medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Today (30. January) was once and may yet somewhere be the feast day of:
1) Hippolytus of Antioch (?). H.'s status in the Roman church has declined somewhat. Listed as a martyr in the fourth-century Syriac Martyrology, he occurs as well in the (pseudo-)Hieronymian Martyrology, where he is said to have been a bishop, and in the Martyrology of Florus of Lyon. Ado, followed by Usuard, confuses H. with the Hippolytus of Rome eulogized by pope St. Damasus I and has him "deceived a little" by the schism of Novatus but orthodox at the time of his martyrdom (which would then have been under Valerian?). In the version of the RM most closely preceding Vatican II he is styled _beatus_ rather than _sanctus_. The latest version (2001) of the RM appears to dispense with H. altogether.
Today (30. January) is certainly the feast day of:
2) Martina (?). M. is said to have been a virgin martyr of Rome. Our earliest notice of her comes from the _Liber Pontificalis_, which tells us that Honorius I (625-638) dedicated to this saint a church in the Roman Forum. A Roman festal listing from 740 shows that she was celebrated then. Hadrian I (772-795) is reported to have made offerings at her altar. In the ninth century there was an oratory dedicated to her at the tenth milestone on the Via Ostiensis.
M. has a legendary Passio (BHL 5587 and subsequent versions) which clearly had a Greek forerunner and whose content is so close to that of the Greek Passio of the Roman virgin martyr Tatiana (BHG 263; seventh- or early eighth-century) that some have called it an adaptation of the latter. In this confection, M. is a deaconess whose resistance to the attempts of emperor Alexander Severus (222-35) to get her to sacrifice to the idols leads on two occasions to the destruction of a pagan cult statue and to the death of pagan priests. She is subjected to a variety of tortures and is finally decapitated.
Ado's martyrology includes an abbreviated version of this story. In the later thirteenth-century a Reichenau-connected official of the Teutonic Knights, Hugo von Langenstein, used the Passio as his base for a ca. 30,000-line poem in German on M., the _Martina_.
In the eleventh century, remains thought to be those of M. were unearthed at her church in the Forum. In 1634 these were rediscovered in that building's ruinous crypt, whereupon Urban VIII commissioned the building there of a replacement church, today's Santi Luca e Martina. The latter's basic plan is that of a Greek cross; one wonders if its predecessor were not also so shaped. It was Urban too who fixed 30. January as M.'s feast day (in Ado and in Usuard she is a saint of 1. January).
and of:
3) Peregrinus of Triocala (?). P. (Italian: Pellegrino) is the patron saint and legendary protobishop of Caltabellotta (AG) in southwestern Sicily. The seventeenth-century hermitage there that bears P.'s name is built over the remains of a structure thought to be of the Norman period. Whether the latter had any connection with his cult is unknown.
P.'s accomplishments are preserved in an eighteenth-century manuscript whose Italian-language text appears to have been translated from a Latin original. According to this text, P. was called from Leukas in Greece by St. Peter to preach in Sicily. Not long after his arrival at Triocala (generally assumed to be the pre-Arab-period predecessor of Caltabellotta) P. rescued a local boy from the clutches of a dragon whose lair was in a cave above the town. Recognizing P.'s superiority, the dragon fled to its cave, roaring terribly. P. pursued the beast, fixed its jaws open with his staff, and caused it to disappear into an abyss opening within the cave itself. The grateful townspeople swiftly accepted Christianity from P., who himself became a hermit, settling in a cave above the one the dragon had used and dying peacefully at threescore years and ten.
None of the material evidence for P.'s cult would appear to antedate the sixteenth century. P., who has never graced the pages of the RM, is probably an offshoot of the Pereginus of relatively nearby Agrigento. The latter, supposedly martyred under Valerian (253-260), is attested by a somewhat inventive Latin Passio (BHL 4909) and by a mention in the medieval Greek Encomium of St. Marcian of Syracuse (BHG 1030).
In these views the Eremo di San Pellegrino is at center left; next to it is the former monastery named for him:
http://gwpageperso.free.fr/sicile/sicile7a.htm
http://www.caltabellotta.com/dispimage.asp?id=359
Here's a view of the Eremo's facade:
http://tinyurl.com/2p2ode
From within one may enter two grottoes once used as chapels. The upper one is now called the Grotta di San Pellegrino and the lower one is now called the Grotta del Dragone. The former is shown here:
http://www.caltabellottanet.it/images/eremogrosan1.JPG
A text of P.'s Vita is here:
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Parthenon/3137/index.html
That presentation omits all but one of the the manuscript's illustrations. Here's a reduced, black-and-white image of its picture of P. rescuing the boy from the dragon:
http://tinyurl.com/yu7dhf
4) Bathild (d. ca. 680). According to her late seventh-century Vita (BHL 905), the highly born Englishwoman B. (also Balthild, Bathildis, Balthildis, etc.) was as a girl sold into slavery at the Neustrian court, where, probably in 648 or 649, she married Clovis II. Humble and charitable as queen, she founded the monasteries of Chelles (where her Vita is thought to have been written) and Corbie. At Clovis' death she became regent for her eldest son, the future Clothar III. Perhaps when in about 669 he reached adulthood but possibly a few years later, B. retired to her convent at Chelles.
There, according to her Vita, she lived as a simple nun until her death. Dado of Rouen's contemporary Vita of St. Eligius (BHL 2474), which associates B. with a miracle having to do with his burial, has B. at Chelles still wearing royal insignia of gold. Stephen of Ripon's early eighth-century Vita of St. Wilfrid (BHL 8889) depicts B. as haughty and scheming during her regency. According to Stephen, she was involved in the assassination of several churchmen. B. was buried at Chelles, where in 833 she was accorded a formal elevatio.
In 1999 the gold seal matrix of an Englishwoman who is reasonably thought to have been B. was found in a field near Norwich. It is now in the Norwich Castle Museum. Here are two views:
http://www.museums.norfolk.gov.uk/asv/so_/mas_bsm_f.html
http://www.museums.norfolk.gov.uk/asv/so_/mas_bsm_b.html
Another view of the latter side:
http://tinyurl.com/22frhc
Here's a depiction (ca. 1470) of B. as founder of Corbie (Mâcon, Bibliothèque municipale, ms. 3, fol. 145; Jean de Vignay's French-language translation of the _Legenda aurea_ continued by Jean Golein):
http://tinyurl.com/2xxmh2
Best,
John Dillon
(Hippolytus of Antioch, Martina, and Peregrinus of Triocala lightly revised from last year's post)
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