medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Today (20. February) is the feast day of:
1) Martyrs of Tyre (d. early 4th cent.). Formerly commemorated under this rubric were five clerics who perished at different times and places relatively early in the Great Persecution (Tyrannion, bishop of Tyre, martyred at Antioch; Silvanus, bishop of Emesa, martyred at Emesa; Peleus and Nilus, martyred in Palestine; bishops from Egypt; and Zenobius, priest of the church of Sidon, martyred at Antioch). Their joint commemoration seems to have been the brainchild of St. Ado of Vienne, who without specifying their particular churches brought together these saints from different accounts in Eusebius and who fashioned for his martyrology under today's date a synthetic account of them and their different manners of execution as well as of unnamed others _quorum numerus solius Dei scientia colligit_ ('whose number is known to God alone'), all supposedly martyred at Tyre.
Usuard's abbreviation of Ado's account retained its essentials, again naming the aforementioned five (with Nilus appearing as Linus, as he had already in the second version of Ado) and again assigning Tyre as their common place of martyrdom. In U.'s version, though, the named martyrs are made more clearly representative of the whole through the device of re-assigning their particular modes of execution to the martyrs of Tyre as a generality. Until its revision of 2001 the RM essentially followed suit, perhaps in the belief that the ninth-century Ado was better informed about the place of suffering of the five named martyrs than was his source, the late third-/early fourth-century Eusebius (whom Ado will have read in Rufinus' translation). The RM in its 2001 version has separate commemorations (not all on this date) for the named five. Its elogium for the Martyrs of Tyre specifies five martyrs but does not name them.
In the Maronite church the number of the Martyrs of Tyre is put at 500 (really just another form of expressing considerable multitude).
2) Eleutherius of Tournai (d. earlier 5th cent.). E. is the chiefly legendary protobishop of Tournai (Doornik) in Belgian Hainaut. His core dossier (a Vita in different forms plus supplementary accounts; BHL 2455-2470) seems in the form in which we have it to have been begun at Tournai in the twelfth century both to document an existing cult and to support attempts to re-erect Tournai as a separate diocese (it was then joined with Noyon). Opinions differ on the extent, if any, to which one may rely on its data concerning either the saint himself or his earlier veneration. E.'s own existence may be inferred from the early sixth-century prose Vita of St. Medardus formerly attributed to Venantius Fortunatus (BHL 5864). His relics are said to have been found in 897 in a church in nearby Blandain and to have been translated to Tournai in the time of Baldwin, bishop of Noyon-Tournai (r., 1044/45-1068).
At Tournai and in its diocese E. enjoyed an important cult from at least the late eleventh century onward. A major monument is his châsse of 1247. A French-language account is here:
http://tinyurl.com/2gs59v
Some views:
http://www.westga.edu/~rtekippe/038%20Untitled-5.jpg
http://tinyurl.com/yd4jmqx
http://tinyurl.com/yeg4hs5
http://tinyurl.com/y8g8fzj
http://tinyurl.com/yaes9vo
http://i29.servimg.com/u/f29/11/61/74/35/eleuth15.jpg
Detail (St. Barnabas):
http://www.heiligenlexikon.de/Fotos/Barnabas.jpg
Detail (St. James the Great):
http://www.radiocamino.net/images/tournai-5.jpg
http://tinyurl.com/23qpr8
Tournai's originally twelfth-century cathédrale Notre-Dame / Onze-Lieve-Vrouw kathedraal is an UNESCO World Heritage site:
Illustrated, English-language accounts:
http://www.trabel.com/tournai/tournai-cathedral.htm
http://www.sacred-destinations.com/belgium/tournai-cathedral
http://tinyurl.com/27vm2r
Illustrated, French-language accounts:
http://tinyurl.com/2pbpgc
http://www.tournai.be/fr/officiel/index.php?page=230
Illustrated, Dutch-language account:
http://www.tournai.be/nl/officiel/index.php?page=24
Views (exterior):
http://tinyurl.com/2tctkv
http://tinyurl.com/34nbnr
E. on the West portal:
http://tinyurl.com/2ngmfd
http://tinyurl.com/24lr32
Views (interior):
http://tinyurl.com/27c24w
http://tinyurl.com/yzfxc34
Views (exterior and interior):
http://tinyurl.com/28d8hb
Plan:
http://tinyurl.com/2a2txg
Some views of E.'s originally eleventh-century church at Esquelmes, a village in the municipality of Pecq in the Belgian province of Hainaut:
http://tinyurl.com/35z5fd
3) Leo of Catania (d. 7th or 8th cent.). From 591 to 604 pope St. Gregory the Great wrote a number of letters to a bishop of Catania of this name and also referred to him in letters directed to others. In one of the latter (14. 1 Ewald-Hartmann), L. is said to act severely against illdoers (_malefici_), possibly magicians. This L. is perhaps the historic referent of the otherwise legendary saint Leo, bishop of Catania in the eighth century, the hero of a Bios surviving in a polished longer version thought to have been written somewhere in the Greek East (BHG 981b; variously dated to the eighth or ninth century and from the location of its surviving witness sometimes called the Moscow version) and of a shorter and, in its surviving witnesses, somewhat truncated Italo-Greek version (BHG 981; dated to the late eighth or earlier ninth century). The dates of both versions are conjectural. BHG 981 seems to be closer in content and in arrangement to their now lost ancestor.
That text makes L. an overseer of church property at Ravenna who in the absence of acceptable local candidates was chosen to fill the see of Catania, who struggled mightily with an evil and blasphemous thaumaturge named Heliodorus, and who cured a woman of a hitherto incurable bloody flux (on which latter cf. Luke 8:43-48). Most of this Bios concerns the struggle with Heliodorus (a.k.a. Liodorus), in which L. operates holy magic to overcome the achievements of his diabolically inspired and imperially condemned opponent, capturing him with his stole after he had profaned a service at Catania and, without damage either to his own hand or to the stole, holding him in a fire until he is burned to death. In a slightly fuller Latin version (BHL 4838), L. also destroys a pagan cult statue surviving from the days of the emperor Decius.
L.'s cult travelled to Constantinople (in Byzantine synaxaries he's remembered on 21. February) and elsewhere in the Greek-speaking world. Other texts participating in this tradition include Greek hymns by the ninth-century St. Joseph the Hymnographer and by the eleventh-century St. Bartholomew of Grottaferrata, a verse Bios (BHG 981c) preserved in the first volume (Messanensis gr. 30) of the famous menologion written in 1307 or 1308 for the monastery of Santissimo Salvatore at Messina, and Latin hymns from L.'s late medieval Office at Catania.
Heliodorus has survived at Catania in the name (U Liotru) of the mostly basalt late antique elephant which in the Middle Ages stood over one of the city gates and which led Arabic-speakers to refer to Catania as Medina el-fil ('City of the Elephant'). The city's official symbol since 1239, in the eighteenth century it was made part of a sculptural confection adorning a fountain in the Piazza Duomo:
http://tinyurl.com/cz4adj
http://web.tiscali.it/andreacatania/catania/gallery/CT06.jpg
http://web.tiscali.it/andreacatania/catania/gallery/CT05.jpg
The church of San Leone at Saracena (CS) in Calabria, rebuilt in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, has been dedicated to today's L. since the thirteenth century. Herewith two views of its originally fourteenth-century belltower:
http://tinyurl.com/ytmlm9
http://tinyurl.com/bdm8ca
At today's Rometta (ME) in northeastern Sicily (once famous, when it was still Rametta, for being the last East Roman stronghold in Sicily), the former abbey church of San Leone vescovo is a sixteenth- and twentieth-century rebuilding, after earthquakes, of the twelfth-century chapel of what had been a Cistercian grange:
http://tinyurl.com/yathlof
The dedication to L. reinforces a local tradition that identifies a grotto on the site as one in which he had resided as an hermit.
An even older and somewhat better preserved building in Rometta is its orginally sixth- to tenth-century chiesa di San Salvatore (of chiesa di Gesù e Maria), also known as Rometta's chiesa bizantina:
http://tinyurl.com/yzoah2d
http://tinyurl.com/yglzx2r
L. is the patron saint not only of Saracena and of Rometta but also, again in northeastern Sicily, of Longi (ME) and of Sinagra (ME). In all of these once Greek-speaking towns he is the subject of a popular cult, evidenced -- in addition to the usual patronal festivals -- by the presence of cult figures, such as this seated L. in an _edicola_ (votive shrine) at Longi:
http://tinyurl.com/cj8sct
4) Eucherius of Orléans (d. 738 or 739, supposedly). We know about E. (in French, Eucher) from a Vita (BHL 2660) that presents itself as closely posthumous but that in the view of Jacques Le Maho probably was written in the mid-tenth century by Anno, abbot of Jumièges (in Normandy) and of Micy (near Orléans). According to this account, E. was the offspring of noble parents who lived in the vicinity of Orléans. When E. was still in the womb an angel appeared to his mother as she was dropping off to sleep after returning from matins, informed her that she was carrying a future bishop, and gave both her and her seed a divine blessing. E.'s mother promptly conveyed this news to her husband and he, bolstered by fear and joy, refrained from further intercourse with his wife until E. was born.
At the age of eight E. was handed over to be educated. He surpassed all before him and continually absorbed either by reading or by hearing the written knowledge of all men. After he had thoroughly scrutinized all the teaching of the canons, St. Paul's observations about the transitory nature of this world and about the wisdom of this world being foolishness in God's sight (1 Cor 7:31, 8:19) came into his hands and he entered the monastery at Jumièges. Elected to succeed his uncle Soavaricus [in other sources, Savaricus] as bishop of Orléans, E. accepted with reluctance. During his tenure he adorned churches, loved the clergy, corrected the people through his preaching, and regularly visited the numerous monasteries about Orléans, treating their inhabitants with charity and fraternity.
Although E. was loved by all, his growing fame caused him in time to be slandered before Charles Martel by some who hoped to benefit from a redistribution of his offices. After Charles had won his victory over the Saracens who had invaded Aquitania he exiled E. first to Köln and then to the Hesbaye (de Haspengouw) in today's Belgium. There E. entered the monastery of Saint-Trond (Sint-Truiden), dying in that house in the sixth year of his exile. Postmortem miracles confirmed his sanctity. Thus far E.'s Vita. A later version (BHL 2661) incorporates from the Vita of St. Rigobertus of Reims a report of E.'s having been translated to the next world while at prayer and of his there seeing Charles in torment in Hell.
Best,
John Dillon
(last year's post revised and with the addition of Eucherius of Orléans)
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