Navona.
In 1615 remains said to be E.'s were intended to be enclosed along with those of the by then headless Agnes in a silver reliquary commissioned by Paul V and located in Rome's Sant'Agnese fuori le Mura. In 1621 this reliquary was placed under the same pope's newly commissioned altar for that church. When it was rediscovered early in the twentieth century it contained only the skeleton of one headless girl, generally assumed to be A.
In the (pseudo-)Hieronymian Martyrology E. appears under 16. September. Her feast today, two days after that of her supposed sister, is in the historical martyrologies from Bede onward, in the Gelasian Sacramentary, and in other early medieval liturgical sources. In the Mozarabic liturgy Agnes and E. are celebrated jointly on 20. January.
The British Museum's Royal Gold Cup (ca. 1370-1380) depicts E.'s stoning:
http://tinyurl.com/ywqzgm
The church of Santa Emerenziana in Tuenno (TN) in Trentino - Alto Adige's Val di Non is an early sixteenth-century expansion of an originally eleventh- or twelfth-century building. Herewith some views of its "gothic" exterior:
http://tinyurl.com/2e9qbl
http://www.flickr.com/photos/angelike/2171664394/
and two views of details, one interior and one exterior:
http://tinyurl.com/ytnt3u
Can anyone point to a reproduction of its fourteenth-century fresco of E. on her deathbed?
2) Amasius of Teano (d. ca. 356, supposedly). Today's less well known saint of the Regno is said in his two untrustworthy Vitae (BHL 354, 355) to have been a priest who fled Arian persecution in the East under Constans I and who arrived in Rome in the papacy of Julius I (337-52). Sent to preach at Sora, he was forced out by the Arian party there and proceeded to Teanum Sidicinum, today's Teano (CE) in Campania. There he was elected bishop and died peacefully. A. is the second of Teano's three legendary early bishops, following St. Paris and preceding St. Urban. He is also the patron saint of Piedimonte San Germano (FR) in southern Lazio.
In Teano's rebuilt cathedral of San Clemente the present parapet (a replacement for the original, badly damaged in the fire of 1608) of the ambo is composed of panels taken from a fourteenth-century funerary monument decorated with images of, among others, Paris, Amasius, and Urban. Two views of it are here:
http://www.prolocoteano.it/Monumenti/Ambone.htm
Best,
John Dillon
(last year's post revised)
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