medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Hi, Henk
The Regno is what Italians and Italianists call the territories of the mostly mainland portion of the former Kingdom of the Two Sicilies (an early nineteenth-century designation for what since 1302 had been two kingdoms, sometimes ruled by the same person, sometimes not). One says "mostly mainland" so as not to exclude insular territories, e.g. the Aeolian, Pontine, and Tremiti island groups. Another term for the same area is "Kingdom of Naples" / "Regno di Napoli": I avoid this because the "of Naples" / "di Napoli" portion of this term, though in popular use since at least the later fifteenth century, was never official.
When I started posting "saints of the day" notices several years ago I made a point of emphasizing the Regno, an area with whose medieval history I am somewhat familiar, for several reasons:
1) to force me to read more of the kingdom's religious literature (I'm better versed in its secular writings).
2) to deepen my knowledge of the kingdom's ecclesiastical and architectural history.
3) to focus on a failed nation state as a small protest against the teleological view, common in higher education in the last two centuries, that in general the only medieval European histories worth teaching in any detail are those of the modern industrial success stories.
4) to focus on a Mediterranean area (if you've noticed, I also pay a lot of attention to insular Sicily and to Sardinia) as a small protest against a perceived bias in contemporary Anglophone medieval studies (and this is, after all, an Anglophone list) towards England and France.
Reasons 1) and 2) were personal. Reasons 3) and 4) could apply to a lot of traditions and I had hoped that over time others would chime in with notices from other regions. Indeed, as a stimulus for such contributions, for a while I even ignored "obvious" saints from elsewhere. That didn't work but even now, because of limitations of time and of personal knowledge, I still underemphasize saints of many areas.
Today, incidentally, was unusual in that among its saints are three saints of the Regno (in one way or another) plus a fourth (Benedict of Dolia) who spent some time in one of its major monasteries and who was remembered in that house.
Best,
John Dillon
On Sunday, February 17, 2008, at 12:00 pm, Henk 't Jong wrote:
> Hi John,
>
> I notice that a lot of saints seem to be from the 'regno' or are being
> revered in this area. I was wondering what you mean by this. Is it something
> graet like the reign of emperors or do you mean the region called
> Reggio in
> the Po area of Italy?
>
> Henk
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