medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Today (30. May) is the feast day of:
1) Gavinus of Porto Torres (d. 303?). One of the genuine ancient martyrs of Sardinia, Gavinus (Gabinus, Gabinius; Italian: Gavino; Sardinian: Ainu [three syllables]) occurs twice in the (pseudo-)Hieronymian Martyrology, once under today with a fellow sufferer named Crispulus and again under 25. October; in Sardinia the latter is G.'s accepted _dies natalis_ and major feast day. Today is G.'s day of commemoration in Usuard and in the RM.
G.'s place of martyrdom is recorded as Turres in Sardinia, i.e. the ancient Turris Libyssonis, medieval Torres, and modern Porto Torres (SS). His Passio (BHL 3291j) is late (early twelfth-century) and unreliable; so too an Inventio (BHL 3291k; thirteenth- or fourteenth-century) that links him to two local saints of 27. October, Protus and Januarius. These texts, which make G. out to have been a Roman soldier martyred during the Diocletianic persecution, refer to, and are surely to be associated with, G.'s ex-cathedral at Torres (once the capital of the homonymous Sardinian judicate), initially built in the eleventh century and expanded to its present length in the twelfth, when it assumed its present profile with an apse on either end.
San Gavino is Sardinia's largest "romanesque" church. Its ornamental main portal is fifteenth-century "gothic". Brief accounts of this building are here, in Italian:
http://www.ilportalesardo.it/monumenti/ssportotorres.htm
http://www.giroscopio.com/itinerari/sardegna3.html#1
http://www.shardanas.net/dettagli_da_visitare.asp?id_record=7
and in English:
http://www.stintino.net/Churches.htm
Exterior and interior views of various features and details are here (click on "Porto Torres (Ss), S.Gavino do Torres"):
http://web.tiscali.it/romanico/flumenar.htm
A series of predecessor churches on the same site is said to go back as far as the fifth century. Adjacent to the site is a Roman-period necropolis whose pre-Christian and Christian inscriptions are now housed in the antiquarium at Porto Torres. Here's a view of one portion of the necropolis:
http://www.albergotorres.com/immagini/foto_citta2b.jpg
Remains said to be those of G., of Protus, and of Januarius are kept in three late antique sarcophagi in the crypt of San Gavino. In this view, G.'s is at left:
http://tinyurl.com/46ps6v
G. has been and is venerated in several parts of the island (and in Corsica as well). Pope St. Gregory the Great in a letter of 599 refers to an abbess Gavinia at a monastery of saints Gabinus and Luxorius in the diocese of Cagliari. The present parish church of S. Gavino at San Gavino Monreale (VS) dates to the fourteenth century and is noted for its sculptural representations of later medieval judges of Arborea (though, just as in the case of the Swabian royals at Bitonto, which individuals are represented is somewhat controversial). See:
http://web.tiscali.it/sangavinos2k/chiese/sgavino.htm
http://tinyurl.com/2u32nm6
http://tinyurl.com/2v6bxoe
This figure is often interpreted as representing Eleonora of Arborea (r., 1383-1404), who as regent of Sardinia's last independent judicate successfully resisted Arborea's incorporation into the Crown of Aragon:
http://tinyurl.com/35cjqg7
The oldest literary text we now have in Sardinian is Antonio Cano's mid-fifteenth-century _Sa Vitta et sa Morte, et Passione de sanctu Gavinu, Prothu et Januariu_. This has recently been edited by Dino Manca (Cagliari: Centro di Studi Filologici Sardi; CUEC, 2002) with good bibliography on other hagiographic writings on Gavinus. P. G. Spanu, _Martyria Sardiniae: I santuari dei martiri sardi_ (Oristano: S'Alvure, 2000), has a Latin text of G.'s Passio (last critically edited by Giancarlo Zichi [Sassari: Chiarella, 1989]).
2) Basil the Elder and Emmelia (d. later 4th cent.). B., a virtuous and wealthy rhetor whose mother was St. Macrina the Elder, and his wife E., the likewise virtuous and wealthy daughter of a martyr, withdrew from Caesarea in Cappadocia to Neocaesarea in Pontus during the Great Persecution but returned after the promulgation of the Edicts of Milan. Among their numerous children were Sts. Macrina the Younger, Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa, Naucratius, and Peter of Sebaste(ia); it is from the younger Basil and from Gregory that we know about B. and E. E. shared the monastic inclinations of her famous offspring; in the 350s she assisted Macrina the Younger in converting an estate on the Iris in Pontus into a house for women religious and was head of this community until her death in ca. 373.
3) Dympna (d. 7th cent., supposedly). D. (also Dymphna) has a legendary thirteenth-century Vita (BHL 2352) by Peter, a canon of Cambrai, that follows local tradition in making her the daughter of a Celtic king who fell in lust with her because of her resemblance to her mother. Spurning all opportunities to engage in incest, D. fled with her confessor St. Gerebernus to Geel in today's Belgian province of Antwerp where they were killed by D.'s father, who had pursued them. In the thirteenth century D.'s relics at Geel were credited with miraculous cures, also recorded by canon Peter (BHL 2353, 2353b). D. is the patron saint of the mentally ill.
Erik Drigsdahl's valuable notice last year of a rare commemoration of D. in a Book of Hours from Belgium ca. 1490 (Poitiers, Médiathèque François Mitterrand, ms. 51, fol. 26r) may be found here:
http://tinyurl.com/27wrq3n
4) Hubert of Liège (d. 727 or 728). H. (Hubertus, Hucbertus) was a disciple of the murdered St. Lambert, whom he succeeded in ca. 704 as bishop of Tongeren-Maastricht. He is said to have evangelized in southern Brabant and in the Ardennes. In 717 or 718 he translated Lambert's remains from Maastricht to a recentlly built church at Liège/Lüttich, which latter town he shortly made his seat. H. died while on a journey; his body was brought back to Liège and was buried there. In 744 the Austrasian mayor of the palace Carloman accorded his remains, which had been discovered to be incorrupt, an Elevatio at Liège. The first of H.'s numerous Vitae (BHL 3993, etc.) was written shortly thereafter. 3. November has long been the day of H.'s principal feast in Belgium and in other countries. Today, his _dies natalis_, is now his day of commemoration in the RM.
Here's a view of Rogier van der Weyden's painting (ca. 1437-1440), now in the National Gallery, London, of the exhumation of H. (whose vestments too were said to have been undecayed):
http://tinyurl.com/67fouz
In the fourteenth century the legendary episode of a conversion prompted by the sight while hunting of a stag with a cross between its antlers was borrowed from the legend of St. Eustace and applied to H., who henceforth became a patron of hunters. Here's the moment as depicted in the Hours of Catherine of Cleves (ca. 1440; New York, Morgan Library and Museum, ms. M. 917)
http://www.int-st-hubertus-orden.de/html/xbekehrung.html
The scene is also portrayed above the entrance to the chapel of St. Hubert (1491-96) at the château of Amboise (Indre-et-Loire):
http://tinyurl.com/3evjbm
http://tinyurl.com/27kcm9g
The scene as depicted in the early sixteenth-century Grandes Heures d'Anne de Bretagne (ca. 1503-1508; Paris, BnF, ms. Latin 9474, fol. 191v):
http://tinyurl.com/2fme3p7
5) Walstan (d. 1016, supposedly). W. is a local saint of East Anglia with a cult centered upon Bawburgh (Norfolk), where in the later Middle Ages farmers and farm laborers visited his shrine in great numbers. Both his Latin-language Vita (BHL 8793), first printed in Capgrave's _Nova legenda Anglie_ (1516), and his very late fifteenth- or early sixteenth-century verse Life in English (edited by M. R. James in 1917) are legendary productions attesting to the late medieval cult: they affirm the saint's healing powers for man and beast (John Bale had polemic fun with the Vita's assertion that W. could replace lost genitalia) and the verse Life was actually displayed at the shrine.
According to the Vita, W. came of royal lineage and was the son of a wealthy farmer at Bawburgh. When he was twelve, taking to heart the message of Luke 14:33, he renounced against the wishes of his parents his right of succession to family property and traveled north to Taverham (also in Norfolk) where he became a laborer in the fields for another married farmer. W. worked very hard and lived very meanly, giving even his clothing to the poor. One day he gave away his shoes to a beggar. When word of this reached the farmer's wife she compelled him to work with bare feet among spiny and thorny plants that he was to [uproot and] load into a cart. But the saint's feet remained unpierced and the plants as he trampled them gave off an odor of roses.
This miracle caused the wife tearfully to ask W.'s forgiveness and the farmer to offer to make W. his heir. But W. would accept from him only the offspring of a pregnant cow, who soon gave birth to two male calves. Later, when they had grown into steers and in accordance with an angelic foretelling to W., who died on this day in 1016, they drew a cart bearing the deceased saint's body to wherever God would ordain as his burial site. Holy springs arose at points along their journey; the latter ended at Bawburgh where W. is buried in the church dedicated to him. Thus far the narrative portion of the Vita. W. has yet to grace the pages of the RM.
Herewith two pages with expandable views of Bawburgh's mostly late medieval church of St Mary and St Walstan (proceeds from the cult paid for a rebuilding in the 1470s):
http://tinyurl.com/2dp27jk
http://tinyurl.com/2ds4ej8
W.'s chief attribute is his scythe, mentioned in both the Vita and the verse Life. The only known wall painting of W. is in the church of St Andrew at Cavenham in Suffolk and he appears on the rood screen of the church of St Peter and St Paul at Foxearth in northern Essex on its border with Suffolk. Unfortunately, I have not been able to find on the web a view of either representation of W. Here's an illustrated page on the church at Cavenham (whose link to the wall painting of W. no longer works):
http://www.suffolkchurches.co.uk/cavenham.htm
And here's an early twentieth-century view of the interior of the church at Foxearth, with most of the rood screen obscured by the pews:
http://tinyurl.com/22u9445
6) Ferdinand III of Castile and León (d. 1252). F. (whose numeration follows the sequence for León) was the son of Alfonso IX of León. He succeeded to that throne in 1230, uniting it with that of Castile, which latter he had held since 1217. A leading figure of the Reconquista, F. brought such cities as Jaén, Córdoba, and Sevilla under Christian rule. The recipient of an immediately posthumous cult, he was canonized papally in 1671.
Here's F. as depicted in a thirteenth-century miniature in a collection of royal privileges at Santiago de Compostela (Archivo Catedral de Santiago, Tumbo A):
http://tinyurl.com/6j2azd
7) Joan of Arc (d. 1431). J., an adjudged heretic, was burned at the stake in Rouen in 1431. In 1456 pope Calixtus III overturned her conviction. J. was canonized in 1920.
Best,
John Dillon
(last year's post lightly revised and with the additions of Basil the Elder and Emmelia and Walstan)
**********************************************************************
To join the list, send the message: join medieval-religion YOUR NAME
to: [log in to unmask]
To send a message to the list, address it to:
[log in to unmask]
To leave the list, send the message: leave medieval-religion
to: [log in to unmask]
In order to report problems or to contact the list's owners, write to:
[log in to unmask]
For further information, visit our web site:
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/medieval-religion.html
|