medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture

Today (29. July) is the feast day of:

1) Martha of Bethany (d. 1st cent.). M., the sister of Mary of Bethany and of Lazarus of Bethany, appears three times in the Gospels, at Luke 10: 38-42, John 11: 1-44, and John 12:1-3. In a later medieval legend popular in the Latin West, e.g. in her late twelfth- or early thirteenth-century Vita by pseudo-Marcilia (BHL 5545-5546), she accompanied Mary Magdalen (considered the same person as Mary of Bethany) and Lazarus to Provence and there was active as a missionary before dying at, and being buried at, Tarascon, the town she had freed from a man-eating monster (in modern French, la Tarasque). Here's an English-language translation of M.'s Vita in the _Legenda Aurea_:
http://www.catholic-forum.com/saints/golden239.htm

Some visuals:

Mary (Magdalene) and M., representing the contemplative and the active life (early fifteenth-cent.):
http://saints.bestlatin.net/gallery/marymartha_dutchms.htm
Domestic Martha with penitents (Swabia, late fifteenth-century):
http://tinyurl.com/6pvps7
Domestic _and_ contemplative Martha (Isabella Breviary; 1497):
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Saint_martha.jpg

M. (holding the Tarasque) as a protector of travelers (fourteenth-century; Petites Heures de Jean de Berry; BnF, ms. lat. 18014, fol. 181v):
http://tinyurl.com/65o3f5
Two fifteenth-century depictions of M. with the Tarasque:
a) Breviary for the Use of Paris (ca. 1414; Châteauroux, Bibliothèque municipale, ms. 2, fol. 254v):
http://tinyurl.com/676rwc
b) Missal for the Use of Aix-en-Provence (1424; Aix-en-Provence, Bibliothèque municipale, ms. 11, p. 668):
http://tinyurl.com/64bfmx
M. (treading on the Tarasque) and Mary Magdalene, among the early sixteenth-century paintings of protectors of travelers, chapelle Notre-Dame de Benva, Lorgues (Var):
http://lorgues.free.fr/benva/ste-madeleine2.jpg
Detail (M.):
http://lorgues.free.fr/col-chapelles/benva-ste-marthe.jpg
Two illustrated, French-language sites on this chapel:
http://lorgues.free.fr/benva1.html
http://www.culture.gouv.fr/culture/medieval/francais/e-gale.htm

M.'s supposed relics are in the collégiale Ste.-Marthe at Tarascon (Bouches-du-Rhône):
Illustrated, English-language account:
http://www.tarascon.org/en/patrimoine_collegiale.php
Exterior views:
http://tinyurl.com/5jvorg
http://tinyurl.com/68ru3g
Interior views:
http://paroisse-de-tarascon.over-blog.com/album-333407.html
http://tinyurl.com/5tolet
M.'s sarcophagus in the crypt:
http://tinyurl.com/lonzjc


2) Mary of Bethany and Lazarus of Bethany (d. 1st cent.). Martha (see above) is the only one of the three siblings of Bethany now present in the general Roman Calendar. But her sister Mary and her brother Lazarus too are commemorated in the RM under 29. July, albeit in a separate elogium. M., long supposed in the church of Rome to be identical with Mary Magdalene, had been celebrated in the West through the latter's feast on 22. July (in Orthodox churches, Martha and Mary, the latter distinguished from Mary Magdalene, are celebrated on 4. June). L. had previously had a Roman Calendar feast of his own on 17. December.

In Orthodox churches L. is celebrated on 17. October, commemorating his late ninth-century translation by the emperor Leo VI from Kition/Larnaka on Cyprus to Constantinople and the deposition of his relics in a newly built church there (according to Greek legend, the Bethany trio had been put to sea in a leaking boat by hostile Jews but had by divine providence arrived safely at Cyprus, where L. had been made bishop of Kition and where all three had died peacefully). Some views of L.'s church (Ayios Lazaros) at Larnaka in Cyprus, built in the ninth century and restored in the seventeenth:
Exterior:
http://tinyurl.com/kjjnem
http://www.pbase.com/image/74167286
http://tinyurl.com/m38xkw
http://tinyurl.com/m4xz54
Interior:
http://tinyurl.com/nh4cbz
http://tinyurl.com/6gw5m9
L.'s former tomb in the crypt:
http://tinyurl.com/kuy4uw
http://tinyurl.com/nux99e
The Sacred Destinations page on this church:
http://tinyurl.com/ntyr5w

In the Latin West, from at least the eleventh century onward the presence in the crypt of St.-Victor at Marseille of the tomb of a fifth-century bishop of Aix-en-Provence also named Lazarus conduced to the belief that our L.'s remains reposed or had reposed there. In 1147 relics claimed to be L.'s (and said to have been translated from Marseille) were placed in a shrine in a church dedicated to him at Autun (Saône-et-Loire) in Burgundy that later became that city's cathedral. Herewith some illustrated sites on that well known monument:
http://www.sacred-destinations.com/france/autun-cathedral
http://www.romanes.com/Autun/
http://tinyurl.com/68j8rm

Another dedication to L. in Burgundy is his originally late eleventh- and twelfth-century church at Avallon (Yonne). Some illustrated pages on it:
http://tinyurl.com/68twd2
http://tinyurl.com/58oqde
http://tinyurl.com/5kbp6n

In the thirteenth century there developed a legend (BHL 4802, etc.) to the effect that the Bethany trio (with Mary identified, as was customary in the Latin West, with Mary Magdalene) had arrived by boat in Provence and had evangelized in the region, that L. had been made bishop of Marseille, and that he had been martyred there under Domitian. Here they are (with others) arriving at Marseille as depicted by Giotto and assistants from the earlier (first quarter) fourteenth-century Mary Magdalen cycle in the Cappella della Maddalena, Basilica Inferiore, Assisi:
http://tinyurl.com/mlusyf
Marseille too has claimed to possess L.'s relics. Here's a view of its set as shown in a nineteenth-century display reliquary in that city's cathedral:
http://tinyurl.com/l7zhou


3) Flora and Lucilla (d. 2d cent., supposedly). According to their legendary Passio (BHL 5017, etc.), the Christian Roman virgins Flora and Lucilla were taken prisoner in a raid by the barbarian king Eugegius and brought to his homeland, where, captivated by their beauty, he attempted to seduce them. But their firm and persistant refusals so impressed him that he granted these ladies high rank and himself converted to Christianity. After the passage of twenty years the Lord urged F. and L. in a dream to return to Rome in order to undergo martyrdom. Accompanied by E., they did return and all three were martyred along with various others named and unnamed.

This legend, whose earliest surviving versions were recognized by Lanzoni as fairly faithful reproductions of that purveyed in the Passio of Sts. Luceia and Auceia (BHL 4980), appears to have originated at the Benedictine monastery of Flora and Lucilla near (later, in) Arezzo, founded from Montecassino in the very early tenth century. The cult itself does not seem to be much older; during the central Middle Ages it was diffused principally in southern Tuscany and nearby Umbria by the Aretine monastery, which had substantial holdings in the region. Later it spread more widely in Europe.

In 1196 the commune of Arezzo compelled the monastery to relocate to within the city proper, where it has occupied the same site since 1209. Subsequent re-building of its church, involving such famous Quattro- and Cinquecento names as Giuliano da Maiano and Giorgio Vasari, has effaced most of the medieval structure. But there remains this crucifix, dated to 1319 and attributed to Segna di Bonaventura:
http://tinyurl.com/nfyx6
Reliquary busts of F. and L. may be seen here (in a baroque grandma's attic of a chapel):
http://tinyurl.com/o8xzr

Literary monuments dealing with F. and L. include two sermons by Peter Damian (nos. 34-35; _Patrologia Latina_, vol. 144, cols. 687-93) and the seemingly early twelfth-century _Augmentatio passionis Florae et Lucillae_, an impressive prosimetrum edited by Edoardo D'Angelo in his "Il dossier delle sante Flora e Lucilla e la 'Augmentatio passionis' (BHL 5021c)," _Hagiographica_ 8 (2001), 121-64.

F. and L. were dropped in 2001 from the RM, where previously they had been commemorated along with Eugegius (whose name the RM normalized to Eugenius) and with other, unnamed companions. They are still celebrated today as the patron saints of Santa Fiora (GR) in southern Tuscany. Here's an illustrated, Italian-language page on Santa Fiora's originally twelfth-/fifteenth-century pieve delle Sante Flora e Lucilla (most views are of polychrome reliefs from the workshop of Andrea della Robbia):
http://tinyurl.com/m9sk7v


4) Simplicius, Faustinus, Viatrix, and Rufus (?). S., F., V. (who used to be known as Beatrix), and R. are Roman martyrs of the cemetery of Generosa on the Via Portuensis recorded (with the exception of R.) for today in the (pseudo-)Hieronymian Martyrology.

In 683, according to the _Liber Pontificalis_, pope Leo II translated the remains of S., F., and V. (as B.) to an oratory near the church of Santa Bibiana. When that oratory was destroyed a sarcophagus bearing an inscription naming the martyrs S. and F. and saying that they had been buried in the cemetery of Generosa was transferred to Santa Maria Maggiore where it still was in the early 1960s. In 1868 the cemetery of Generosa was discovered and partly excavated. Inscriptions in the remains of its basilica attested to the commemoration there of S., F., Viatrix (as the fragment of her Damasan _titulus_ proved her name to have been spelled in the mid-fourth century), and R. (who in consequence of this discovery has now been included in the commemoration).


5) Felix II, (anti)pope (d. 365). F., archdeacon at Rome, was elected pope in 355 early in the exile of the initially anti-Arian Liberius, whom he predeceased. He was unable to quell the opposition of most of his clergy and of the citizenry, who preferred L. to their Arian-accommodating incumbent. The emperor Constantius II acceded to this reality by allowing L. to return in 358 and from then until F.'s death there were two bishops of Rome, with F.'s position becoming much the weaker. In time, as evidenced by their Vitae in the Liber Pontificalis, F. came to be viewed as a martyr who had died upholding Nicene Christianity, while L., who did eventually capitulate to Constantius, was viewed as a traitor to orthodoxy.

Here's F., shown with the martyrs Simplicius and Viatrix/Beatrix (see no. 3, above), in a later fourteenth-century Roman Missal (Avignon, Bibliothèque municipale, ms. 136, fol. 257):
http://tinyurl.com/645v84


6) Olaf of Norway (d. 1030). Olaf II Haraldsson became king of Norway in 1015, reconquered areas that had been under the control of Danes and Swedes, and effected, partly by force, the conversion to Christianity of his then still largely pagan country. A rebellion forced him from his throne in 1028; he died two years later trying to regain it and was buried at what much later became Trondheim. O.'s son Magnus promoted his veneration as a saint and built a chapel at his grave. In 1075 that chapel was replaced by a cathedral (now the cathedral of Nidaros). The later twelfth-century archbishop of Nidaros, St. Eystein (also spelled Øystein; latinized as Augustinus) wrote the Passio preserved in O.'s Office (BHL 6322, 6324). A paper on it by Eyolf Østrem is here:
http://hem.passagen.se/obrecht/leeds99.htm

O.'s mid-thirteenth-century statue at Tyldal kirke in Østerdalen:
http://home.broadpark.no/~jantaule/helgener/helgener.htm
http://aomoi.net/blog/arkiv/960
An English-language site on the much rebuilt cathedral of Nidaros:
http://www.nidarosdomen.no/english/nidaroscathedral/
O.'s spring in the cathedral:
http://www.trondheim.com/content.ap?thisId=1117611476
An illustrated, English-language page on the cathedral's early fourteenth-century St Olav altar frontal (thanks again to John Shinners for sharing this with the list last year):
http://www.niku.no/olavsfro/english/1_olavs.htm

Some O.-related visuals outside of Norway:
O. in the mid-fifteenth-century vault paintings in Överselö kyrka in Strängnäs kommun (Södermanlands län):
http://tinyurl.com/2tl5qx
O. on the fifteenth-century rood screen at St Michael, Barton Turf (Norfolk):
http://tinyurl.com/5vaj5w
An English-language page on, and some views of, the originally mostly fifteenth-century St Olave's church in Chester (restored, 1859):
http://tinyurl.com/ks27ee
http://tinyurl.com/nu5znz
http://www.flickr.com/photos/clivester/3356470592/sizes/l/
An English-language page on, and some views of, the originally late medieval St. Olav's church in Tallinn:
http://tinyurl.com/kpmxc6
http://tinyurl.com/m28j2w
http://tinyurl.com/nnsau3
http://tinyurl.com/mtk95w

Best,
John Dillon
(last year's post revised; Flora and Lucilla revised from an older post)

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