medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Today (25. June) is the feast day of:
1) Febronia of Nisibis (d. ca. 304, supposedly). The virgin martyr F. is the subject of a legendary Passio in Syriac that is at least as old as the seventh century. This makes her a religious who refused to flee her monastery during the Great Persecution and who was arrested, tortured at great length, and finally decapitated at Nisibis (today's Nusaybin in southeastern Turkey's Mardin province). Nisibis was the seat of a Syrian Christian diocese (Nestorian from the later fifth century onward) for most of late antiquity and throughout the Middle Ages.
F.'s cult seems to have begun at Nisibis. In 1997 the remains of a monastery, seemingly active from the fifth-/sixth-century to the very early fifteenth, were uncovered at Tuneinir in eastern Syria. Shown on this page
http://users.stlcc.edu/mfuller/Area10reliquary.html
is a tooth-shaped reliquary from this site thought to have held a relic of F. (one of whose teeth figures prominently in her Passio).
F.'s Passio is formed on Greek models. It was translated into Greek and spread throughout the Greek-speaking world, including parts of southern Italy and ultimately eastern Sicily, where her cult, attested at Messina from the twelfth century, has been important at Patti (ME) since at least the fourteenth century and at Palagonia (CT) since at least the seventeenth century (though her rupestrian church at Palagonia may be as old as the seventh century, there's no evidence of its having been dedicated to her medievally). TAN: Whereas F.'s cult at Palagonia seems to be early modern in origin, afficionados of the bedecking of cult images with ex-votos and other offerings might appreciate these views of F.'s statue there, first as she ordinarily appears in the oratory and then in parade dress for her annual celebration:
http://tinyurl.com/l93zns
http://www.gesuevivo.it/febronia%20oro.jpg
There's an English-language translation of F.'s Syriac-language Passio in Sebastian P. Brock and Susan Ashbrook Harvey, trs., _Holy Women of the Syrian Orient_ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987; updated ed., _ibid._, 1998). Early medieval Greek- and Latin-language versions of F.'s Passio are edited by Paolo Chiesa, _Le versioni latine della Passio Sanctae Febroniae. Storia, metodo, modelli di due traduzioni agiografiche altomedievali_ (Spoleto: Centro italiano di studi sull'Alto Medioevo, 1990).
2) Maximus of Turin (d. 5th cent.). The first recorded bishop of Turin, M. is known principally for a collection of over a hundred mostly brief sermons, not all of which may really be his. The date of his death is uncertain: Gennadius of Marseille sets his _floruit_ at 423. Attempts to identify him with the M. who was at synods of Milan in 451 and Rome in 465 are not altogether convincing. M.'s legendary Vita (BHL 5858; not earlier than the twelfth century) attests to his cult but tells us nothing useful about him. M. is one of Turin's principal patron saints. Here's a view of his depiction in that city's oldest surviving collection of statutes, the fourteenth-century Codice della Catena:
http://tinyurl.com/2dgfo4
3) Prosper of Aquitaine (d. ca. 465). P. was a disciple of St. Augustine who wrote prolifically on behalf of his master's positions on grace and predestination. He was also a Christian poet and the first continuator of St. Jerome's _Chronicle_. We last hear of him from the year 463. A late ninth-century fresco in the lower church of San Clemente at Rome depicting a tonsured S. Prosperius is thought to be a representation of this P.
4) Prosper of Reggio (d. 5th or 6th cent.). The undated P. figures in the traditional lists of the early bishops of Reggio in Emilia. He is the subject of two tenth-century sermons (BHL 1013, 1014) that focus on his pastoral virtues and that tell us that at the beginning of the eighth century bishop Thomas both rebuilt the extramural church of St. Apollinaris in which P. had been buried and then re-dedicated that church to P. In 962 P.'s relics were translated to the city's then cathedral. They now repose under the main altar of Reggio's present early sixteenth-century basilica di San Prospero (1514-23), a replacement for the old San Prospero extra moenia, a monastery church that succeeded bishop Thomas' structure and that was consecrated in 997. Despite its eighteenth-century facade, this is still a building most of whose construction falls within our period, so let's have a look. Herewith an illustrated, Italian-language page on it:
http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basilica_di_San_Prospero
An aerial view:
http://tinyurl.com/2cqch7w
A facade view, showing the belltower and this church's famous lions (the latter were created in the early sixteenth century to support columns of a pronaos that was never built and were placed in their present positions when the present facade was erected; afficionados of _Star Wars_ might think them the church's Wookie guardians):
http://tinyurl.com/2etyru5
Two lions/Wookies in close-up:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/37409770@N00/2416821836
http://tinyurl.com/2dnqhcf
More exterior and interior views are here:
http://tinyurl.com/35btyed
Also dedicated to this P. is the originally eleventh- to thirteenth-century pieve di San Prospero at Collecchio (PR) in Emilia. Some illustrated, Italian-language pages on this church, its twelfth-century baptismal font and relief of the baptism of Jesus:
http://tinyurl.com/57qgjj
http://www.mondimedievali.net/Edifici/Emilia/collecchio.htm
http://tinyurl.com/5b5ouh
http://tinyurl.com/5a29ao
Other exterior views:
http://tinyurl.com/2brhnl7
http://tinyurl.com/2ct5meo
http://tinyurl.com/26da6u9
http://tinyurl.com/28xqg4k
Considerably farther south, the chiesa di San Prospero in Perugia (PG) in Umbria is thought to have this P. as its titular. Herewith illustrated English-language and Italian-language accounts of this originally seventh- or eighth-century structure, expanded in the twelfth- and thirteenth-centuries, and housing an eighth-century ciborium and frescoes from the earlier thirteenth and fourteenth centuries:
http://www.ktucitywalks.co.uk/264.html
http://tinyurl.com/26nvbkf
Closer looks at the ciborium:
http://www.leonexiii.org/img_sanprospero2_ex.jpg
http://www.flickr.com/photos/renzodionigi/3959127392/sizes/l/
http://www.jemolo.com/alta/CI%2085.jpg
The earlier thirteenth-century frescoes, signed by an artist named Bonamicus, include this depiction of P.:
http://www.leonexiii.org/img_sanprospero1_ex.jpg
This church also houses a thirteenth-century statue of P.:
http://tinyurl.com/2cdpfw9
http://tinyurl.com/2339pzg
The Archivio capitolare in Modena displays on at least two of its pages this relief sculpture of P. but does not identify it by location:
http://tinyurl.com/3xuw7lf
5) Moluag (d. 592, perhaps). M. (also Moluog, Moloc, Molocus, Molonachus, etc. -- but not, it would seem, Moloch) is the legendary evangelist of Argyll. According to his Vita (BHL 5989) as preserved in lections in the Aberdeen Breviary, he was an Irish disciple of St. Brendan who with divine aid performed such magic feats as the casting of his bell with metal that in default of coals had been made molten when heated with burning reeds and the crossing of the Irish Sea on part of a large rock on which when he and his fellow monks had been unable to procure an ordinary vessel he had stood and which he had then split with a prayer. So transported M. and his fellows arrived at the island of Lismore, where they established a monastery and M. became abbot. Later M. went north to Ross, where he preached and where he died on this day in an unspecified year, _non sine miraculis_. He was buried with great veneration in the church of St. Boniface at Rossmarkie.
Thus far the Vita. That M. died in 592 (a datum repeated not only in popular accounts but also in M.'s entry in the _Bibliotheca Sanctorum_) is the pronouncement of James Ussher, archbishop of Armagh in the earlier seventeenth century, the same who fixed the creation of the world at 4004 BC. It's not a bad guess -- as long as one is willing to accept as historically accurate the Vita's statement that M. was a disciple of St. Brendan. The abbey on Lismore prospered and its church of St. M. became the cathedral of the medieval diocese of Argyll. The present building, still called a cathedral but in fact a parish church, dates from the fourteenth century but has been greatly altered since. Here's an exterior view not showing anything distinctively medieval:
http://tinyurl.com/lpo3gd
The expandable views on this page do show medieval features of the building, both without and within:
http://tinyurl.com/nwdbqt
An illustrated, English-language account of late medieval remains of a church dedicated to M. at Alyth (Perthshire):
http://arts.st-andrews.ac.uk/~cmas/site.php?id=125117
An illustrated, English language account of a restored later medieval church on the Isle of Lewis now called St Moluag's Church (Teampull Moluaidh), though its only attested medieval titular is St. Maelrubha:
http://tinyurl.com/najrym
6) Adalbert of Egmond (d. 8th cent.). According to his late tenth-century Vita by Rupert of Mettlach (BHL 33), A. (also Adelbert) was an Englishman who accompanied St. Willibrord to the Low Countries and who evangelized in Frisia. A deacon, he founded a church at Egmond in today's Noord-Holland. Both Rupert's Vita and a later one (BHL 34-36) composed at the abbey of Egmond -- which considers A. its founder -- attribute miracles to him. A.'s cult is attested in the dioceses of Utrecht and and of Gand/G(h)ent from the tenth century onward and was furthered by various counts of Holland.
A. (in the illustration at lower right) as depicted in the later tenth-century illuminated pages added to the Egmond Gospels (Den Haag, KB, 76 F 1, fol. 215r):
http://www.keesn.nl/sources/en4_egm_pics.htm
An English-language account of this book is here:
http://www.thewords.com/gallery/gospel.htm
This page from the abbey reproduces a sixteenth-century depiction of A.:
http://tinyurl.com/5jph4m
The medieval abbey was largely destroyed in 1579 (its present successor is a rebuilding of the last century). Here's a view of the ruined abbey church:
http://www.engelfriet.net/Alie/Hans/abdijkerkegmpr.jpg
7) William of Montevergine (d. 1142). According to his late twelfth century Vita (BHL 8924) by John of Nusco, today's less well known saint of the Regno (also W. of Vercelli) was already a penitent at the age of fourteen, when, with iron bands constricting his body, he set off from his north Italian home for Compostela. Most of his life was spent in southern Italy. Alternately an hermit and a monastic founder, he was active chiefly in Irpinia (approximately today's Avellino province of Campania), where the abbey of Montevergine traces its origin to a community he directed on its mountain above today's Mercogliano (AV).
W. got down into Basilicata as well, where he founded a church at Monte Pierno near today's San Fele (PZ). This received a double monastery that became a dependency of the abbey of the Goleto (see next paragraph). Today it is the heart of the Sanctuary of the Blessed Virgin of Pierno, honoring a wooden statue of the BVM that W. is said to have miraculously found there. The church, rebuilt in the late twelfth century by master Sarolus of Muro Lucano (famous for his work on the cathedral of Rapolla) under the Goleto's then abbess Agnes, is one of Basilicata's few notable specimens of "romanesque" architecture.
Exterior views (expandable):
http://www.basilicata.cc/paesi_taddeo/t_676/p_monum/676_02.htm
Interior views (expandable):
http://www.basilicata.cc/paesi_taddeo/t_676/p_monum/676_02_2.htm
W. died at the double monastery of the Goleto near today's Sant'Angelo dei Lombardi in southern Campania. Another of his foundations, this was essentially a house for women with a small attached community of males who were there to perform sacraments and to provide spiritual direction. Dedicated to the Holy Savior ("the Goleto" is a toponym), the monastery flourished until the middle of the fourteenth century and was closed in the early sixteenth (the last abbess died in 1515). The property then reverted to Montevergine, which promptly reopened it as a small, male institution. Late in the same century the monastery began to grow again. Its early modern prosperity, nineteenth-century abandonment, and recent restoration are beyond the remit of this list.
Some views of the abbey of the Goleto (now called that of St. William) before and after restoration are here:
http://www.goleto.it/storia.htm
More are included in the virtual tour accessible here:
http://www.goleto.it/home.htm
(Click on "visita l'abbazia").
More views of the abbey are on pages 2 and 3 of this set of travel photos:
http://travel.webshots.com/album/554209036MQgpLs
Note in these views the existence of a "torre Febronia", an originally mid-twelfth-century defensive structure named for an abbess whose name saint will have been no. 1), above.
The cappella di San Luca was the upper part of the abbey's church in the later Middle Ages. Two interior views:
http://www.goleto.it/images/storia06.GIF
http://www.goleto.it/images/visita5_big.GIF
This church's lower part was originally the funerary chapel of the "romanesque" basilica of the Holy Savior. W. remained there until 1807, when he was removed to Montevergine. His relics now reside in the crypt of that abbey's church.
Best,
John Dillon
(last year's post lightly revised)
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