medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
It is also the day of David of Munktorp, an English missionary in Sweden in
the eleventh century (d. ca 1082).
Fredrik Fernbom
Doctoral student in Church history
Department of Theology, Lund University
----- Original Message -----
From: "John Dillon" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, June 25, 2008 5:57 AM
Subject: [M-R] saints of the day 25. June
> medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
>
> Today (25. June) is the feast day of:
>
> 1) Febronia of Nisibis (d. ca. 304, supposedly). The virgin martyr F. is
> the subject of a legendary Passio in Syriac that is at least as old as the
> seventh century. This makes her a religious who refused to flee her
> monastery during the Great Persecution and who was arrested, tortured at
> great length, and finally decapitated at Nisibis (today's Nusaybin in
> southeastern Turkey's Mardin province). Nisibis was the seat of a Syrian
> Christian diocese (Nestorian from the later fifth century onward) for most
> of late antiquity and throughout the Middle Ages.
>
> F.'s cult seems to have begun at Nisibis. Her Passio, formed on Greek
> models, was translated into Greek and spread throughout the Greek-speaking
> world, including parts of southern Italy and ultimately eastern Sicily,
> where her cult, attested at Messina from the twelfth century, has been
> important at Patti (ME) and at Palagonia (CT) since at least the
> fourteenth century. (F.'s rupestrian church at Palagonia goes back to the
> seventh century but we don't know when it was first dedicated to her.).
> Early medieval versions of F.'s Passio exist in many other languages,
> including Latin. The Celestinians carried her cult from southern Italy to
> France.
>
> In 1997 the remains of a monastery, seemingly active from the
> fifth-/sixth-century to the very early fifteenth, were uncovered at
> Tuneinir in eastern Syria. Shown on this page
> http://users.stlcc.edu/mfuller/Area10reliquary.html
> is a tooth-shaped reliquary from this site thought to have held a relic of
> F. (one of whose teeth figures prominently in her Passio).
>
>
> 2) Maximus of Turin (d. 5th cent.). The first recorded bishop of Turin,
> M. is known principally for a collection of over a hundred mostly brief
> sermons, not all of which may really be his. The date of his death is
> uncertain: Gennadius of Marseille sets his _floruit_ at 423. Attempts to
> identify him with the M. who was at synods of Milan in 451 and Rome in 465
> are not altogether convincing. M.'s legendary Vita (BHL 5858; not earlier
> than the twelfth century) attests to his cult but tells us nothing useful
> about him. M. is one of Turin's principal patron saints. Here's a view
> of his depiction in that city's oldest surviving collection of statutes,
> the fourteenth-century Codice della Catena:
> http://tinyurl.com/2dgfo4
>
>
> 3) Prosper of Aquitaine (d. ca. 465). P. was a disciple of St. Augustine
> who wrote prolifically on behalf of his master's positions on grace and
> predestination. He was also a Christian poet and the first continuator of
> St. Jerome's _Chronicle_. We last hear of him from the year 463. A late
> ninth-century fresco in the lower church of San Clemente at Rome depicting
> a tonsured S. Prosperius is thought to be of this P.
>
>
> 4) Prosper of Reggio (d. 5th or 6th cent.). The undated P. figures in
> the traditional lists of the early bishops of Reggio in Emilia. He is the
> subject of two tenth-century sermons (BHL 1013. 1014) that focus on his
> pastoral virtues and that tell us that at the beginning of the eighth
> century bishop Thomas rebuilt the church of St. Apollinaris in which P.
> had been buried and rededicated that church to P. In the later tenth
> century P.'s relics were translated to the city's then cathedral. They
> are said to now repose under the main altar of Reggio's present early
> sixteenth-century cathedral (1514-23) dedicated to him.
>
> The eleventh- to thirteenth-century pieve di San Prospero at Collecchio
> (PR) in Emilia is also dedicated to this P. Some illustrated,
> Italian-language pages on that church are here:
> http://tinyurl.com/57qgjj
> http://tinyurl.com/5a29ao
> http://www.mondimedievali.net/Edifici/Emilia/collecchio.htm
> http://tinyurl.com/5b5ouh
>
>
> 5) Moluag (d. 592, perhaps). M. (also Moloc, Molocus, Molonachus,
> etc. -- but not, as far as I can tell, Moloch) is the legendary evangelist
> of Argyll. According to his Vita (BHL 5989) as preserved in lections in
> the Aberdeen Breviary, he was an Irish disciple of St. Brendan who with
> divine aid performed such magic feats as the casting of his bell with
> metal that in default of coals had been made molten when heated with
> burning reeds and the crossing of the Irish Sea on part of a large rock on
> which he had stood and split with a prayer when he and his fellow monks
> had been unable to procure an ordinary vessel. So transported he and his
> fellows arrived at the island of Lismore, where they established a
> monastery and M. became abbot. Later M. went north to Ross, where he
> preached and where he died on this day in an unspecified year, _non sine
> miraculis_. He was buried with great veneration in the church of St.
> Boniface at Rossmarkie.
>
> Thus far the Vita. That M. died in 592 (a datum repeated not only in
> popular accounts but also in M.'s entry in the _Bibliotheca Sanctorum_) is
> the pronouncement of James Ussher, archbishop of Armagh in the earlier
> seventeenth century, the same who fixed the creation of the world at 4004
> BC. It's not a bad guess, as long as one is willing to accept as
> historically accurate the Vita's statement that M. was a disciple of St.
> Brendan. The abbey on Lismore prospered and its church of St. M. became
> the cathedral of the medieval diocese of Argyll. The present building,
> still called a cathedral but in fact a parish church, dates from the
> fourteenth century but has been greatly altered since. Two views are
> here, a little more than halfway down the page:
> http://www.kirkweb.org/appinlismore.htm
> Another view (not showing any of the surviving medieval doorways):
> http://tinyurl.com/3vfc6p
>
> Here's an expandable view of the restored thirteenth-century church
> dedicated to M. at Ness in the Isle of Lewis:
> http://tinyurl.com/5tudkr
>
>
> 6) Adalbert of Egmond (d. 8th cent.). According to his late
> tenth-century Vita by Rupert of Mettlach (BHL 33), A. (also Adelbert) was
> an Englishman who accompanied St. Willibrord to the Low Countries and who
> evangelized in Frisia. A deacon, he founded a church at Egmond in today's
> Noord-Holland. Both Rupert's Vita and a later one (BHL 34-36) composed at
> the abbey of Egmond -- which considers A. its founder -- attribute
> miracles to him. A.'s cult is attested in the dioceses of Utrecht and and
> of Gand/Ghent from the tenth century onward and was furthered by various
> counts of Holland.
>
> Here's A. (in the illustration at lower right) as depicted in the later
> tenth-century illuminated pages added to the Egmond Gospels (Den Haag, KB,
> 76 F 1, fol. 215r):
> http://www.keesn.nl/sources/en4_egm_pics.htm
> An English-language account of this book is here:
> http://www.thewords.com/gallery/gospel.htm
> This page from the abbey has a views of a sixteenth-century depiction of
> A.:
> http://tinyurl.com/5jph4m
> The medieval abbey was largely destroyed in 1579 (its present successor is
> a rebuilding of the last century). Here's a view of the ruined abbey
> church:
> http://www.engelfriet.net/Alie/Hans/abdijkerkegmpr.jpg
>
>
> 7) William of Montevergine (d. 1142). According to his late twelfth
> century Vita (BHL 8924) by John of Nusco, today's less well known saint of
> the Regno (also W. of Vercelli) was already a penitent at the age of
> fourteen, when, with iron bands constricting his body, he set off from his
> north Italian home for Compostela. Most of his life was spent in southern
> Italy. Alternately a hermit and a monastic founder, he was active chiefly
> in Irpinia (approximately today's Avellino province of Campania), where
> the abbey of Montevergine traces its origin to a community he directed on
> its mountain above today's Mercogliano (AV).
>
> W. got down into Basilicata as well, where he founded a church at Monte
> Pierno near today's San Fele (PZ). This received a double monastery that
> became a dependency of the abbey of the Goleto (see next paragraph).
> Today it is the heart of the Sanctuary of the Blessed Virgin of Pierno,
> honoring a wooden statue of the BVM that W. is said to have miraculously
> found there. The church, rebuilt in the late twelfth century by master
> Sarolus of Muro Lucano (famous for his work on the cathedral of Rapolla)
> under the Goleto's then abbess Agnes, is one of Basilicata's few notable
> specimens of "romanesque" architecture.
> Exterior views (expandable):
> http://www.basilicata.cc/paesi_taddeo/t_676/p_monum/676_02.htm
> Interior views (expandable):
> http://www.basilicata.cc/paesi_taddeo/t_676/p_monum/676_02_2.htm
>
> W. died at the double monastery of the Goleto (near Sant'Angelo dei
> Lombardi in southern Campania). Another of his foundations, this was
> essentially a house for women with a small attached community of males who
> were there to perform sacraments and to provide spiritual direction.
> Dedicated to the Holy Savior ("the Goleto" is a toponym), the monastery
> flourished until the middle of the fourteenth century and was closed in
> the early sixteenth (the last abbess died in 1515). The property reverted
> to Montevergine, which promptly reopened it as a small, male institution.
> Late in the same century the monastery began to grow again. Its early
> modern prosperity, nineteenth-century abandonment, and recent restoration
> are beyond the remit of this list.
>
> Some views of the abbey of the Goleto (now called that of St. William)
> before and after restoration are here:
> http://www.goleto.it/storia.htm
> More are included in the virtual tour accessible here:
> http://www.goleto.it/home.htm
> (Click on "visita l'abbazia").
> The Chapel of St. Luke was the upper part of the abbey's church in the
> later Middle Ages. Two interior views are here:
> http://www.goleto.it/images/storia06.GIF
> and here:
> http://www.goleto.it/images/visita5_big.GIF
> This church's lower part was originally the funerary chapel of the
> "romanesque" basilica of the Holy Savior. W. remained here until 1807,
> when he was removed to Montevergine. His relics now reside in the crypt
> of that abbey's church.
>
> Best,
> John Dillon
> (Febronia of Nisibis, Maximus of Turin, Prosper of Aquitaine, Prosper of
> Reggio, Adalbert of Egmond, and William of Montevergine revised from last
> year's post)
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