medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Today (20. March) is the feast day of:
1) Martin of Braga (d. ca. 579). Like his namesake, St. Martin of Tours, this M. was a Pannonian who went west. But first he travelled east to Palestine, where he made a lengthy pilgrimage, learned Greek, studied theology, and became a monk. Having thus prepared himself, he went into the uttermost west, ending up in what is now northern Portugal. M. founded a monastery, of which he was head, at Dumio near Bracara Augusta (modern Braga), the capital of Gallaecia, a former Roman province that early in the preceding century had become the kingdom of the Sueves.
In 569 M. became archbishop of Bracara. He succeeded in converting the Suevian kings from Arianism to Catholicism and was zealous in suppressing rural "pagan" cults and in converting their adherents to Christianity. Venantius Fortunatus, in a poem addressed to M. (5. 2), twice calls him in effect the apostle of Gallaecia. M.'s surviving work includes a translation, from the Greek, of a collection of the sayings of the (Egyptian) Desert Fathers, a number of moral treatises drawing on Seneca or on John Cassian or on both, a treatise on baptism, and the pastoral _De correctione rusticorum_, rich in mentions of non-Christian rural cults and practices.
Here's M. as depicted in the later tenth-century (976) Codex Albeldensis (El Escorial, Ms. d I 2):
http://tinyurl.com/3azowy
Much later than M., but certainly worth a look while we're here, is Braga's cathedral:
Illustrated, English-language page:
http://www.answers.com/topic/braga-cathedral
Portuguese-language page with other views:
http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A9_de_Braga
2) Cuthbert (d. 687). C., seems to have sprung from Anglo-Saxon nobility living in in the more northerly parts of the kingdom of Northumbria; as he trained at Melrose Abbey, quite possibly his family was in Lothian. After serving as guest master at a newly founded daughter house at Ripon he returned to Melrose as prior, moved on to Lindisfarne where he was also prior, and then became a hermit on Inner Farne. In 685 he was consecrated bishop of Lindisfarne (for which he exchanged Hexham, to which he has just been elected). At the very end of 686 or early in 687 C. returned to Inner Farne and died there, probably in his early fifties. His body was taken back to Lindisfarne and interred next to the altar of St. Peter's church. Eleven years later, C. received a formal elevation, at which time his body was declared to be incorrupt.
The focus of what became a more than regionally significant cult, C. received an anonymous early Vita (BHL 2019) from a monk of Lindisfarne and two Vitae by St. Bede, the first in verse and the second an expanded one in prose (BHL 2020, 2021). When Northmen sacked Lindisfarne in 793 the monks began a lengthy peregrination with C.'s body and other treasures (not least the head of St. Oswald), settling in 883 or 885 at Chester-le-Street in today's County Durham. By this time Northumbrian missionaries had carried C.'s veneration to the Continent and C. was listed in the major Carolingian martyrologies. Grotefend lists feasts for him not only in continental dioceses either founded by Englishmen (e.g. Utrecht, Freising, Bremen) or influenced from England (e.g. Rouen, Trondheim) but in others as well (e.g. Cracow, Toledo). In 995 C.'s remains were brought from Chester-le-Street to Durham, where they repose in the cathedral.
Here's a Quicktime virtual tour of C.'s shrine in Durham Cathedral:
http://tinyurl.com/2jl257
and a view of a twelfth-century wall painting, thought to be of C., in the cathedral's Galilee Chapel:
http://tinyurl.com/2llog4
Other views of Durham Cathedral:
http://tinyurl.com/2mvjnn
http://tinyurl.com/36w95y
In 1104, when C.'s tomb was opened prior to his translation to his present shrine it was found to contain a small copy of the Gospel of John, made at Monkwearmouth or Jarrow during the abbacy of St. Ceolfrith. Later known, from a former place of safekeeping, as the Stonyhurst Gospel and now referred to as the St Cuthbert Gospel of St John, it is on permanent loan to the British Library. Views of its goatskin binding (said to be the oldest western binding now in Europe) are here:
http://faculty.luther.edu/~martinka/art43/daily/2nd/ston.jpg
and a view of one page (f. 27r):
http://tinyurl.com/2995rg
Herewith some views, etc. of other medieval dedications to C. With the likely exception of the church at Wells, these are all at places said in one or another source to have been one of C.'s resting places before he reached Durham. What they really are (other than Chester-le-Street) are former extralimital possessions of the see of Durham and thus once part of its Patrimony of St. Cuthbert.
Originally twelfth-century St Cuthbert's Church, Aldingham (Lancashire):
http://www.explorelowfurness.co.uk/stcuthbert.htm
http://www.lancashirechurches.co.uk/aldingham.htm
Originally thirteenth-century Church of St Mary and St Cuthbert, Chester-le-Street (Durham):
Views:
http://tinyurl.com/2sacdn
http://www.maryandcuthbert.org.uk/images/Church-exterior-col.jpg
History, with plans:
http://www.maryandcuthbert.org.uk/building.htm
Late fourteenth- or early fifteenth-century St Cuthbert's Church at Elsdon, Northumberland:
Brief description with expandable view (can be a slow loader):
http://tinyurl.com/yt3b6z
That view:
http://ww2.durham.gov.uk/nd/nsmr/m/N9768.jpg
Several exterior views on this page:
http://www.northumberland-cam.com/elsdon/jan-2007.htm
Narrow aisle (this church has very thick exterior walls):
http://tinyurl.com/yry8pq
Mostly thirteenth-/ fifteenth-century St Cuthbert's Church, Wells (Somerset):
http://www.stcuthbertswells.co.uk/our_church.html
http://www.pbase.com/billie_mercer/image/44157279
Mostly fifteenth-century St Cuthbert's Church, Crayke (North Yorkshire):
Description:
http://www.crayke.org.uk/cuthbert.cfm
Views:
http://tinyurl.com/23aaml
http://tinyurl.com/2cp5f9
3) John of Nepomuk (d. 1393). J. (also John Nepomucene; in Czech, Jan Nepomucký), a Bohemian from Pomuk (later renamed Nepomuk), was a priest, notary, and canon lawyer educated at the universities of Prague and Padua. In 1390 he became vicar general of the Archdiocese of Prague. His defense of diocesan immunities made him an obstacle to king Wenceslas (Václav) IV, who removed that impediment by having J. thrown to his death into the Vltava from Charles Bridge in Prague. The archbishop pronounced him a martyr. Sensationalism soon made J. the confessor of the queen of Bohemia, murdered for refusing to violate the seal of the confessional. Bohemia's principal patron saint, he was canonized in 1729. It was once customary to place J.'s statue on bridges. He is invoked against death by drowning and other water-related perils.
J.'s remains repose in a baroque tomb in Prague's cathedral of St. Vitus:
http://www.katedralapraha.cz/img/gallery/1_img_2822.jpg
Where he occurs on local calendars J. is usually feasted on 16. May. Today is his _dies natalis_ and his day of commemoration in the RM.
4) Battista Spagnolo (Bl.; d. 1515). B. (usually known by some form of his humanist name, Baptista Mantuanus) was a native of Mantua whose Spanish father, captured by the Genoese at the battle of Ponza along with Alfonso V of Aragon and I of Sicily, had after his release settled in the Gonzaga capital. After study there under the humanists Giorgio Merula and Gregorio Tifernate B. went on to Padua but left the university there without taking a degree and entered the Carmelite Order in 1463 at Ferrara. He completed his studies there and was ordained priest (seemingly by 1470). B. had a distinguished career as a Carmelite administrator and diplomat, rising late in life to the generalship of his Order. He was beatified in 1885. Today is his _dies natalis_ and his day of commemoration in the RM.
B. was a prolific author in both prose and verse. Some of his poems, most notably the eclogue collection _Adulescentia_ and some of his _Parthenicae_ (brief epics on female saints), were widely used as school texts in the sixteenth century. Most of B.'s writings lack modern critical editions. Here (at right) are the opening verses of his _De contemnenda morte_ in a manuscript copy (Stanford University Libraries, Misc 119; ca. 1500) with annotations showing student use:
http://tinyurl.com/35hh7u
And here's a page from a 1513 Deventer printing of B.'s _Parthenice secunda de passione virginis Catharinae_:
http://tinyurl.com/2ogaha
Best,
John Dillon
(Martin of Braga and Cuthbert lightly revised from last year's post)
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