medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture

Today (14. May) is the feast day of:

1)  Matthias, apostle (d. 1st cent.).  According to Acts 1:21-26, after the Ascension M. was chosen by lot to replace Judas.  After that he disappears from the New Testament.  By the second century he had become popular with Gnostics in Egypt.  Though Clement of Alexandria quotes one of their number (Heracleon) as saying that M. died peacefully, by far the more common view was that he had preached among the savages and cannibals of Ethiopia and had there been martyred.  A Gnostic Gospel was written in M.'s name, while he and St. Andrew are the joint protagonists of a legendary set of Acta recounting their doings in the land of the cannibals.  M. is also said to have evangelized in other places.

Prior to its revision of 1969, the general Roman Calendar entered M. under 24. February.  That was his usual feast day in the Middle Ages and is still his feast day in some non-Roman churches (e.g. Anglican churches generally, Lutheran churches generally).

In later medieval, Renaissance, and more recent art M. is often shown with with a halberd or an axe symbolizing his supposed decapitation, as in this image from the fifteenth-century rood screen at St Agnes, Cawston (Norfolk):
http://www.norfolkchurches.co.uk/cawston/Dscf3692.jpg
context:
http://www.norfolkchurches.co.uk/cawston/cawston.htm
Or as in this late fifteenth-century painting of him in the apse of the église Saint-Pierre at Montanay (Rhône):
http://www.commune-montanay.fr/iso_album/saint_mathias_1.jpg
M.'s martyrdom as depicted in the Nuremberg Chronicle (1493, Beloit College copy, fol. CVIIv):
http://tinyurl.com/r7ehkr

There is a view in the archdiocese of Trier that M. was buried in Palestine, that St. Helena had found his remains, and that she brought them back to this late antique capital of the empire, where they now repose.  Witnesses to this belief do not appear to antedate the ninth century.  In 1127, during the demolition there of the old abbey church of St. Eucharius (Trier's first bishop) in preparation for the erection of a successor, these putative remains were miraculously rediscovered.  The new church, now much rebuilt, quickly become known as that of M.  Some views of M.'s modern tomb and of his former resting place in the crypt:
http://tinyurl.com/3pmaue
http://tinyurl.com/4glqy4
http://tinyurl.com/5xf5on
http://tinyurl.com/4bqa6f
And a view of the tombs of Sts. Eucharius and Valerius (V. is Trier's second bishop) still down in the crypt:
http://tinyurl.com/yvnewn

A page of views of the originally fourteenth-/sixteenth-century Sint Matthiaskerk in Maastricht:
http://www.kerkgebouwen-in-limburg.nl/view.jsp?content=684


2)  Justa, (Justina), and Henedina (d. ca. 131, supposedly).  Justa's cult is attested medievally at several places on Sardinia, most notably at the city of Santa Giusta (OR) near Oristano in what until 1410 was the judicate of Arborea.  She has no Vita or Passio earlier than the one by the early modern canon of Oristano, Antonio Martis.  Published in 1616 and supposedly drawn from an ancient document, this was shown in the eighteenth century to be a melange of oral tradition and of matter from the Acta of another saint of this name.  Martis' account makes Justa (in Italian, Giusta) a virgin martyr put to death under Hadrian along with her maids Justina and Henedina (Giustina, Enedina) at the very spot where later was built the crypt of the cathedral of the town of Santa Giusta.  A variant known to the sixteenth-century Sardinian historian Giovanni Fara made the saints confessors rather than martyrs and identified Justina and Henedina as Justa's sisters.

In the early seventeenth century, during the Corpi Santi episode when remains of presumed early Christian martyrs were being unearthed all over Sardinia, relics identified as those of Justa, Justina, and Henedina were found in Cagliari's Cripta di Santa Restituta and were re-located next to those of Restituta herself.  Presumed destroyed during the bombing of Cagliari in 1943, they were found in 1997 -- still in their seventeenth-century chest -- in Cagliari's church of Sant'Anna.  In 2004 they were translated to Santa Giusta and placed in that city's ex-cathedral dedicated to this saint.  Here they are on dispaly in the crypt:
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2317/2477293179_19947c3fe9_o.jpg
Justina was dropped from the RM in its revision of 2001, presumably in the belief that she's really just a doublet of Justa.

Santa Giusta's Basilica di Santa Giusta, consecrated in 1144, was the cathedral church of a homonymous diocese that was incorporated into that of Oristano in 1503.  In 1226 this church was the site of an all-island synod (the last until the twentieth century) whose constitutions are a major document in the history of the church in medieval Sardinia.  The building is thought to have been erected in the 1130s and 1140s and has not been rebuilt.  An Italian-language account of it, with bibliography, is here:
http://tinyurl.com/pn8w2
Exterior views (expandable) are here:
http://www.madeinsardinia.org/Oristano_%20Santa_Giusta/index.html
Others, and one interior view, (not expandable) are here:
http://www.ilportalesardo.it/monumenti/orsantagiusta.htm
A better view of the interior:
http://tinyurl.com/296s56o


3)  Isidore of Chios (d. 250 or 251, supposedly).  The megalomartyr I. has an early Passio (BHG 960) that's thought be of the first half of the fifth century and probably to have been written on Chios, where he has long been the patron saint.  According to this text, I. was was sailor on the Roman fleet who while stationed on Chios during the Decian persecution was denounced as a Christian, steadfastly maintained his faith during an interrogation by his naval commander, had his tongue removed as a punishment for contumacy, was executed by decapitation on 14. May, and was given honorable burial by a comrade.  By the time of St. Gregory of Tours (_In gloria martyrum_, 101) one could visit both his large martyrial basilica on Chios and a well in which it was said his body had first been thrown.  Here's a view of the remains of that basilica:
http://www.travel-to-chios.com/place.php?place_id=86
The last three views (click on the hotlinks where their thumbnails were) on this page from the Archeological Museum of Chios show mosaics and column capitals from that church:
http://www.chiosonline.gr/gallery_museum.asp

Beyond Chios, the veneration of relics of I. is attested for North Africa and for Constantinople in the fifth century and for Rome by the end of the eighth century (when a church dedicated to him was recorded in what we now know as the Einsiedeln Itinerary).  A relatively late legendary Passio (BHG 961) makes I. a native of Alexandria in Egypt (a major base for the East Roman fleet until 641); his veneration in the Coptic church has produced further legendary Passiones in that tongue.  For the probable veneration of this I. as the titular of the church of the originally tenth-century Benedictine abbey at Dueñas (Palencia) in Castile, see the article by Charles Julian Bishko reproduced here:
http://libro.uca.edu/monastic/monastic6.htm
Some views of the now Trappist monasterio de San Isidro at Dueñas:
http://tinyurl.com/ok5m27

Shortly after 1125 Venetians removed I.'s remains from his basilica on Chios and brought them to thier city, where since 1354/55 they have reposed in the chapel dedicated to him in San Marco.  The chapel's rich decor includes mosaics illustrating scenes from I.'s life as well as his translation to Venice.  Does anyone have views of these to share?

Still in the Adriatic, I. (Sv. Sidar) is the patron saint of Cres (in Italian: Cherso) on the homonymous island in Croatia.  Herewith a photographic view of the facade and a line drawing of the rear of his originally twelfth(?)-century church there:
http://tinyurl.com/267okun
http://tinyurl.com/2ewfm9z 

I.'s martyrdom as depicted in a May calendar scene in the earlier fourteenth-century frescoes (betw. ca. 1312 and 1321/1322) in the monastery church of the Theotokos at Gračanica in, depending on one's view of the matter, either Serbia's province of Kosovo and Metohija or the Republic of Kosovo:
http://tinyurl.com/28b25rp

I. as depicted in the earlier fourteenth-century frescoes (betw. 1335-1350) in the nave of the church of the Pantocrator at the Visoki Dečani monastery near Peć in, depending on one's view of recent events, the Republic of Kosovo or Serbia's Kosovo province of Kosovo and Metohija:
http://tinyurl.com/27hpbms

In the Latin historical martyrologies from Florus of Lyon through the RM prior to the latter's revision of 2001 I. was commemorated on 15. May.  In the "new" RM his commemoration was moved to today, the day given in his early Passio and I.'s ordinary feast day in the Greek church.


4)  Felix and Fortunatus (d. ca. 304, supposedly).  F. and F. (sometimes both called "of Aquileia") are martyrs of northeastern Italy of whom St. Venantius Fortunatus says in his _De virginitate_ (vv. 165-66) that Vicenza rejoices in Felix for his merits and that Aquileia boasts Fortunatus as its own.  They have a legendary Passio (BHL 2860) whose oldest witness has been dated to the eleventh century and that makes them brothers from Vicenza who were martyred at Aquileia under Diocletian and Maximian, with the Vicentines reclaiming Felix' body and the Aquileians retaining that of Fortunatus.  But each city appears to have had relics of both at an early date.  From their martyrial churches their joint cult spread widely in the Middle Ages across northern Italy from the diocese of Aquileia, where they were celebrated on 14. August, to that of Milan, where they were celebrated on 14. May (so also in the Passio and in the diocese of Vicenza).

Aquileia's relics of both saints were translated in the early Middle Ages first to Grado and then to Malamocco in the Venetian lagoon.  In about 1100 they were moved to Chioggia, where F. and F. now repose in that city's seventeenth-century cathedral and where they are the patron saints, celebrated in early June.  Here's a view of their chapel in the cathedral:
http://www.cartoleriapegaso.com/images/duomo_interno_2.jpg

In Vicenza, the present basilica dei Santi Felice e Fortunato is a replacement for one destroyed by Magyars in 889.  Built into a paleochristian cemetery, it incorporates as a chapel a fifth-century martyrion that, according to an inscribed stela that De Rossi dated as early as the first half of the fourth century, honored both saints.  The church was badly damaged in the great earthquake of 1117 and was rebuilt shortly afterward; its present look dates from a restoration in the 1930s.  An illustrated, Italian-language page on it is here:
http://tinyurl.com/qlnbp6
Some views of mosaics undergoing restoration or recently restored in that former martyrion (now the sacello di S. Maria Mater Domini):
http://www.operarestauro.it/attivita/restauro/ss-felice-e-fortunato.html


5)  Constantius of Capri (d. late 8th cent., perhaps).  Reliable information about today's less well known saint from Regno while he was still alive is nonexistent.  According to two incompletely preserved sermons of probable early eleventh-century date and apparent Bay-of-Naples-area authorship as well as to an early modern notice deriving from a now lost manuscript at Benevento, C. (in Italian, Costanzo) was a bishop of Constantinople who successfully fought heresy and who either died in that city, with his corpse later being brought to Capri, or else arrived at Capri by chance when already at death's door.  From these dubious indications a late eighth-century date has been inferred for him.  C. has yet to grace the pages of the RM.  He is Capri's patron saint.

As we learn from the _Sermo de virtute s. Constantii (BHL 1936d), C. saved Capri from a Muslim raid in 991.  More impressive, though, is his vindication of a pregnant young woman of Capri seduced and betrayed by a young man from Ischia who had reneged on a promise to marry her.  As recounted in the _Sermo de transito s. Constantii_ (BHL 1936e), she prayed to the saint for retribution as a warning to others, whereupon the cad, who at that very moment was entering Capri's cathedral (dedicated to C. and then sanctified by his remains), was instantly struck by lightning and so burned up that not an ash remained of his miserable body (_Qui cum templi limen attingeret pede, igneo protinus fulmine tactus, ita concrematus est, ut nec cinis eius ex miserabili corpore remaneret_).

Capri's church of San Costanzo at Marina Grande was the island's cathedral from the erection of the diocese in 987 until that function was transferred in 1596 to the less open-to-raiders church of Santo Stefano in the center of the island.  By that time C.'s relics were already in Santo Stefano (which remained the cathedral until the diocese's suppression in 1818).  At least one is still there, kept in a reliquary bust used in festival processions on this day:
http://www.capri.com/en/san-costanzo
Some of C.'s relics are again housed in San Costanzo.  Others are kept at a church at Termini (NA) near the tip of the Sorrentine Peninsula to the east northeast of Capri (C. is also Termini's patron saint) except during the summer months when they reside instead at a chapel dedicated to C. atop adjacent Monte San Costanzo.  Still others (if they indeed belong to the same saint) are in St. William of Vercelli's crypt at Montevergine.

Marina Grande's San Costanzo has been rebuilt several times, but its central portion still reveals the Greek-cross-in-a-square floor plan of the original late tenth- / early eleventh-century cathedral (said to have been built over an earlier small basilica).  Both this design and C.'s supposed origin in Constantinople reflect the diocese of Capri's origin as a suffragan of the archdiocese of Amalfi at a time when resurgent East Roman power in southern Italy and a northward spread of Greek monastic settlement were making themselves felt in the Amalfitan state and, indeed, in coastal Campania generally.  Exterior views of the church, the first two showing a fourteenth-century "gothic" main portal (on a front resystematized in the nineteenth century -- so those pointy-arched windows are merely medievalizing), are here:
http://www.capriazzurra.it/chiese/leggi.asp?cod=1576
http://tinyurl.com/2939nt5
http://tinyurl.com/28egj9c
http://www.capridream.com/images/sancostanzo.jpg
A view of the interior, showing columns under the dome:
http://tinyurl.com/265wl3b
The aforementioned four columns from San Costanzo now at Caserta are of yellowish marble and may be seen here, behind the altar:
http://tinyurl.com/nuc7z

The two sermons on Constantius were edited by Adolf Hofmeister in his "Aus Capri und Amalfi: Der Sermo de virtute und der Sermo de transito s. Constantii und der Sarazenenzug von 991," _Münchener Museum für Philologie des Mittelalters und der Renaissance_ 4 (1924; reprint, Nendeln: Kraus Reprint, 1972), 233-72.  Hofmeister's second edition of the anonymous sermon on the Transit of St. Constantius (in MGH, Scriptores, vol. 30, pt. 2) is a partial one only, excluding matter not thought to be of historical interest (as this was then construed by the editors of the MGH), and lacks the story of the young woman's vindication.


6)  Hallvard (d. 1043, supposedly).  Tradition makes H. the son of a prominent farmer of Huseby in Lier (Buskerud), Norway.  He became a trader in the Baltic.  One day, while his ship was in the Drammenfjord, he gave sanctuary on it to a women suspected of theft.  In at least one account, she was pregnant.  Her enemies shot him/them to death with arrows.  Wishing to conceal H.'s fate, they tied a millstone to his body and threw it into the fjord.  Miraculously, both the body and the millstone floated to the surface,  H. was buried at Lier, then in the diocese of Oslo.  In the twelfth century his relics were translated to Oslo's new cathedral dedicated to him (now a ruin); his Passio (BHL 3750) may date from the 1170s.  H., who has been shown on the city's seal since the fourteenth century, is Oslo's patron saint.  Tomorrow (15. May) is his feast day in Norway.

Two views of the remains of Oslo's Hallvardskatedralen:
http://tinyurl.com/3ybzxzt
http://tinyurl.com/5lwjxr
A relief thought to have come from that cathedral and now immured in the fabric of its present replacement:
http://tinyurl.com/2uch5rj

The restored, originally early thirteenth-century church of St. Nicholas at Botne in Holmestrand (Vestfold) has an originally thirteenth-century wooden statue of H.:
http://tinyurl.com/ourbd7
http://www.lier.kommune.no/liers-historie/5-117.gif

An originally  thirteenth-century church at Løvøy in Borre (Vestfold) is dedicated to H. (and to St. Martin of Tours).  Here's an illustrated account of it in its present restored state:
http://falkensten.pbworks.com/L%C3%B8v%C3%B8y-kapell
Whereas this page has some revealing, expandable views of the building prior to restoration:
http://tinyurl.com/yp4d5c

A view of H.'s holy spring at Lier:
http://www.olavsrosa.no/images/251872.jpg

Best,
John Dillon
(last year's posts combined and revised)

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