medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Today (3. March) is the feast day of:
1) Arthellais (Artellais; also forms with single 'l'; d. ca. 560, supposedly). Today's less well known saint from the Regno has an incident-laden, highly fictional Vita that survives in at least three versions of differing length (BHL 718-720). A high-born, youthful virgin forced to flee her native Constantinople for the safety of her uncle Narses'
Italy, she and her retinue of eunuch attendants have a series of adventures en route. After crossing the Adriatic and visiting the sanctuary of St. Michael on Monte Gargano where she makes a generous donation, A. arrives in Benevento, makes a major donation to its central church of the BVM, performs miracles, and in short order dies of an illness.
By the late eleventh century Benevento had a church of St. A. This still existed in 1370. At some point after that A.'s relics were moved to Benevento's medieval cathedral (a later version of the church of the BVM mentioned in the Vita), where in the eighteenth century they were said to repose below the main altar. With any luck they will have survived the terrible bombing of the cathedral by American warplanes on 12. September 1943. Today's saint of the day in the Diocese of Benevento is Kunigunde (no. 3, below). The Diocese's website
http://tinyurl.com/7p8xh
omits A. from its section on the diocesan _santi_.
2) Anselm of Nonantola (d. 803). Duke of Friuli and brother-in-law of the Lombard king Aistulf, A. became a cleric and with Aistulf's support founded, a couple of years after the Lombard conquest of Ravenna in ca. 750, a monastery in southern Emilia near Bologna along the main road from the Lombard capitals in the north. This later became the great abbey of (pope) St. Sylvester at Nonantola, whose reconstruction of its early history included an imagined papal donation of S.'s remains to abbot A.
A.'s abbatial tenure saw the creation of several dependencies. It was interrupted for the entirety of the reign of king Desiderius, when another abbot was appointed and A. lived in exile at Montecassino. A. was restored after Charlemagne's conquest of the Lombard kingdom in 774. He assisted in reconciling the count and the bishop of Brescia (both nephews of Desiderius) with their new overlord, the king of the Franks.
This panel from the famous sculptures of the main portal at the abbey church of Nonantola (MO) seems to show Aistulf endowing A. with the possession of the land on which his monastery would be built:
http://tinyurl.com/yummdg
And this one shows the completed monastery with a founder's portrait of the now tonsured and beardless A. (looking a great deal like a more recent _duce_):
http://tinyurl.com/2zfc2n
These images are from the Italia nell'Arte Medievale site on the abbey church:
http://tinyurl.com/yzz8pu
3) Kunigunde of Luxemburg (d. 1033 or 1039). Daughter of count Siegfried I of Lützelburg (Luxemburg), K. (Cunegunda, Cunegundis, etc.) was married in about the year 1000 to duke Henry III of Bavaria (the future emperor St. Henry II). In June 1002, six months after the death of his cousin Otto III, Henry had himself crowned king of the Germans at Mainz. A separate coronation of K. as queen took place in early August in the cathedral of Paderborn. The upper illumination on this page from the Pericopes of Henry II (Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 4452; no later than 1012) shows them both being crowned by Christ:
http://tinyurl.com/2nuggg
Most of K.'s official acts have to do with support for churches and monasteries. In 1007 the royal couple used her dowry to found the diocese of Bamberg. In 1014 Henry and K. were jointly crowned as emperor and empress by Benedict VIII. After Henry's death in 1024 K. exercised a brief regency. In 1025, after the accession of Konrad II, she retired to the monastery of Kaufungen near Kassel and lived there until her death as a simple nun.
Here's a black-and-white view of a charter of Henry II from 1019 granting properties to the monastery at Kaufungen:
http://tinyurl.com/2c4avd
The monastery is gone but its church remains. Here's a view:
http://tinyurl.com/2kyq8f
And an illustrated, German-language page on the monastery is here:
http://www.akademie-im-stiftshof.de/kloster.htm
K.'s cult seems to have begun after Henry's canonization in 1146. She was canonized in 1200 by Innocent III and in 1201 her remains were translated to the cathedral of Bamberg, the Bamberger Dom. Her canonization Vita (BHL 2001) was subsequently modified several times, as was also her Office. In 1513 the pair was translated to their present resting place, the great tomb in the Bamberger Dom sculpted by Tilman Riemenschneider (K. at left):
http://www.heiligenlexikon.de/Fotos/Kunigunde-Grab.jpg
Herewith two illustrated, German-language pages on the cathedral:
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bamberger_Dom
http://tinyurl.com/2szkw4
K. and Henry may be seen, in recent replacement copies (mounted, 2002), on the cathedral's Adamspforte (Adam's Portal; variously dated to ca. 1225 or to ca. 1237). The original statues are now in the diocesan museum.
http://tinyurl.com/3a3z5w
They are shown as founders in this representation of them on the fourteenth-century tomb (1340) of bishop St. Otto of Bamberg (d. 1139) in the crypt of Bamberg's St. Michelskirche:
http://tinyurl.com/2hsceu
Here, from the website of the Diocese of Bamberg, are expandable views of panel carvings of them, each holding half of the Bamberger Dom:
http://tinyurl.com/2whxrq
They, and that building, are united in this representation of them in the Beloit College copy of the _Nuremburg Chronicle_:
http://tinyurl.com/yt7dwl
The Antependium of Basel, a piece of early eleventh-century gold repoussé work now in the Musée National du Moyen Age (Musée Cluny) in Paris, shows Henry and K. at the feet of its central figure of Christ (for a better view of them, click on the thumbnail over "Altar Face of"):
http://www.musee-moyenage.fr/ang/pages/page_id18362_u1l2.htm
A better view of the piece as a whole is here (but treat with caution the accompanying statement of when and under what circumstances this antependium came to Basel):
http://tinyurl.com/2yje6t
Here are K. and Henry in statues from ca. 1290 on Basel's ex-cathedral, the Basler Münster, whose rebuilding Henry initiated and which later medieval tradition in Basel held had been consecrated in the couple's presence in 1019:
http://www.altbasel.ch/pic/doss_heinrich1.jpg
Here they are again, flanking the BVM in a sculpture of ca. 1511 on the facade of Basel's city hall:
http://www.altbasel.ch/pic/doss_heinrich3.jpg
And here they are in a window from 1520 in the same building's Saal des Regierungsrates:
http://www.bs.ch/heinrich-gross.jpg
4) Peter Geremia (Bl.; d. 1452). The Palermo-born P. belonged to one of the numerous originally knightly families ennobled under Frederick III (the prevalent numeration for Sicily's second monarch of this name) who formed the core of the Sicilian capital's nobility in the fourteenth century. While studying law at Bologna he is said to have been visited one night by the spirit of a deceased relative, also a lawyer, who lamented that his own worldly success had led to sins that cost him entry into Heaven. Thus prompted by an early fifteenth-century predecessor of Marley's Ghost, P. chose a life of religion. In 1424, without informing his father, he entered the Order of Preachers. After a period of training at Fiesole under St. Antoninus of Florence, P. was ordained priest and began a brilliant career of preaching and teaching at the papal court and at various places in the north of Italy.
Sent to Sicily as his Order's vicar, P. led a program of Observant reform and encouraged the founding of schools and hospitals by Dominican houses. In 1444 he was in Catania to reorganize the convent of Santa Maria La Grande when lava flowing from Mt. Etna threatened the city. Carrying St. Agatha's famous funerary veil in the traditional apotropaic procession, P. assisted her in halting the flow at today's Sant'Agata Li Battiati (CT). On 18. October 1445 P. delivered the inaugural address, _De laude scientiarum_, at the opening of Catania's university, the Siculorum Gymnasium. The island's first university, this had been authorized in 1434 by king Alfonso but only began operation now, on the basis of a papal bull issued in 1444 by Eugenius IV and entrusted to Peter for execution.
P. died in Palermo at his Order's convent of Santa Cita (Zita) several years before its completion of a new church of that name that was replaced by yet another in the 1580s. The latter, now bearing a late eighteenth-century facade and rebuilt after suffering severe damage in World War II, houses a spectacular collection of late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century religious art, including several pieces by Antonello Gagini and the Pietà by Giorgio da Milano shown here:
http://www.entasis.it/grandtour/Pasantacita1.htm
This page, which has a not awfully good expandable view of Gagini's funerary sculpture for Santa Cita's cappella Platamone, is better than some others for the convent's early history:
http://www.campodivolo.it/canale.asp?id=2165
P.'s cult was maintained by the Dominicans of his province and was confirmed papally in 1784. P. is a civic patron of the city of Palermo.
Best,
John Dillon
(older posts revised)
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