medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Today (18. May) is the feast day of:
1) Venantius of Camerino (d. 251 or 253, supposedly). V. is the principal patron of Camerino (MC) in the Marche. He has been venerated there since at least the eleventh century and quite possibly since at least the fifth or sixth century, when the predecessor of Camerino's reconstructed Basilica of San Venanzio seems to have been built. His eleventh- or twelfth-century Passio (BHL 8523; there are later, expanded versions), which makes him a fifteen-year-old native of Camerino martyred under Decius or Valerian, is a very close reworking of the Passio of the similarly youthful Agapetus or Agapitus of Praeneste (BHL 125), so close, in fact, that the Second Supplement to the BHL calls it a copy with the names changed. Despite what one reads in the old _Catholic Encyclopedia_ (whose entry for him prefers to 'Venantius' the name-form 'Wigand'), etc., we really don't know anything about V. prior to his veneration in the central and later Middle Ages.
V.'s cult seems to have attained significantly increased importance in the thirteenth century, when he begins to be figured artistically as a civic defender holding a sword and/or a standard. Also dating from the end of the thirteenth or the early fourteenth century is his impressive marble tomb in Camerino's Basilica of San Venanzio. V. is said to have replaced in the fourteenth century Camerino's previous principal patron, the ninth-century bishop St. Ansovinus. This may have happened earlier: in 1259, when troops of king Manfred of Sicily sacked Camerino, they brought V.'s relics, but not A.'s, to Naples, where they remained until 1269. The 117-line Latin poem _Gentibus ut pateat, Venanti sancte, futuris_ recounting V.'s removal and celebrating his return is a monument of later thirteenth-century political verse.
Camerino's Basilica of San Venanzio, badly damaged by an earthquake in 1799, was rebuilt neoclassically in the nineteenth century. It retains a thirteenth-century apse and belltower and a fourteenth-century main portal surmounted by a rose window:
http://tinyurl.com/2dh2l5
http://tinyurl.com/3twajb
http://tinyurl.com/4quo4g
http://www.claudiocolombo.net/Ciclogiro2004/Paginefoto/263-Camerino.htm
http://medioevo.org/artemedievale/Pages/Marche/Camerino.html
The flanking figure on the left in the lunette is said to be bishop St. Porphyry, one of the characters in V.'s Passio. The corresponding space on the right once held a statue of V. himself; this was destroyed in the aforementioned earthquake. I have not been able to find a Web-based view of V.'s monumental tomb. There is a photograph of it in the _Bibliotheca Sanctorum_, vol. 12, col. 970.
V. is also the principal patron of the nearby city of Fabriano (MC), which latter until the eighteenth century was served by the diocese of Camerino. Its originally twelfth-century church dedicated to V., rebuilt in the early seventeenth century, preserves some "gothic" chapels with fourteenth-century frescoes by Allegretto Nuzi, including the representation of V. shown here:
http://www.fabrianostorica.it/chiese/cappellesanve.htm
Fabriano's Pinacoteca Civica "B.Molajoli" houses this polyptych by the same artist (V. is the saint on the far right):
http://www.fabrianostorica.it/musei/immagini/allegret.jpg
Yet another depiction of V. by Allegretto Nuzi (this time with John the Baptist):
http://www.fabrianostorica.it/oda/giovannivenanzio.htm
Two fifteenth-century pictorial representations of V. as patron of Camerino are this by Giovanni Boccati from a polyptych of 1468 in the parish church of Belforte sul Chienti (MC):
http://www.cultura.marche.it/CMDirector.aspx?id=2221
and this famous one by Carlo Crivelli from his Polyptych of San Domenico di Camerino now in the Brera Gallery in Milan (1482?; V. at right, next to St. Peter Martyr):
http://tinyurl.com/m4ury
V. appears in dedications and in later medieval calendars from a number of places in central Italy. A spectacularly scenic instance is the hermitage named for him at Raiano (AQ) in Abruzzo, spanning the gorge of the Aterno. First recorded from the twelfth century, it may have been dedicated to V. in his capacity as patron saint of those in danger of falling from high places (in his Passio, V. suffers no harm from having been thrown down from Camerino's high city wall). Some views:
http://tinyurl.com/2wgcn7
http://tinyurl.com/2wcobb
http://tinyurl.com/3awn4k
http://www.enit.it/foto-ad/images/big/abr_0007.jpg
A later addition to V.'s Passio brings this locale into V.'s story by having him seek refuge here from persecution. V. is the patron saint of Raiano and, in Umbria, of San Venanzo (TR).
Bl. Cesare Baronio entered V. in the RM. In 1670 Clement X, a former bishop of Camerino, extended V.'s cult to the Roman Catholic church as a whole. The church of the Annunziata at Piedimonte Matese (CE) in Campania, where V. has been specially venerated since 1707, claims to have his skull (thus making him -- however dubiously -- a partial saint of the Regno). V. was removed from the RM 2001.
2) Potamon, Hortasius, Serapion, and companions (d. ca. 340). P. was bishop of Heraclea in Upper Egypt and a friend and supporter of St. Athanasius the Great (whose writings and those of St. Epiphanius are our principal sources for him). During the persecution of Maximinus Daia in 310 he was tortured so severely that he lost an eye and became permanently lame. These badges of his suffering made a lasting impression upon his fellow Fathers at the Council of Nicaea (325). A double martyr, he died of a clubbing in Alexandria at the hands of Arian opponents of Nicene orthodoxy. The (pseudo-)Hieronymian Martyrology enters him under today's date and names the priests Hortasius (Ortasius) and Serapion and not a few others as his fellow martyrs at Alexandria. In the medieval Latin tradition P.'s name assumed several forms, e.g. Potamion, Potomon, Patamon, Pantamon.
3) John I, pope (d. 526). A Tuscan by birth, John was an elderly senior deacon at Rome when he became its bishop in 523. On the recommendation of Dionysius Exiguus, he adopted the Alexandrian method of computing the date of Easter. Boethius dedicated three of his theological tractates to J. According to the _Liber Pontificalis_, J. restored the church of Sts. Felix and Adauctus. In 526, at the behest of king Theodoric, J. undertook a mission to Constantinople to persuade the emperor Justin I to cease his persecution of T.'s fellow Arians in the East. Though he was received with honor and though he obtained most of what was sought, he did not persuade Justin to gratify T.'s chief desire, that Arians forcibly converted to Catholicism be allowed to revert to their previous belief.
On J.'s return to Ravenna Theodoric expressed his displeasure at this failure by withdrawing his official favor and protection and by ordering him to remain at Ravenna rather than permitting him to return to Rome. Worn out from his travels and stressed by by the uncertainty of what might happen next, J. died soon after. His body, already reported to work miracles, was quickly brought back to Rome and was interred in Old St. Peter's on 27. May (his former feast day). He is considered a martyr.
4) Erik of Sweden (d. 1160). Erik IX became Sweden's king in 1156. He was killed in 1160 while defending his throne against a rival claimant. After several years in which Sweden was ruled by a king from the previous royal house, E.'s son Knut (d. 1196 or 1197) came to the throne in 1167 and sought to reinforce the authority of the new dynasty by having E. declared a martyr. E.'s liturgical cult is first attested in a calendar of the diocese of Uppsala from 1198. In 1273 his relics were removed from Old Uppsala (the former capital) and placed in Uppsala cathedral, where they now repose in a shrine made in 1574 to replace one destroyed during the Reformation. Here's a view:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/63/Eric.JPG
The third seal of the city of Stockholm, first used in 1376, bears a portrait of E.:
http://tinyurl.com/4lg6n2
Here's a view of a wall painting (fifteenth-century) of E. in the church of Brunnby in Höganäs, Skåne län:
http://www.heiligenlexikon.de/Fotos/Erik_von_Schweden2.jpg
An illustrated page on that church, whose oldest portions are said to be of the twelfth century:
http://www.musikikullabygd.se/brunnby.html
A wall painting (sixteenth-century) of E. in the church of Söderala, Gävleborgs län:
http://tinyurl.com/4vsjg6
Legend made E. bring Christianity to Finland through military conquest. For their exploits in this poorly attested enterprise he and his bishop of Uppsala, St. Henry of Uppsala (or of Finland) received a lasting cult in Finland, evidenced _inter alia_ by an altar at the originally fourteenth-century cathedral of Turku (consecrated in 1400 when E. became a co-dedicatee of the cathedral):
http://tinyurl.com/545bey
and by their joint portrayal (in separate ships) in a detail of the early fifteenth-century brass monument (ca. 1420) commemorating St. Henry at his former burial place at Nousiainen (Swedish: Nousis) in Varsinais-Suomi in Finland:
http://www.heiligenlexikon.de/Fotos/Erik_von_Schweden.jpg
Here's a view of the originally early fifteenth-century (1420-25) church of St. Lawrence and St. Erik at Mynämäki (Swedish: Virmo) in Varsinais-Suomi in Finland:
http://tinyurl.com/5yvyv3
Uppsala cathedral (inaugurated, 1425) is also dedicated to L. and E. (as well as to Norway's St. Olaf). E. is Sweden's national saint (since 1. October 1861 its Roman Catholic patron saint has been Bridget of Sweden). Medieval attempts to secure papal recognition of E.'s cult were unavailing. But he seems now to have been equivalently canonized, as in the RM he is commemorated today with the designation Saint (and already was so prior to 2001).
Best,
John Dillon
(Venantius of Camerino and John I revised from last year's posts)
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