medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Today (15. May) is also the feast day of:
Liberator (?). This saint of the Regno has left no known Acta. Once widely venerated in the Beneventan cultural area and beyond, he has left his name in toponyms from Umbria and the Marche to southern Campania. Some not totally bereft of Greek identify him with the St. Eleutherius of 18. April. It will surprise few on this list to learn that L. was said to have been a martyr and that he was sometimes also thought of as having been a bishop.
L.'s principal monument is his monastery church of San Liberatore a Maiella (also "alla Maiella") at Serramonacesca (PE) in Abruzzo, in its present form a later eleventh- to thirteenth-century structure restored from 1967 to 1971 and once serving a monastery that for much of its active existence was a major dependency of Montecassino. A brief, illustrated, English-language account is here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Liberatore_a_Maiella
and the Italian-language page from which that was taken is here (same three views; bibliography not present in the English-language version):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Liberatore_a_Maiella
Here's the church's page at Italia nell'Arte Medievale:
http://tinyurl.com/466fbu
More views here (incl. two good ones of the reconstructed ambo):
http://tinyurl.com/4xnuhu
Another noteworthy place of L.'s medieval veneration is today's Monte San Liberatore between Cava de' Tirreni and Vietri sul Mare in the vicinity of Salerno. A women's monastery with an _ecclesia sancti Liberatoris_, recorded on this elevation as early as 979, became in the following century a dependency of the abbey of the Most Holy Trinity at Cava de' Tirreni. We have the names of some of its abbesses in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. By 2. July 1338 the sisters, still keeping their identity as a community of St. L., had moved to Salerno and were residing there in the monastery of St. Sophia. In the seventeenth century the monastery on the mountain had become a male hermitage. Abandoned in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, the site was reoccupied in 1948 and a new church, dedicated to Christ Liberator of the Universe, was built over what had been one of its later medieval predecessor's two aisles.
Here are a few views of Monte San Liberatore and of the present hermitage on it:
http://tinyurl.com/5qfgck
http://tinyurl.com/6c4t74
http://tinyurl.com/qeule7
http://tinyurl.com/5fa4xs
http://tinyurl.com/67m5ly
(Yes, those crosses are lit at night.)
L. has never graced the pages of the RM. Though his cult seems now largely in abeyance, he is still celebrated on 15. May (his usual late medieval feast day) at the former cathedral dedicated to him in Magliano Sabina (RI) in eastern Lazio and in the _frazione_ of Cappella San Liberatore in Ariano Irpino (AV) in south-central Campania, where he is traditionally considered a former bishop of Ariano. Here's an aerial view of L.'s church at Magliano Sabina:
http://tinyurl.com/ooa3h2
And here's an Italian-language page on the history of his cult there:
http://www.sabinamente.info/index/home_file/Page578.htm
At Civitacampomarano (CB) in Molise, where L. is the patron saint, he is celebrated on 13. May.
An L. who may be the same saint has a moveable feast on the last Sunday in August at his much rebuilt, originally early fifteenth-century church at likewise Campanian Massa Lubrense (NA) on the western end of the Sorrentine peninsula. An Italian-language page on this L.'s cult at Massa Lubrense is here:
http://sit.provincia.napoli.it/md.asp?key=1129
A better view of the church:
http://www.massalubrense.it/canon/sliberatore2.jpg
Best,
John Dillon
(A post from 1. Sep. 2008 lightly revised)
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