medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Today (15. January) is the feast day of:
1) Ephysius (d. ca. 303, supposedly). E., whose name is also spelled 'Ephysus', 'Ephisius', 'E(u)visius', and 'Efisius', is a Sardinian martyr of uncertain date. His cult first comes to light in the late eleventh and very early twelfth centuries, when Latin monks from the continental mainland were taking over what previously had been the island's very provincial Byzantine church. The evidence takes two forms: the oldest version of a highly legendary Latin-language Passio (BHL 2567, etc.) and a church at today's Nora (CA) built over a hypogeum containing a loculus traditionally said to have been E.'s.
The earliest surviving version of E.'s Passio occurs in a twelfth-century codex (Vat. lat. 6453) and was published in _Analecta Bollandiana_ 3 (1884), 362-77. It and its offshoots are an adaptation of the Greek second Bios of St. Procopius, possibly through a lost Latin translation composed on the Italian mainland (generally supposed to have been south Italian in origin, though why it might not instead have been Roman escapes me). According to this account E. is a soldier from Jerusalem whom Diocletian places at the head of his army and sends to Italy to harass the Christians. There a voice from heaven shows him a cross, promises him through its power victory over all his enemies, and proclaims that he will become a martyr.
The now Christian E. proceeds to Gaeta, has a goldsmith make him a cross adorned with gold and silver, and then, displaying this as a visible sign and standard (_signum_), defeats in battle a host of Saracens anachronistically present in Diocletian's Italy. In what is clearly a doublet of this scene for a Sardinian audience, E. next proceeds to Arborea (one of the Sardinian judicates) and with the aid of a heaven-sent messenger dressed as an imperial eunuch and bearing a special weapon (a two-pointed _romphea_ with a cross above) wins a victory over local barbarians who are probably to be identified with the Sardinian _barbaricini_ known to us and to E.'s hagiographer from a mention in the correspondence of pope St. Gregory the Great. These feats accomplished, E. goes on to Cagliari, where he is arrested as a Christian, incarcerated, tried, and finally taken to Nora and there decapitated. Thus far E.'s Passio.
E.'s church at Nora is first attested from 1089, when it appears in a list of properties given by the judge of Cagliari to the Victorines of Marseille (a later report says that the Victorines found it empty; this is the basis for the widely accepted view that in the year 1088 E.'s relics were translated to Pisa, whose special devotion to E. is attested as early as 1126). The church, erected in what had been a late antique cemetery, is an originally eleventh-century structure that has since been greatly modified. In the later Middle Ages it was one of Sardinia's major pilgrimage destinations. An exterior view of it is here (could those be pilgrims in the foreground?):
http://www.paladix.cz/gallery.php?ido=16916
An illustrated page on this monument:
http://tinyurl.com/y77ftp
There is a good discussion of it, with photographs and plans, in Pier Giorgio Spanu, Martyria Sardiniae. _I santuari dei martiri sardi_ (Oristano: S'Alvure, 2000), 61-81.
Other medieval or possibly medieval dedications to E. are reported from the judicate of Cagliari: a church at Quartucciu (CA) given to the Victorines of Marseille in 1119 (still in their possession in 1218) and the church of undated origin in Cagliari's Stampace quarter built over a subterranean chamber probably used in Roman times as a jail and now exhibited as E.'s prison. An illustrated, Italian-language account of the latter is here:
http://tinyurl.com/9dk3p2
Furter views of it (including one of the column to which E. is supposed to have been bound):
http://www.fotodisardegna.it/cagliari/carcere/carcere.htm
In Pisa, E.'s major monuments are the remains of the Camposanto frescoes depicting scenes from his Passio painted by Spinello Aretino in 1391-92. The best known of these is an interpretation of the celestial messenger's showing E. the _romphea_; here the cross has moved from that weapon (in the label for this view ineptly called a flag) to the angel's vestment:
http://www.artrenewal.org/asp/database/image.asp?id=27064
The small reproduction here shows more of the composition, with the scene with the angel on the left and a battle on the right:
http://www2.alfea.it/RESOURCES/DOC/cca-001/CCA001_18.jpg
Another panel from these frescoes was in the news in 2003, as restorers announced the successful use of a bacterium to remove glue that had covered it since it was removed from the wall of the Camposanto in the 1950s:
http://tinyurl.com/fh1n
http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s886276.htm
E.'s cult received a major boost in the early seventeenth century during Cagliari's great promotion of its _corpi santi_. E. is also credited with having brought an end to a plague that ravaged Cagliari and other places from 1652 to 1656; since then he has been the archdiocese of Cagliari's patron saint and was for much of that time also that of the city of Cagliari (whose patron is now St. Saturninus/Saturnus of Cagliari). In 1793 he was credited with having defeated an attempted French invasion of the island. In 1886 a portion of his relics at Pisa was returned to the archdiocese and now resides in his aforementioned church in Cagliari. E. was dropped from the RM in its revision of 2001 but continues to be celebrated liturgically in Sardinia.
2) John the Calybite (d. mid-5th cent.). According to his Bioi (BHG 868-869h), J. was born to a wealthy senatorial family in Constantinople. At the age of twelve he was inspired by an Acoemete monk to join that recently founded community. The Acoemetes were particularly devoted to the Gospels and required each monk to have his own copy. Being aware of this, J. asked his parents to obtain a copy for him; not being aware of his intent, they provided J. with a very costly manuscript whose binding was ornamented with gold and with precious stones. After J. had been with the Acoemetes for six years he received permission to return to Constantinople, where, dressed in rags, he took up life as a beggar near his parents' palace.
The parents did not recognize J. as their son but his father, who was more tolerant of the beggar than was J.'s mother, allowed a servitor to erect a hut for him next to the palace door (whence his Greek appellation Kalybites, i.e. hut-dweller). J. lived there for another three years, revealing himself (and confirming this by showing his mother the golden Gospels) on when he was a death's door. The parents experienced a religious conversion, turned their palace into a hospice, and erected a church in J.'s memory where the hut had been.
The church was in existence in the year 468. Anthony of Novgorod saw J.'s tomb there in the early thirteenth century. A head of J. venerated at Besançon until its disappearance in 1794 is sometimes said to have arrived there shortly after Constantinople fell to the Latins in 1204 (does anyone know when its presence at Besançon is actually first recorded?). The relics said to be J.'s in the early modern church dedicated to him on Rome's Tiber Island were discovered there only during its construction. Whereas that church's predecessor (first attested from 1016) was dedicated to a St. John, proof that J. was its titular is lacking.
In about 870 Anastasius Bibliothecarius translated J.'s pre-metaphrastic Bios (BHG 868) into Latin (BHL 4358); this text was later revised (BHL 4358b; also of Roman origin). After the mid-eleventh century someone probably belonging to or connected with the Amalfitan community in Constantinople translated J.'s metaphrastic Bios (BHG 869) into Latin; this version was published by Paolo Chiesa in 1995 but has yet to be entered in the Bollandists' online database _Bibliotheca Hagiographica Latina Manuscripta_. Although J. is said not to appear in western medieval calendars, he was certainly venerated at today's Caloveto (CS) in Calabria's Sila Greca, a town that takes its name from that of a local rupestrian monastery dedicated to him that is thought to have been founded in the eighth century (the eleventh-century St. Bartholomew of Grottaferrata entered religion there). Herewith a couple of views:
http://www.silagreca.it/comuni/images/caloveto04.jpg
http://www.silagreca.de/caloveto.html
3) Maurus, disciple of St. Benedict (6th cent.). Benedict of Nursia's disciple at Subiaco, M. had a fantastic afterlife at the abbey named for him at Glanfeuil (at Le Thoureil, Maine-et-Loire), where in the ninth century relics said to be his were discovered and where he received from abbot Odo both a splendidly anachronistic Vita (BHL 5772-74), supposedly written by a contemporary of M., Faustus of Montecassino, and a separate Miracula (BHL 5775-5776). Views of some medieval remains at this abbey supposedly founded by M. are here:
http://perso.orange.fr/erwan.levourch/stmaur1.htm
By the early eleventh century, when Lawrence of Amalfi wrote a Vita of him in verse (BHL5776m), M.'s cult had been accepted at Montecassino. For a discussion of one outstanding example of his eleventh-century reception here, see John B. Wickstrom, "Text and Image in the Making of a Holy Man: An Illustrated Life of Saint Maurus of Glanfeuil (MS Vat. Lat. 1202)", _Studies in Iconography_ 14 (1994), 53-85.
In the later Middle Ages M. was a widely venerated Benedictine saint. He is the patron of, among other places, Aci Castello (CT) in Sicily, where major festivities in his honor occur annually at this time, Castelnuovo Parano (FR) in southern Lazio, a former dependency of Montecassino, and San Mauro Torinese (TO) in Piedmont, where M. is said on the town's official website to have stopped, while on his sixth-century journey to what is now France, at the originally eighth- or ninth-century abbey around which the town grew up (it was only in 1420 that the town became San Mauro):
http://www.comune.sanmaurotorinese.to.it/comune_smt/storia.htm
A twelfth-century full-page illumination from a manuscript of the Rule of St. Benedict showing B. explaining the Rule to M. (Cambrai, Bibliothèque municipale, ms. 829, fol. 54v):
http://tinyurl.com/2x5wo4
This thirteenth-century reliquary of shrine of M. was discovered in 1985 in the chapel of the castle at Bečov nad Teplou in today's Czech Republic:
http://www.sweb.cz/stara.hospoda/relikviar.jpg
An English-language account with further views is here:
http://www.vitejte.cz/objekt.php?oid=806&j=en
Some views of the fourteenth- and late fifteenth-/early sixteenth-century fortified église Saint-Maur at Martel (Lot), a center of the late medieval and early modern vicomté de Turenne:
Exterior:
http://en.structurae.de/photos/index.cfm?JS=57873
http://img156.imageshack.us/img156/5363/marteleq3.jpg
http://tinyurl.com/23z7ne
http://en.structurae.de/photos/index.cfm?JS=57872
http://tinyurl.com/2rgeeq
Exterior, twelfth-century tympanum thought to have been retained from a predecessor:
http://tinyurl.com/3boot8
Interior:
http://tinyurl.com/3443yk
http://tinyurl.com/37egrw
http://tinyurl.com/3dq7zx
Filippo Lippi's portrait (ca. 1440-45) of M. at Benedict's bidding saving his companion Placidus (Gregory the Great, _Dial._, 2. 7) is reproduced here:
http://tinyurl.com/yktvu5
A late fifteenth-century (ca. 1470) illumination from a French-language version of the Golden Legend (Mâcon, Bibliothèque municipale, ms. 3, fol. 137v), showing M. curing a child who was both lame and mute:
http://tinyurl.com/2pjdfp
Best,
John Dillon
(Ephysius and Maurus, disciple of St. Benedict lightly revised from last year's post)
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