medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture

Today (14. May) is the feast day of:

1)  Matthias, apostle (d. 1st cent.).  According to Acts 1:21-26, after the Ascension M. was chosen by lot to replace Judas.  After that he disappears from the New Testament.  By the second century he had become popular with Gnostics in Egypt.  Though Clement of Alexandria quotes one of their number (Heracleon) as saying that M. died peacefully, by far the more common view was that he had preached among the savages and cannibals of Ethiopia and had there been martyred.  A Gnostic Gospel was written in M.'s name, while he and St. Andrew are the joint protagonists of a legendary set of Acta recounting their doings in the land of the cannibals.  M. is also said to have evangelized in other places.

Here's a portrait of M. from the originally eleventh-century Cappella San Giorgio in the cathedral of San Gaudenzio at Novara:
http://homes.dico.unimi.it/~monga/etc/SMattia.jpg
context:
http://homes.dico.unimi.it/~monga/smattia.html
Here are two fourteenth-century depictions of M.'s evangelizing and martyrdom (Paris, BN, ms. Français 18 , foll. 58, 67):
http://tinyurl.com/ynq8ke
http://tinyurl.com/2he8c7
In later medieval and Renaissance art M. is often shown with with a halberd or an axe, symbolizing his supposed decapitation, as in this image from the fifteenth-century rood screen at St Agnes, Cawston (Norfolk):
http://www.norfolkchurches.co.uk/cawston/Dscf3692.jpg
context:
http://www.norfolkchurches.co.uk/cawston/cawston.htm
And here's M.'s martyrdom from the Nuremberg Chronicle (1493, Beloit College copy, fol. CVIIv):
http://tinyurl.com/yon426

There is a view in the archdiocese of Trier that M. was buried in Palestine, that St. Helena had found his remains, and that she brought them back to this late antique capital of the empire, where they now repose.  Witnesses to this belief do not appear to antedate the ninth century.  In 1127, during the demolition there of the old abbey church of St. Eucharius (Trier's first bishop) in preparation for the erection of a successor, these putative remains were miraculously rediscovered.  The new church, now much rebuilt, quickly become known as that of M.  Some views of M.'s modern tomb and of his former resting place in the crypt are here:
http://tinyurl.com/3pmaue
http://tinyurl.com/4glqy4
http://tinyurl.com/5xf5on
http://tinyurl.com/4bqa6f
And here's a view of the tombs of Sts. Eucharius and Valerius (V. is Trier's second bishop) still down in the crypt:
http://tinyurl.com/yvnewn


2)  Justa, (Justina), and Henedina (d. ca. 131, supposedly).  Justa's cult is attested medievally at several places on Sardinia, most notably at the city of Santa Giusta (OR) near Oristano in what until 1410 was the judicate of Arborea.  She has no Vita or Passio earlier than the one by the early modern canon of Oristano, Antonio Martis.  Published in 1616 and supposedly drawn from an ancient document, this was shown in the eighteenth century to be instead a melange of oral tradition and of matter from the Acta of another saint of this name.  Martis' account makes Justa (in Italian, Giusta) a virgin martyr put to death under Hadrian along with her maids Justina and Henedina (Giustina, Enedina) at the very spot where later was built the crypt of the cathedral of the town of Santa Giusta.  A variant known to the sixteenth-century Sardinian historian Giovanni Fara made the saints confessors rather than martyrs and identified Justina and Henedina as Justa's sisters.

In the early seventeenth century, during the Corpi Santi episode when remains of presumed early Christian martyrs were being unearthed all over Sardinia, relics identified as those of Justa, Justina, and Henedina were found in Cagliari's Cripta di Santa Restituta and were re-located next to those of Restituta herself.  Presumed destroyed during the bombing of Cagliari in 1943, they were found in 1997 -- still in their seventeenth-century chest -- in Cagliari's church of Sant'Anna.  In 2004 they were translated to Santa Giusta and placed in that city's ex-cathedral dedicated to this saint.  Thumbnail views of these remains are here:
http://tinyurl.com/eovfz
http://www.isolanews.it/cultura/200405/15/40a60be80246c/urna4.jpg
Justina was dropped from the RM in its revision of 2001, presumably in the belief that she's really just a doublet of Justa.

Santa Giusta's Basilica di Santa Giusta, consecrated in 1144, was the cathedral church of a homonymous diocese that was incorporated into that of Oristano in 1503.  In 1226 it was the site of an all-island synod (the last until the twentieth century) whose constitutions are a major document in the history of the church in medieval Sardinia.  The building is thought to have been erected in the 1130s and 1140s and has not been rebuilt.  An Italian-language account of it, with bibliography, is here:
http://tinyurl.com/pn8w2
Exterior views (expandable) are here:
http://www.madeinsardinia.org/Oristano_%20Santa_Giusta/index.html
Others, and one interior view, (not expandable) are here:
http://www.ilportalesardo.it/monumenti/orsantagiusta.htm 


3)  Constantius of Capri (d. late 8th cent., perhaps).  Reliable information about today's less well known saint from Regno while he was still alive is nonexistent.  According to two incompletely preserved sermons of probable early eleventh-century date and apparent Bay-of-Naples-area authorship as well as to an early modern notice deriving from a now lost manuscript at Benevento, C. (in Italian, Costanzo) was a bishop of Constantinople who successfully combatted heresy and who either died in that city, with his corpse later being brought to Capri, or else arrived at Capri by chance when already at death's door.  From these dubious indications a late eighth-century date has been inferred for him.  He is Capri's patron saint.

As we learn from the _Sermo de virtute s. Constantii (BHL 1936d), C. saved Capri from a Muslim raid in 991.  More impressive, though, is his vindication of a pregnant young woman of Capri seduced and betrayed by a young man from Ischia who had reneged on a promise to marry her.  As recounted in the _Sermo de transito s. Constantii_ (BHL 1936e), she prayed to the saint for retribution as a warning to others, whereupon the cad, who at that very moment was entering Capri's cathedral (dedicated to C. and then sanctified by his remains), was instantly struck by lightning and so burned up that not an ash remained of his miserable body (_Qui cum templi limen attingeret pede, igneo protinus fulmine tactus, ita concrematus est, ut nec cinis eius ex miserabili corpore remaneret_).

Capri's church of San Costanzo at Marina Grande was the island's cathedral from the erection of the diocese in 987 until that function was transferred in 1596 to the less open-to-raiders church of Santo Stefano in the center of the island.  By that time C.'s relics were already in Santo Stefano (which remained the cathedral until the diocese's suppression in 1818).  At least one is still there, kept in a reliquary bust used in festival processions on this day:
http://www.capri.com/en/san-costanzo
Some of C.'s relics are again housed in San Costanzo.  Others are kept at a church at Termini (NA) near the tip of the Sorrentine Peninsula to the east northeast of Capri (C. is also Termini's patron saint) except during the summer months when they reside instead at a chapel dedicated to C. atop adjacent Monte San Costanzo.  Still others (if they indeed belong to the same saint) are in St. William of Vercelli's crypt at Montevergine.

Marina Grande's San Costanzo has been rebuilt several times, but its central portion still reveals the Greek-cross-in-a-square floor plan of the original late tenth- / early eleventh-century cathedral (said to have been built over an earlier small basilica).  Both this design and C.'s supposed origin in Constantinople reflect the diocese of Capri's origin as a suffragan of the archdiocese of Amalfi at a time when resurgent East Roman power in southern Italy and a northward spread of Greek monastic settlement were making themselves felt in the Amalfitan state and, indeed, in coastal Campania generally.  Exterior views of the church, the first showing its Angevin-period "gothic" main portal (on a front resystematized in the nineteenth century -- so those pointy-arched windows are merely medievalizing), are here:
http://www.capriweb.com/web/immagini/grCapriMarinaGrande08.jpg
http://www.capridream.com/images/sancostanzo.jpg
And an interior view showing some some of the Greek cross's columns (originally all spolia from a nearby ancient Roman imperial villa; four of these were taken in the eighteenth century for the Palatine Chapel at
Vanvitelli's royal palace at Caserta and replaced with granite  substitutes):
http://www.capriweb.com/web/immagini/grCapriMarinaGrande12.jpg
Another interior view:
http://www.capriweb.com/web/immagini/grCapriMarinaGrande09.jpg
Two Italian-language descriptions:
http://www.capridream.com/t-chiesascostanzo.htm
http://tinyurl.com/cmctt  

The aforementioned four columns from San Costanzo now at Caserta are of yellowish marble and may be seen here, behind the altar:
http://tinyurl.com/nuc7z

The two sermons on Constantius were edited by Adolf Hofmeister in his "Aus Capri und Amalfi: Der Sermo de virtute und der Sermo de transito s. Constantii und der Sarazenenzug von 991," _Münchener Museum für Philologie des Mittelalters und der Renaissance_ 4 (1924; reprint, Nendeln: Kraus Reprint, 1972), 233-72.  Hofmeister's second edition of the anonymous sermon on the Transit of St. Constantius (in MGH, Scriptores, vol. 30, pt. 2) is a partial one only, excluding matter not thought to be of historical interest (as this was then construed by the editors of the MGH), and lacks the story of the young woman's vindication.

Best,
John Dillon
(older posts lightly revised)

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