medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Today (10. June) is the feast day of:
1) Getulius (?). G. is a martyr of the Sabina (essentially today's Rieti province of Lazio) buried at approximately the thirtieth milestone from Rome on the Via Salaria. Not having been a martyr of Rome or its environs, he is absent from the usual testimonia for genuine martyrs of the Eternal City. By the beginning of the eighth century a basilica at/over his grave had come into possession of the monastery of Farfa. By 1060 his remains had been translated to the abbey church at Farfa, where they are attested through the sixteenth century.
At some time from the sixth to the eighth century G. acquired a legendary Passio (BHL3524-25) which gives him companions (other saints from various places in south central Lazio), makes him the husband of St. Symphorosa of Tibur/Tivoli, has him martyred at approximately the thirtieth milestone on the Via Salaria, and has Symphorosa bury him on his Sabine property. G. entered the historical martyrologies with St. Ado of Vienne, whose account of him (somewhat abbreviated by Usuard) is based on this Passio and retains the companions (Cerealis, Amantius, and Primitivus).
Symphorosa has her own Passio (BHL 7971), in which G. is buried on the Via Tiburtina along with S. and her seven martyred sons. Pope Steven III (752-57) had the putative relics of the entire family translated from Tivoli and interred in his newly built Roman church known today as Sant'Angelo in Pescheria.
By the tenth century yet another hagiographer had plagiarized G.'s Passio for a Passio (BHL 9028) of St. Zoticus of Rome and _his_ companions (different from G.'s except for Amantius, G.'s supposed brother). In the sixteenth century, if not earlier, it was thought on the basis of the similarity between these Passiones that Zoticus and Gaetulius were really one and the same person recorded under different names. The sarcophagus into which the relics said to be those of the Symphorosan family were placed for safekeeping at Sant'Angelo in Pescheria identifies its contents as (in part): _corpora SS. Martyrum Simforosae, viri sui Zotici (Getulii) et Filiorum ejus_ ("the bodies of the holy martyrs Symphorosa, of her husband Zoticus (Getulius), and of his sons").
The frequently restored chiesa di Sant'Angelo in Pescheria was built into the remains of Augustus' Porticus Octaviae (near the Tiber Island and the Theater of Marcellus), which latter, when the church was built, was serving as Rome's fish market. Herewith some exterior views of the entrance to the church:
http://tinyurl.com/2aqegbl
http://tinyurl.com/38kml8
http://tinyurl.com/2a25x89
http://www.romeartlover.it/Vasi28ah.jpg
The dome visible in the background of the first view belongs to Santa Maria in Campitelli.
Two expandable views of the early medieval frescoes in the left apse of the crypt are here:
http://tinyurl.com/6qkw3t
(The third view is mislabeled. It's of Santa Maria Maggiore.)
G.'s cult traveled, probably from Farfa, to the border city of Teramo in northeastern Abruzzo, where in the early Middle Ages a church was dedicated to him. This was rebuilt in earlier twelfth century only to fall victim to the burning of the city by the Norman count of Loritello in the 1150s. Two interior views of what survives (essentially, the presbytery; the church is now known as that of Sant'Anna):
http://tinyurl.com/kq8gbh
http://tinyurl.com/njbbp9
Two exterior views:
http://tinyurl.com/n7svds
http://tinyurl.com/mntl3w
G., who previously had been entered under today as a Beatus, was dropped from the RM in its revision of 2001. He is celebrated in the parish named for him at Tivoli (RM) in Lazio and, presumably, at the church of Sant'Angelo in Pescheria.
2) Maximus of Aveia (d. 250 or 251, supposedly). Today's less well known saint of the Regno is the titular of the cathedral of L'Aquila (AQ) in Abruzzo. A textual difficulty in versions of his Passio makes his place of origin uncertain.
According to his brief Passio (BHL 5829; said to have come from St.-Germain-des-Prés), M. was a deacon who suffered martyrdom in the province of Asia; in a related, longer Passio (BHL 5847, from L'Aquila) he is said to have been from Aveia, the ancient Roman city of the Vestini located not very far from L'Aquila. As M. is also said in Usuard (the only early martyrology to mention him) to have suffered _Apud Aviensem provinciam_, it is thought that Aveia was meant and that BHL 5829's _apud Asiam provinciam_ is erroneous. But as Aveia was never a Roman province, it seems at least possible that someone in the early Middle Ages localized an Asian martyr M. in central Italian Aveia, near to the _civitas Sancti Maximi_ (today's Civita di Bagno; identified in BHL 5847 with Forcona) where M. was venerated as the local saint of a bishopric transferred to L'Aquila in the thirteenth century.
The Asian M. of BHL 5829 is in that text said to have suffered martyrdom on 14. May, whereas in all his early sources the M. said to be of Aveia is given a laying to rest on either 19. or 20. October. He's in the _Acta Sanctorum_ under 19. October; until its latest revision the RM, which now seems to be doing without him, entered him under 20. October. At L'Aquila M.'s feast has been celebrated today since shortly after 1360. This date may have arisen from an early local appropriation of the feast of Maximus of Naples, who until very recently was entered in the RM on 10. June but who is now commemorated on 11. June (the date furnished by Naples' Marble Calendar).
In 1413 remains believed to be those of M. were translated to L'Aquila and were installed in that city's then cathedral. TAN: That church was destroyed in the earthquake of 1703 and was replaced by today's neoclassical structure. The latter in turn suffered severely from the earthquake of 6. April 2009:
http://tinyurl.com/l5l3rl
http://tinyurl.com/37s6np8
Also from the fifteenth century comes a forged charter bearing an obviously fictitious account of a visit, prompted by M.'s miracles, that Otto I is alleged to have made to Forcona and of a miraculous vision that he is said to have experienced there.
3) Ithamar (d. ca. 656). I., who came of Kentish stock, became Anglo-Saxon England's first native bishop when he received the see of Rochester in 644, at which time he assumed the Old Testament name by which he is known. According to St. Bede the Venerable, he was the equal of his missionary predecessors in learning and in manner of life. I. was consecrated by St. Honorius of Canterbury; in 655 he consecrated the first native archbishop of Canterbury, the South Saxon Deusdedit. The post-Conquest bishop Gundulf, who in 1080 had begun work on today's Rochester cathedral, enshrined I. in 1100. Here's a view of the Ithamar chapel in Gundulf's crypt:
http://www.rochestercathedral.org/virtual-tour/11.asp
4) Landericus of Paris (d. ca. 657). L. (in French, Landry) is the traditional twenty-eighth bishop of Paris and the traditional founder of an hospital whose present-day descendant, still on the Île de la Cité, is that city's Hotel-Dieu. He had a great reputation for charity. An originally medieval church dedicated to L., also on the Île de la Cité, was demolished in 1829. At some point L.'s remains were removed to Paris' church of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, where they were venerated from 1171 to 1793.
L. as depicted in an earlier fifteenth-century breviary (ca. 1414) for the Use of Paris (Châteauroux, Bibliothèque municipale, ms. 2, fol. 186v):
http://tinyurl.com/2apxt2w
5) Oliva of Palermo (?). O. has a cult with pictorial remains at Palermo and at Alcamo that may be as old as the thirteenth century and with church dedications to her across northern Sicily of which the earliest documented is one in Palermo in 1310. She has a legendary Passio (BHL 6329), preserved in a fifteenth-century witness to the originally twelfth-century Gallo-Sicilian lectionary. This makes her a Sicilian girl of noble birth who was exiled to Tunis, where she cured two blind people, was exposed to beasts in a wilderness, converted and baptized some hunters who came upon her, was arrested by the local ruler, underwent hideous tortures without injury, and finally was decapitated. Some Christians stole her body, returned it to Sicily, and had it buried in or near Palermo.
Thus far the Passio. A version of that story in which O.'s relics were said to be still in Tunis was current in 1402 when king Martin I asked the caliph of Tunis for their return. TAN: in a quirk of royal succession, Martin I (M. the Young) of insular Sicily was succeeded in 1409 by his father, Martin II (M. the Old; d. 1410). Another version of the story, from 1470, has O. buried under Tunis' Mosque of the Olive.
Two views of O.'s earliest known representation, an icon once in Palermo's chiesa di Santa Maria dell'Ammiraglio (or chiesa della Martorana) and now in its diocesan museum:
http://tinyurl.com/29ky99
http://tinyurl.com/yqqfqk
O. has yet to grace the pages of the RM. In 1981 she was removed from the general calendar of the ecclesiastical region of Sicily. An optional Memorial is authorized for the city of Palermo.
6) Giovanni Dominici (Bl.; d. 1419). A native of Florence, G. entered the Order of Preachers at its convent there of Santa Maria Novella in 1372. In 1380 he was ordained priest. Administrative appointments at the same house followed swiftly: vice-prior in 1381, prior in 1386. In 1388 G. was sent to the Dominican convent of Santi Giovanni e Paolo (San Zanipolo) in Venice as professor of theology and was there until 1399, when he was expelled for having led, in defiance of a government order, a procession in support of White Penitents ('Bianchi'). While in Venice G. founded a house for Observant Dominicans and wrote -- in Italian, for a broad audience -- one of his major works, the _Libro d'amor di carità_ (1397/98).
G. returned to Santa Maria Novella where he continued to preach and to write, composing in 1405 his _Lucula noctis_. Written in Latin for a scholarly audience and dedicated to the leading Florentine humanist of the previous generation (and G.'s fellow orator), Coluccio Salutati, this massive scholastic treatise on Christian education was a response to Salutati's vigorous promotion of the study and use of ancient pagan writing. G. wrote prolifically and some of his religious verse in Italian is still anthologized.
In 1406 Florence sent G. to Rome to help put an end to the Great Western Schism. The recently elected Gregory XII turned G. into one of his diplomats, in the process making him archbishop of Ragusa and cardinal priest of San Sisto and supporting him with revenues from several monastic houses and small dioceses in the Regno. G. played an important role at the Council of Constance. Martin V appointed him papal legate in Bohemia and Hungary. G. died on this day in Buda and was buried there in the church of St. Paul the Hermit. Miracles were later reported at his tomb and G. was invoked as a Beatus. His cult was confirmed papally in 1832.
Beato Angelico's portrait of G. from the row of Dominican worthies in the Chapter Room of the Museo nazionale di San Marco in Florence:
http://tinyurl.com/65xfn3
Best,
John Dillon
(last year's post lightly revised)
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