medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture

Today (4. January) is the feast day of:

1)   Pharaildis (?).  Also known as Pharahildis, Pharailde, Veerhilde, Veerle, etc., P. is the patron saint of G(h)ent.  She has a brief prosimetric Vita (BHL 6791), said to be of the twelfth century, that makes her the daughter of a king Theodoric who ruled in the border area of Lotharingia and Gaul.  Through her prayers she obtained the grace of preserving her virginity on her wedding night.  Thereafter P. went nightly to a monastery.  Her husband, falsely suspecting her of adultery, beat her daily (except in the year during which P. helped him recover from a nearly fatal hunting accident).  After many years of this he did die and P. was free to live as a pious widow until she was nearly ninety, engaging in acts of mercy and performing miracles.

This Vita (a.k.a. P.'s Vita prima) details one miracle.  P. found some wild geese in a field and herded them into a pen for the night as though they were domestic animals.  One was stolen by a servant, cooked, and partially consumed.  P. reconstituted it and brought back to life.  As G(h)ent's Latin name-forms 'Gandum' (whence French 'Gand')  and 'Gandavum' were held to derive from a word for goose (cp. English 'gander' or German 'Gans'; modern scholarship favors a derivation from a Celtic word for confluence), a patronal allegory would seem to be operative here.  Medieval Ghenters thought that P.'s remains had been in their city if not always then since at least 752, when, it was later recorded, they had been brought to that city's abbey of St. Bavo (Sint Baaf).  P.'s  Vita secunda, of the thirteenth century, is even more legendary, adding miracles and through a fabricated genealogy connecting her with other female patron saints of the region.

In 939 the count of Flanders obtained from the monks of St. Bavo some relics of P. for the chapel of his castle at G(h)ent.  In the late twelfth-century the castle (het Gravensteen) was rebuilt and in the following century a collegiate church serving the castle and dedicated to P. was built in the immediate vicinity.  It became a parish church in 1289, maintained a school for choristers, and was deconsecrated and structurally altered in the 1580s when G(h)ent was officially Calvinist.  There's a description, with two views, of this former Sint-Veerlekerk, now the privately owned dwelling at Sint-Veerleplein, nr. 2, here (scroll down to "15 april 2005"):
http://tijlv.studentenweb.org/mt/archives/2005/04/
Here's a view of the rear of that building.  The stepped gable is said to be a remnant of the reworked church:
http://tinyurl.com/y333xa
Reliefs from the church, now in G(h)ent's Sint-Niklaaskerk, are shown in the view at lower right here (text in Flemish):
http://www.stniklaas.com/NEDERLANDS/Verbouwing.htm
and in the upper right here (text in English):
http://www.stniklaas.com/ENGELS/Verbouwing.htm
The first two coins whose designs are reproduced here are church pennies from the Sint-Veerlekerk.  The first is from the early fifteenth century and the second from 1585, perhaps the last year of the church's existence as a place of worship:
http://tinyurl.com/yyvpm4

P. was widely venerated in late medieval and early modern Flanders.  At Bruay-sur-l'Escaut (Nord), France, where she is said to have caused a spring to appear miraculously, the modern church of Sainte-Pharaïlde preserves a twelfth-century cenotaphic representation of her discovered in the early 1890s when its predecessor was being demolished:
http://www.paroissesaintjacques.fr/stephara/cenotaphe.jpg
as well as this fifteenth-century reliquary containing what are said to be relics of P.:
http://www.paroissesaintjacques.fr/stephara/reliquaire.jpg
The village of Oostkerke in Diksmuide (West-Vlaanderen), Belgium, was destroyed in World War I.  Photographs of its chiefly fifteenth-century Sint-Pharaïldiskerk or Sint-Veerlekerk taken during the war may be seen here (note the progressive deterioration of the belltower):
http://tinyurl.com/3dmtm4

As a supposed saint of the imperial family, P. is represented by a mid-sixteenth-century statue in the Hofkirche in Innsbruck.  Here's a view:
http://tinyurl.com/ynbmvs
This lacks the goose (too locally specific?) but has two other recurring elements of P.'s iconography: a house in which people are sheltering and loaves of bread that have been turned to stone.  In the miracle account BHL 6794 the loaves are said to have belonged a woman who falsely claimed not to have any bread to share; their metamorphosis was her punishment.  This is a hagiographic topos that also occurs in Leontius' Bios of St. Gregory of Agrigento, a Greek-language text not known to have been read at G(h)ent.  Other instances? 
For those unacquainted with the Innsbrucker Hofkirche, here's an illustrated, German-language site devoted to this Hapsburg dynastic monument:
http://www.hofkirche.at/hofkirche/


2)  Theoctist of Sicily (?).  Byzantine synaxaries record T. as the hegumen of a monastery at an otherwise unrecorded Koukoumos (vel sim.) in Sicily.  We have no other information about him.  In Orthodox churches, where T. is widely commemorated on this day, he and his fellow monks are often said to have been refugees from iconoclastic persecution at Constantinople or, at least, somewhere in the East and are usually dated to ca. 800.  But this is early modern and later conjecture, unaccompanied by documentary or archaeological evidence, as is also the view advanced by Ottavio Gaetani (d. 1620) that the monastery was located at today's Caccamo in Palermo province.  T. has yet to enter the RM.


3)  Angela of Foligno (Bl.; d. 1309).  The Umbrian ascetic and mystic A. (in Latin, Angela de Fulgineo) was a literate, well-to-do married woman with several sons when in 1285 she began a spiritual conversion under Franciscan guidance.  In 1291, with everyone in her immediate family now dead, she became a Franciscan tertiary and began to experience a series of intense visions communicated to her confessor, Brother A., and recorded by him in his _Memorial_ completed in 1296.  Other companions/disciples recorded further utterances which, posthumously collected and edited under the title of _Instructions_, joined the _Memorial_ in what we now know as the _Book of Angela of Foligno_.  This was quickly approved by her Order; at least twenty-eight manuscripts testify to its diffusion, which was not limited to Franciscan houses.  Here's A. as depicted in a late fourteenth- or early fifteenth-century copy (Milan, Biblioteca Trivulziana, cod. 150, fol. 17):
http://www.beataangela.it/miniatura.asp
There's a larger reproduction on the upper cover of Giulia Barone and Jacques Dalarun, eds., Angèle de Foligno: le dossier (Rome: Ecole franç̧aise de Rome, 1999; Collection de l’Ecole française de Rome, 255).

A.'s relics reside in Foligno's chiesa di San Francesco.  Until 1856 they were kept in a compartment in the sixteenth-century wooden statue shown here:
http://tinyurl.com/2cmgho
(Compare the object routinely called the cenotaph of St. Pharaildis, shown in 1] above).
Foligno was celebrating A.'s feast by 1535; in 1701 an Office for her was granted to the clergy of Foligno and to the Conventual Franciscans.

Best,
John Dillon
(Pharaildis and Theoctist lightly revised from last year's post)

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