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medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Today (16. July) is the feast day of:
1) Helier (d. 6th cent.?). H. (in Latin, Helerius; in Jèrriais, Hélyi) is the eponym of St. Helier on Jersey. He has a legendary Passio (BHL 3797) that makes him the son of pagan parents (his father a Batavian, his mother a Sueve) who was raised as a Christian by a priest who had cured him of paralysis and whom H.'s father later killed. By that time H., who willingly shared his garden with rabbits, had already operated several miracles. He was divinely inspired to seek out St. Marculf (the founder of Nanteuil), whose disciple he became and who after several years sent him to a largely depopulated Jersey, which then was suffering from raids by Northmen.
H. dwelt on a rocky islet off the southern coast of Jersey for over fifteen years, living very austerely and miraculously healing the afflicted. When H. had been there for three years Marculf visited him and the two by their prayers brought about the destruction of a fleet of Northmen that had been about to attack the island. Knowing when he was about to die, he sought out a group of the raiders who were now all over Jersey, one of whom obligingly decapitated him. Whereupon the martyr H. joined the ranks of Francia's numerous cephalophores. Marculf found his body and put it in a boat. The latter miraculously bore H. to the town of St. Helier, where he was buried on this day _non sine miraculis_.
Thus far H.'s Passio. His medieval cult is attested not only on Jersey (where in 1155 a monastery was founded on an islet off St. Helier identified with the islet of the Passio) but also at Le Mans and in Brittany, Normandy, and Picardy. H. is the patron saint both of Jersey and of St. Helier. Here's a view of H.'s islet with what is now called his hermitage:
http://tinyurl.com/55cx3p
2) Monulph (d. late 6th cent.) and Gondulph (d. early 7th cent.). M. and G. are poorly attested bishops of the diocese of Tongeren (Tongres), whose seat from the sixth century onward was in Maastricht. M. has several Vitae (BHL 6012-6018) derived from a Vita of the perhaps fourth-century St. Servatius (Servais, Servaas; 13. May); these ascribe to him, rather than to his predecessor St. Domitian, the moving of the episcopal seat to Maastricht and the building there of a church over S.'s grave. Other building projects are ascribed to M., as is also the founding of the church of Liège. G., if he really existed, is thought to have been M.'s immediate successor. In 1039 bodies said to be those of M. and G. were accorded an Elevatio in Maastricht's church of St. Servatius in the presence of emperor Henry III.
3) Reineldis, Grimoald, and Gondulph (d. 7th cent.). According to her perhaps later ninth-century Passio (BHL 7082), R. (also Raineldis, Renelde, Reinhild) was a daughter of St. Amalburga (10. July) and a sister of St. Gudula (8. January). She is said to have gone on pilgrimage to the Holy Land and on her return to have been slain by barbarian raiders at today's Saintes in Belgian Hainaut. In this perhaps not altogether trustworthy account the subdeacon Grimoald and her servant Gondulph are her companions in martyrdom. R.'s cult has been thought to have been fairly immediate (an Elevatio by a bishop of Cambrai is recorded for her at Saintes in 866), though the suspicion exists that much of her early dossier is the work of the monastery of Lobbes, which claimed to have received her relics in ca. 1170 (a commemorative Translation account, from Lobbes, is BHL 7082b).
Here's an earlier sixteenth-century (ca. 1525) statue depicting R. as a pilgrim:
http://tinyurl.com/5pxfgl
R.'s present church at Saintes dates from the earlier sixteenth century. Two thumbnail views of it are here:
http://www.pixelsbw.com/tubize/saintes.htm
A slightly better view of the tower:
http://tinyurl.com/5wdrkh
A view of the compound containing R.'s holy well at Saintes (R. was invoked especially for afflictions of the eyes):
http://tinyurl.com/5fgqz2
4) Vitalian of Osimo (d. 776?). The tradition at Osimo (AN) in the Marche, and now in the archdiocese of Ancona-Osimo, is that V. succeeded St. Leopard (20. October) as Osimo's bishop and finished building the cathedral that the latter had begun. But it is not certain that Leopard was ever bishop -- though he was certainly so thought of in the later Middle Ages -- and reliable information about the historical V. is lacking. At Catanzaro (CZ) in Calabria a saint V., now thought to be the Campanian V. of Capua, has been celebrated on this day since the twelfth century; though Catanzaro and Osimo (the latter, by the way, is a proparoxytone) are in widely separated regions of Italy, there has long been a suspicion that the two originally were identical. The present V. has yet to grace the pages of the RM.
In this early fifteenth-century polyptych at Osimo, V. is the first (going from center) of the two bishops in the upper right:
http://tinyurl.com/66xzpr
5) Sisenandus of Córdoba (d. 851). We know about S. from St. Eulogius of Córdoba's _Memoriale sanctorum_. A native of Beja in today's southern Portugal (though he has also been thought to have come from Badajoz in Estremadura), he was deacon of the church of St. Acisclus at Córdoba. Stimulated by a vision of the recent martyrs Peter and Walabonsus (7. June), he turned himself in to the authorities during the wave of challenges to Islam that produced the Martyrs of Córdoba, blasphemed against the Prophet, and was executed by decapitation on this day. According to Eulogius, while in jail S. predicted the exact moment at which a guard would come to take him to his death.
6) Our Lady of Mount Carmel (1st cent./1251, supposedly). This Marian feast of Carmelite origin was instituted in the later fourteenth century in commemoration of the BVM's appearance to St. Simon Stock, believed to have occurred on this day in 1251. The early modern dates of the feast's papal approval and extension to the entire church (Latin-rite) are beyond the purview of this list. Herewith some views of originally fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Carmelite churches in various parts of today's Italy:
Orvieto (TR) in Umbria, chiesa di Santa Maria del Carmine (images expandable):
http://www.comune.orvieto.tr.it/I/39D109AF.htm
Mogoro (OR) in Sardinia, chiesa di Santa Maria del Carmine:
http://tinyurl.com/2mpmjx
http://tinyurl.com/lkz5tc
http://tinyurl.com/3de6k2
Pavia (PV) in Lombardy, chiesa di Santa Maria del Carmine (1374-1461;nineteenth-century facade):
http://tinyurl.com/3aysqm
http://tinyurl.com/2o568d
http://tinyurl.com/2qje5o
http://www.cantoambrosiano.com/DSC_0049.JPG
Milan (MI) in Lombardy, chiesa di Santa Maria del Carmine (1399-1400; nineteenth-century facade):
http://www.pbase.com/ugpini/image/36997420
http://www.pbase.com/amlobcas/image/89688688
http://www.pbase.com/amlobcas/image/85886057
Modica (RG) in Sicily, chiesa di Santa Maria del Carmine, whose portal and rose window are rare survivors of the great earthquake of 1693:
http://www.guidemodica.it/luoghi_il_carmine.htm
http://tinyurl.com/2nhpym
http://tinyurl.com/34ttru
Sciacca (AG) in Sicily, chiesa di Santa Maria del Carmine (in its present state, a contender for the Ugliest Church award):
http://tinyurl.com/yqpo4a
http://sicilyweb.com/foto/262/262-11-10-46-1310.jpg
Instead of Florence's much rebuilt Santa Maria del Carmine with its famous fifteenth-century paintings in the Brancacci Chapel, herewith two views of the remaining frescoes of the chiesetta del Carmine at Oneta (BG) in Lombardy:
http://www.brembana.info/borghi/oneta/oneta4.html
http://www.brembana.info/borghi/oneta/oneta5.html
Suelli (CA) in Sardinia, the originally fifteenth-/sixteenth-century chiesa di Santa Maria del Carmine:
http://static.panoramio.com/photos/original/2937254.jpg
http://tinyurl.com/nyarcx
http://tinyurl.com/kq6dua
Best,
John Dillon
(last year's post lightly revised)
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