medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture

Today (9. February) is the feast day of:

1) Apollonia of Alexandria (d. 249). Like yesterday's Quinta/Coint(h)a, A. is a martyr of the anti-Christian riots in Alexandria in the year preceding the Decian persecution. According to Eusebius (_H. E._ 6. 41) or, more precisely, to an account by St. Dionysius of Alexandria from which Eusebius quotes, A. was a virgin advanced in years all of whose teeth were knocked out by blows to her jaw and who leaped onto the blazing pyre that had been prepared for her should she refuse to join the crowd in its blasphemous proclamations.

Since A.'s _elogia_ in Florus and in Ado specify that her persecutors knocked her teeth out, the common later understanding that A. (who has become patron of dentists) had her teeth extracted with a forceps would not seem to be down to Rufinus' translation of Eusebius' _Historia Ecclesiastica_.
A. is second from the left in the predella paintings of Simone Martini's Santa Caterina altarpiece (1319) at the Museo Nazionale di San Matteo in Pisa:
http://tinyurl.com/28cyzv
Here she is in the wing altar (ca. 1430-1440) of the Johanniskirche at Wernigerode in Sachsen-Anhalt:
http://tinyurl.com/3bucks
Here's Jean Fouquet's version of A.'s martyrdom:
http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immagine:Sainte_Apolline.jpg
A version from 1470 (Bibliothèque municipale de Chambéry, ms. 1, fol. 204):
http://tinyurl.com/2btky9
And a seemingly sixteenth-century one from the church of San Tommaso di Canterbury at Corenno Plinio, a _frazione_ of Dervio (LC) in Lombardy:
http://www.dervio.org/qd/luoghi/visite/affr5.htm

A Benedictine convent dedicated to A. was established in Florence in 1339. It was expanded starting in 1445 and was extensively frescoed by Andrea del Castagno between that year and 1450. The small part that remains is today's Museo di Andrea del Castagno. Some views are here:
http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cenacolo_di_Sant'Apollonia


2) Sabinus of Abellinum (d. early 6th cent.). Abellinum was the Roman predecessor of today's Campanian provincial capital of Avellino, which kept the name when it changed location in the early Middle Ages. Outside late antique Abellinum was a necropolis, some of whose Christian burials were honored in a hypogeum called "the martyrs' grotto" (_specus martyrum_; the veneration of saints at this locale is first attested from the year 357). A fourth-century basilican church was built on the site and around this grew the settlement that became medieval and modern Atripalda (first attested from 1086). Located in the grotto, now incorporated in the crypt under Atripalda's church of St. Hippolystus (S. Ippolisto), are the graves of Sabinus, bishop of Abellinum, and of his associate, the deacon Romulus, who outlived him.

We know nothing about either of these saints of the Regno other than what their late antique funerary inscriptions tell us: these allow a rough dating of both men by noting that Sabinus followed a bishop Timotheus (documented as being still in office in 499). Both inscriptions (Sabinus: _CIL_ X. 1194; Romulus: _CIL_ X. 1195) include verse epitaphs in elegiac distichs. Sabinus' funerary inscription gives today as his _dies natalis_.

Some medieval frescoing and sculptural fragments survive in the crypt of Atripalda's originally twelfth-century church of Sant'Ippolisto. The crypt, reopened to the public in 1998, is the subject of Giuseppe Mollo, _Specus Martyrum. Arte e Restauri_ (Viterbo: BetaGamma, 1998), whose cover is shown here:
http://www.betagamma.it/collane/cmc/descrizioni/31cmc.htm


3) Teilo (d. mid-6th cent., conventionally). T. (in Welsh, Deilo [as per usual, the 'd' is unvoiced];in Latin, Teliavus; in Breton, Teliau; in French,T[h]élo, T[h]éleau, T[h]éliau) is the saint of the church named for him, Llandeilo (later, to distinguish it from others, Llandeilo Fawr), in today's Llandeilo in Carmarthenshire. His cult and his bishop's church there are first attested in a few Latin and Old Welsh marginalia from the eighth and ninth (_aliter_, ninth and tenth) centuries in the surviving volume of the Lichfield Gospels and later in a section (_Braint Teilo_) of the Book of Llandaff that despite the latter's frequent inventions may have originated in the late tenth or early eleventh century. T.'s regional prominence was such that in his late eleventh-century Vita of St. David of St Davids (BHL 2107) Rhigyfarch ap Sulien claimed him for Mynyw (now St Davids), saying that he had been a monk there.

To judge from the distribution of surviving toponyms, the early center of T.'s cult will have been Llandeilo Fawr. But in the early twelfth century T. was appropriated by the new bishop of Llandaff and his family, whose assertion of their see's supposed archiepiscopal antiquity entailed the production of T.'s largely legendary Vita (BHL 7997). This claims him as the see's second incumbent, puts him on a par with the great Welsh saints David and Padarn, has him buried at Llandaff, and in an expanded version incorporated in the Book of Llandaff, where it is famously surrounded by a slew of forged charters, has him spend some years in Brittany in the company of archbishop St. Samson of Dol. For the remainder of the Middle Ages pilgrims visited T. in Llandaff Cathedral (of which he is one of five titulars).

Herewith two views of T.'s holy well at Llandeilo (he also has one on the grounds of Llandaff Cathedral):
http://www.enchantedtowy.co.uk/St-teilos-Well-2.gif
http://www.enchantedtowy.co.uk/St-Teilos-Well-1.gif

T.'s cult in Brittany is first evidenced from the later twelfth century. In default of any views of medieval churches dedicated to him (those of Saint-Thélo [Côtes-d'Armor] and Landeleau [Finistère] are now post-medieval), herewith a French-language page showing both a dolmen near Landeleau associated with T. and, in front of the the église paroissiale Saint-Thelo, a Gallo-Roman sarcophagus in which T. is said to have lain as a penitent:
http://www.landeleau.org/rubrique.php?catId=77&__w=1272

Back in Wales, as regular readers of this list will know, a medieval church (ca. 1100-1520) dedicated to T. at Pontarddulais in greater Swansea has, along with the mural paintings discovered in it, been moved to and re-assembled at the Welsh National History Museum at St Fagans. The latter's site on the reconstruction is here:
http://www.museumwales.ac.uk/en/teilo/
A podcast tour of the church (in English):
http://www.museumwales.ac.uk/en/rhagor/podcast/?id=280
A podcast tour of the church (in Welsh):
http://www.museumwales.ac.uk/en/rhagor/podcast/?id=282
A journalistic account of the move with an expandable view of the church on its original site:
http://tinyurl.com/bcn7q5

4) Sabinus of Canosa (d. 566?). Bishop of ancient Canusium, today's Canosa di Puglia (BAT) in Apulia, this saint of the Regno is known from several mentions in the _Dialogues_ of Gregory the Great as a friend of St. Benedict of Montecassino. He is thought to have accompanied pope John I on a mission to Constantinople in 525 and is recorded as the head of a papal delegation in that city in 535-36. He has an early ninth-century Vita (BHL 7443) and a complicated translation history bound up in part with the ecclesiastical politics of eleventh-century Bari, whose cathedral is dedicated to him. John the Archdeacon, better known as the author of the diocesan account of the translation of St. Nicholas of Myra to Bari, has an interesting narration of S.'s translation to this city (BHL 7445); also ascribed to John is a metrical Vita of S. in mostly epanaleptic elegiac distichs (BHL 7444).

Recent excavation at the site of Canosa's late antique cathedral of St. Peter has established through the widespread presence there of bricks bearing S.'s monogram:
http://tinyurl.com/cr9mom
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/it/0/04/Sansabino.jpg
that S. was responsible for building the entire cathedral and its adjoining cemetery complex and baptistery. See now Giuliano Volpe, "Architecture and Church Power in Late Antiquity: Canosa and San Giusto (_Apulia_)", in Luke Lavan, Lale Özgenel. and Alexander Sarantis, eds., _Housing in Late Antiquity: From Palaces to Shops_ (Leiden: Brill, 2007), pp. 131-68. A .pdf of that is downloadable here:
http://www.archeologia.unifg.it/ric/scavi/Pdf/Housing_in_Late_Antiquity_Volpe.pdf
And an illustrated, Italian-language page on the complex is here:
http://www.archeologia.unifg.it/ric/scavi/canosa_sp.asp

An inscription in Canosa's originally mid-eleventh-century cathedral of San Sabino records the building's re-dedication to S. in 1101 by pope Paschal II. Its immediate predecessor had been dedicated to Sts. John and Paul. Much rebuilt, it is notable for its eleventh-century ambo and episcopal chair as well as for its annexed tomb of Bohemond of Antioch. An illustrated, Italian-language page on this church is here:
http://www.canusium.it/Pages/Luoghi/Normanno/normanno.htm
Views of the ambo (NB: the viewer at the first of these pages can be slow to load):
http://tinyurl.com/dee7nd
http://tinyurl.com/bzfuvb
http://www.campidiomedei.it/ambone.gif
Further views of the episcopal chair:
http://tinyurl.com/cmksv3
http://tinyurl.com/df4xvl
http://flickr.com/photos/28433765@N07/2902149021/sizes/l/
For an extended discussion, see Ann Wharton Epstein, "The Date and Significance of the Cathedral of Canosa in Apulia, South Italy", _Dumbarton Oaks Papers_ 37 (1983), 79-90.

An illustrated, Italian-language account of Bari's twelfth-century cathedral of San Sabino is here:
http://www.bennyweb.it/Bari/Foto_04_Cattedrale.htm
A website on this church:
http://www.mondimedievali.net/Reporter/Bari/cattedrale.htm
Illustrated, Italian-language accounts of aspects of its restoration:
http://www.mondimedievali.net/Rec/cattedrale.htm
http://www.mondimedievali.net/Rec/cattedrale03.htm
http://www.mondimedievali.net/Rec/cattedrale02.htm
Three interior views are here:
http://www.bennyweb.it/Bari/Foto_05_CattedraleInt.htm
A detail of the reconstructed ambo:
http://www.immaginidistoria.it/immagine2.php?id_img=38&id=8

An Italian-language account account of the crypt of S.'s cathedral in Bari:
http://www.enec.it/Cripte/SanSabino/Luogo.htm
A plan and various views of this church's crypt:
http://www.enec.it/Cripte/SanSabino/Pianta.htm
http://www.enec.it/Cripte/SanSabino/Costruzione.htm
http://www.enec.it/Cripte/SanSabino/Soccorpo.htm
And here's S.'s altar therein:
http://www.enec.it/Cripte/SanSabino/index.htm
An Italian-language account of the examination in 1992 of Bari's supposed relics of S.:
http://tinyurl.com/ytempg

Best,
John Dillon
(Apollonia of Alexandria, Sabinus of Abellinum, and Sabinus of Canosa lightly revised from last year's post)

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