medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Today (26. August) is the feast day of:
1) Maximilian of Rome (?). M. (also Maximian, Maximus) is a Roman martyr whom the (pseudo-)Hieronymian Martyrology enters under today without indicating his place of sepulture. Seventh-century guidebooks for pilgrims to Rome place him in the cemetery of Basilla on the Via Salaria vetus. The earliest of these, the _Notitiae ecclesiarum urbis Romae_, puts him in the martyrial basilica dedicated to St. Hermes as does also the late sixth-century _Index oleorum_ of abbot John at Monza.
2) Anastasius of Salona (?). A. (also A. the Fuller; in Croatian: Anastazije, Sta¨) is an early martyr of Salona, the capital of Roman Dalmatia. He had an early fifth-century martyrial basilica at a nearby locale that is now Marusinac in Croatia and was one of the Dalmatian and Istrian martyrs whom pope John IV (640-42) translated to Rome and housed in a chapel built for them (that of St. Venantius) in the Lateran Baptistery. The (pseudo-)Hieronymian Martyrology enters under today an A. of Salona whom it says was a fuller. A legendary Passio of an A. the fuller (BHL 414), whose earliest witness is of the tenth century, has him martyred on this day at Salona under Diocletian. The A. in the mosaics of the Lateran Baptistery's cappella di San Venanzio is richly dressed and thus presumably to be thought of as an aristocrat. He's at far right here:
http://www.jemolo.com/alta/ro431.jpg
A. also has a cult at today's Split (in Italian: Spalato), where he is one of the martyrs said to have been translated thither from Salona around the time of the latter's sack by proto-Slavs and Avars in 614. Here's a view of his mid-fifteenth-century altar (1448) by Juraj Dalmatinac (a.k.a. Giorgio da Sebenico) in Split's cathedral:
http://tinyurl.com/5kcqb4
A martyrial basilica at Marusinac is commonly but insecurely identified as that of A. Here's a view of it, showing the presence of a crypt below the place where the altar would have stood:
http://tinyurl.com/5r2unn
3) Victor of Caesarea in Mauretania (?). The (pseudo-)Hieronymian Martyrology enters under this day a V. for whom it gives no locality. But an eleventh-century sacramentary from Santo Domingo de Silos (Burgos) transmits an at least partly legendary Passio, thought to be late antique in origin, of a Victor celebrated on 26. August (BHL 8565) who is said to have suffered _in Cesariensi civitate_. Details of this narration and the preservation in Spain of the Passiones of a number of certainly Mauretanian martyrs conduce to the belief that the Caesarea in question is the one in Mauretania and not, say, the one in Cappadocia (which latter also has a poorly attested saint Victor, venerated in Roccella Ionica [RC] in Calabria) or the one in Palestine.
According to his Passio, V. was summoned before a magistrate during an unspecified persecution. He correctly predicted that the magistrate would condemn him to be crucified and would then miraculously be healed of his gout that had prevented him from walking (one can imagine other persecuting magistrates engaging in clinical trials to test the general efficacy of this interesting cure). When V. was being crucified the nail driven through V.'s feet failed to bite into the wood of the cross; V. bravely brought this to the executioner's attention. The execution took place on a Sabbath and many Jews were in attendance, one of whom attempted to twist out some of V.'s chest hairs with an ad-hoc tweezer fashioned from a reed; V. correctly prophesied to this tormentor that the latter would not re-enter the city alive. V.'s glorious death is remembered annually on this day.
Thus V.'s Passio. For its role in V.'s transformation into a local saint of today's Cerezo de Río Tirón (Burgos) celebrated on this day, see no. 4, below.
4) Victor of Cerezo in Old Castile (d. 10th or 11th cent., supposedly). At today's Cerezo de Río Tirón (Burgos) a V. imagined as a Christian put to death by Muslims is the traditional patron saint, celebrated principally on 26. August. A Passio composed in 1466 on the occasion of a translation of his relics there (BHL 8567) draws on the Passio of Victor of Caesarea in Mauretania (see no. 3, above) venerated in the eleventh century at Silos (in the same diocese as Cerezo de Río Tirón) but changes the locale from _in Cesariensi civitate_ to _in Cerasiensi civitate_ (Cerezo's Latin name is Cerasius): this V. too is crucified and the episode of the nail in his feet is repeated from the Passio of the Mauretanian V.
Another Passio of this more recent V. (in Spanish, San Vitores) that was used for his lections in a breviary for the Use of Burgos printed in 1538 and that probably underlies the one published by Juan Tamayo in 1651 (BHL 8566) transfers to the chief Muslim persecutor the detail of the miraculous cure of the Roman persecutor's gouty feet and re-uses in different contexts phrases from BHL 8565. V. of Cerezo has yet to grace the pages of the RM.
Herewith two views of the remains of Cerezo de Río Tirón's mostly sixteenth-century iglesia de Nuestra Señora de Villalba with its "gothic" apse:
http://www.gabyrulo.es/fotos/rucere02.JPG
http://www.gabyrulo.es/fotos/rucere05.JPG
Today is also the feast day of two probably artificial groups of saints venerated in different parts of the Regno, namely:
5) Orontius (previously, Arontius) and companions (d. ca. 65, supposedly). O. (in Italian, Oronzo, Oronzio) is a medievally attested saint whose present cult is essentially early modern. He is the principal patron of Lecce (LE) on Apulia's Salentine peninsula and a patron of several other towns and cities in the region.
Prior to its revision of 2001, the RM commemorated under 27. August a group of four saints, Arontius, Honoratus, Fortunatus, and Sabinianus. Entered under that day in the (pseudo-)Hieronymian Martyrology as martyrs at Potenza in today's Basilicata, all four were among the dozen saints of southern Italy said to have been translated to Benevento by duke Arechis II in about 760 and there interred magnificently in his newly built church of Holy Wisdom (Santa Sofia). Herewith the Italian nell'Arte Medievale page on that church:
http://tinyurl.com/62p3n3
This larger group was called the "Twelve Brothers" and a Passio was soon written for them (BHL 2297; shorter version, BHL 2298; Donatus, Felix, and companions) in which they literally _are_ brothers. Hailing, it was said, from Hadrumetum in Roman Africa, they were tried in Carthage (seemingly during the persecution of Diocletian) before an official named Valerianus, imprisoned, and released by an angel. They then fled to Italy and were there hunted down and executed in small groups at different places at the command of the selfsame Valerianus (whose obsession in this matter makes him something of a forerunner of Hugo's inspector Javert). Alfanus of Salerno's _carmen 13_ is a metrical version of these saints' Passion and Translation to Benevento (BHL 2299; 1000 dactylic hexameters).
Arontius enjoyed a widespread cult of his own in Apulia and Lucania (the latter including parts of today's Campania and Calabria as well as most of Basilicata) that is documented from the eleventh and twelfth century onward. At Lecce, his cult is first recorded in a charter of the future king Tancred from the year 1181. The change in name form to Orontius seems to have occurred in the later Middle Ages. In about 1480 Francesco II del Balzo, duke of Andria, count of Montescaglioso, etc., etc. offered to Lecce the body of Sancto Orontio, whose whereabouts the duke claimed to know. (This is the same duke who was so instrumental in the rediscovery of the long hidden body of St. Richard of Andria and in later vouching for that saint's canonization when earlier records had inconveniently gone missing.) Lecce was slow to respond, apparently for reasons that were fiscal in nature.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, O. (as we may now abbreviate him) and two other local saints, Justus and Fortunatus, received a new Vita said to have been based in part on a medieval document, not earlier than the twelfth century, that has since disappeared. This new account makes O. a native of Lecce who greeted the missionary Justus when the latter had been sent to Italy in the 60s by the apostle Paul. O. was converted by Justus, later travelled to Corinth, where Paul made him Lecce's first bishop, and finally suffered martyrdom at Lecce during the Neronian persecution.
Modern historians have not looked kindly on this story. Local persistence, aided by O.'s great popularity in the Salento once he had been credited with the region's relatively mild experience of a pestilence that was severe in other parts of the kingdom, led in the later seventeenth century to official confirmation of the cult of Justus, Orontius, and Fortunatus by the Sacred Congregation of Rites. In this revised persona O. (not presently in the RM) is commemorated liturgically on 26. August, his supposed _dies natalis_.
O. is the subject of major festivities at Turi (BA), Ostuni (BR), Campi Salentini (LE), Botrugno (LE), and of course Lecce itself, where his statue gazes down from atop a column (parts of which came from one of a pair of Roman-period columns at Brindisi) in the piazza that bears his name:
http://www.leccenelsalento.it/immagini-lecce/50.jpg
Two views of the column(s) as presently located at Brindisi:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/gbraschi/1058073306/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/gbraschi/1058072234/
Here's O. is again, above the piazza entrance to Lecce's baroque cathedral (Justus and Fortunatus are represented in the niches below):
http://tinyurl.com/36erzz
http://www.flickr.com/photos/blunight72/140774784/
No medieval depictions of O. or medieval buildings dedicated to him appear to have survived.
6) Simplicius, Constantius, and Victorianus (d. ca. 159, supposedly). The patron saints of today's Celano (AQ) in Abruzzo, S., C., and V. are three presumed martyrs whose highly legendary central medieval Passio (BHL 1127) makes them nobles of Burgundy who were converted to Christianity under an emperor Antoninus (usually interpreted to mean Antoninus Pius, r. 138-161) and who during a persecution later in the same reign were sent for execution first to Rome, where they made many converts who themselves were martyred, and then to Marsican territory, where they were decapitated on this day. Jets of water arose from where the severed heads struck the ground, giving rise to a fountain identified with today's Fontegrande at Celano.
According to an early fifteenth-century inscription from Celano, Pandulf, bishop of the Marsi (in office in 1057) oversaw an Inventio of the martyrs' remains and the latter's placing under the main altar of Celano's church of St. John (whose locale, specified in other documents as _in capite aquae_ or _ad caput aquae_, is that of the Passio's fountain). In the thirteenth century that church was replaced as the town's principal one by another in a different location, today's San(ti) Giovanni Battista (ed Evangelista), where in 1406 the then count of Celano had the martyrs' remains translated into a new chapel and interred in a marble sarcophagus. In 1709 these remains were translated to their present location under that church's then new main altar, which latter is said to incorporate pieces from their early fifteenth-century sarcophagus.
In the absence of any early testimony for a martyrdom at Celano, modern scholarly opinion tends toward the view that S., C., and V. are actually saints of these names who in life had nought to do with Celano but whose relics had been brought there at some point prior to the eleventh-century Inventio. They entered the RM in 1630 and left it in the revision of 2001.
Herewith some views of Celano's originally later thirteenth-century chiesa di San Giovanni Battista, two showing its later fifteenth-century wooden doors with ornamental paneling:
http://tinyurl.com/323y6bc
http://members.tripod.com/virgil111/CelanoEnio01.jpg
http://tinyurl.com/2jh7kl
Brief, Italian-language accounts of this church are here:
http://tinyurl.com/34y8bay
http://www.terremarsicane.it/node/456
This church was among those in Celano damaged in last year's great earthquake in the Aquilano.
The original San Giovanni ad caput aquae was rebuilt in the later fourteenth century and, after further vicissitudes, survives as Celano's church of Santa Maria delle Grazie. An illustrated, Italian-language account of it is here:
http://tinyurl.com/2tkukh
Best,
John Dillon
(last year's post revised and with the additions of Victor of Caesarea in Mauretania and Victor of Cerezo in Old Castile)
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