medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Today (27. September) is the feast day of:
1) Gaius of Milan (d. early 3d cent.?). G. is traditionally the second bishop of Milan. Nothing about him is known. The late tenth- or very early eleventh-century author of the _Libellus de situ civitatis Mediolani_ (a.k.a. _Datiana historia_), one of the creators of the supposed apostolic foundation of the church of Milan by St. Barnabas, presents him in a Vita (BHL 3231) as a disciple of that worthy who succeeded St. Anatolius (Milan's traditional first bishop), baptized the future martyrs Vitalis, Gervasius, and Protasius, was martyred in the Neronian persecution, and was laid to rest in Milan's church of Sts. Nabor and Felix.
Liturgical celebration of G. is said to be first attested from the later fifteenth century, when he appears in a Milanese calendar of 1465 under 26. September and as a confessor. A Milanese printed missal of 1482 also enters him under that day. His feast today and his martyrial status are recorded in Milanese missals from 1522 onward.
2) Fidentius and Terentius of Todi (d. 304 or 305, supposedly). F. and T. are a pair of martyrs of very dubious historicity. They have a legendary Passio (versions: 2927b-d) that is thought to be not much older than than the eleventh century. This makes them Syrians who during the persecution of Diocletian and Maximian travel to Rome to bear witness to Christ, who are arrested and tortured, who having survived an attempted execution by fire are brought outside the city to be decapitated but escape when bears devour the soldiers guarding them, who are then hidden in a crypt by an angel, and who finally make their way to the Umbrian town of Todi, are arrested at nearby Martana (in Tudertine Passiones a very dangerous place for martyrs), and are decapitated there on this day; later a little church is erected over their grave.
These saints' Passio is included in a celebrated legendary of the eleventh century (Den Haag, Museum Meerman-Westreenen, ms. 30) whose various Passiones match Sigebert of Gembloux's list of relics that bishop St. Theodoric (Thierry; Dietrich) I of Metz is said to have translated from Italy in 970. F. and T. were dropped from the RM in 2001. They are commemorated today by the Capuchins and perhaps by others in the Franciscan family.
An Italian-language account of the perhaps originally twelfth-century former abbey of F. and T. in a rural section of Massa Martana (PG) in Umbria is here:
http://tinyurl.com/yasq8wn
Better views of abbey church and adjacent tower:
http://www.bellaumbria.net/Massa_Martana/san_fidenzio.jpg
http://tinyurl.com/y8z8txx
3) Hiltrude of Liessies (d. ca. 790). Along with her brother Guntrand, H. (also Hiltrudis, Hiltrud) was one of the saints of the several times rebuilt abbey of Liessies in what is now France's département du Nord. According to her undated Vita (BHL 3953), she was a daughter of the abbey's founder, refused to marry, and lived at the abbey as a holy virgin. The abbey was renewed as a Benedictine house in the eleventh century and lasted until the 1790s. H.'s chapel there survives as today's twefth-/sixteenth-century église Saint-Lambert et Sainte-Hiltrude at Liessies:
http://static.panoramio.com/photos/original/1090980.jpg
http://tinyurl.com/ybvvk8q
4) Bonfilius (d. early 12th cent.). Our sole source for the life and doings of B. (in Italian, Bonfilio and Bonfiglio) is a Vita ascribed to St. Silvestro Guzzolini (d. 1267), the founder of the Silvestrine Bendictines, and preserved into the early modern period at his abbey on Monte Fano near Fabriano (AN) in the Marche. According to this document (BHL 1392), B. was native of Osimo who as a boy displayed a great desire to join the monks of the Benedictine abbey at Storaco (between Osimo and Cingoli) and who then was oblated there by his parents at the request of the abbot and his monks. B. as he grew up was a paragon of monastic virtues and although the youngest in his house the best versed in Scripture and in monastic customs. He was ordained priest, began a life of mortification of the flesh, and was put in charge of a dependent church situated across the Appennines in the Umbrian diocese of Foligno.
There B. was an eloquent, popular, and effective preacher. Both the bishop of Foligno and his clergy held him in veneration and sought his company. B. returned to Storaco where he was a wise and careful abbot at Storaco. Still later, he was elected bishop of Foligno, where he served in exemplary fashion. Still bishop, B. went to the Holy Land as a Crusader (this will have been what's now known as the First Crusade) and stayed there for ten years as an hermit. Divinely prompted to return to Italy, he made a pilgrimage to Rome, learned that a suitable replacement had been found for him at Foligno, and received papal permission to renounce his episcopal status. B. then returned to the abbey at Storaco, where he became unpopular for his strictness and which he left to become an hermit in a mountain valley near Cingoli.
B. died on this day at his hermitage in an unspecified year. A tomb was built for him by a few faithful next to his oratory of the BVM; miracles ensued and he is celebrated annually on this day. Thus far the Vita, which is clearly suffused with Silvestrine ideals and which, having been written (if the tradition is accurate) by someone who himself was a native of Osimo, may also incorporate a certain amount of authorial projection. Nonetheless, no less an historian than Jonathan Riley-Smith describes B. flat out, on the basis of the Vita, as an "ardent reformer" (_The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading_, new ed., University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009, p. 81).
The abbey church of the BVM at Storaco, a _frazione_ of today's Filottrano (AN) in the Marche, was destroyed in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century. The present ex-chiesa di Santa Maria there, now abandoned, was built in the seventeenth century and incorporates surviving parts of its predecessors. Herewith a facade view and a brief YouTube video also focusing on the facade:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/daniele81/3215318301/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQT4ZyDUjoc
A church dedicated to B. was built at his gravesite outside of Cingoli in the earlier thirteenth century. A dependency of the Silvestrine mother house at Monte Fano, it too is now a ruin. Herewith an illustrated, Italian-language page on it:
http://www.antiqui.it/doc/monumenti/chiese/sbonfilio.htm
Here's an illustrated, Italian-language page on the much rebuilt, originally early fourteenth-century chiesa di San Benedetto in Cingoli (MA) in the Marche, into which the Silvestrines translated B. in 1631 and where they are said still to reside (one of the views is of B.'s baroque tomb):
http://www.antiqui.it/doc/monumenti/chiese/sbenedetto.htm
At Foligno, where B. has been venerated since at least the earlier sixteenth century, he is celebrated on 28. September.
5) Deodatus (?), venerated at Sora. Today's perfectly obscure saint of the Regno is in fact venerated rather well upstream from Sora (FR) in Lazio, but in the same diocese, at San Giovanni Valle Roveto, a _frazione_ of today's San Vincenzo Valle Roveto (AQ) in Abruzzo located in Italy's central Appennines near the headwaters of the river Liri. The question mark in the parenthesis after D.'s name could easily be multiplied. Not only are his approximate dates unknown but so also are virtually everything else about him apart from his name, his veneration at this locale, and evidence (noted below) indicating that his cult there is at least late medieval in origin.
In 1617 the then bishop of Sora, Girolamo Giovannelli, discovered in the church of San Giovanni in the aforementioned Valle Roveto community of the same name an altar inscribed in "Gothic letters" to a Deodatus and bearing in relief a depiction of the dedicatee (since dated to the fourteenth century). The latter, Giovannelli learned, was from time immemorial (_a tempore immemorabili_) celebrated annually on 27. September with a mass from the common of confessors with the collect for an abbot.
The altar, which according to Giovannelli had not been been mentioned in accounts of previous episcopal visitations, had had a fenestella cut into it, suggesting that the body of a saint might be present. The altar was removed and, sure enough, human remains were found in a largely disintegrated burial case tucked away down below. A formal recognition followed and Giovannelli had a new chapel constructed in the church (now San Giovanni Vecchio) to house a new altar that he then had built for D. On 4. June 1618 Giovannelli, who had procured a papal indulgence for those present at this event, translated D. (now enclosed within a suitably dressed effigy) to his new resting place above this altar. At the same time, he saw to it that the portion of the old altar bearing D.'s inscription and relief was mounted there in a visible location.
D.'s display coffin and effigy reliquary are still present at San Giovanni Valle Roveto; a view of them is here:
http://tinyurl.com/85bwu
D. has yet to grace the pages of the RM.
The "Santi Beati" website carries an unattributed account of D. that identifies him with the abbot of Montecassino whom prince Sicard of Benevento deposed in 834 in order to get his hands on the abbey's treasury and who died imprisoned in Benevento on 9. October of the same year:
http://www.santiebeati.it/search/jump.cgi?ID=91167
Both this identification and the assertion that Montecassino's abbot St. Bertharius (d. 883) hid D.'s body at San Giovanni Valle Roveto in order to protect it from Muslim raiders are undocumented speculation.
6) Elzear of Sabran (d. 1323). Our information about this less well known saint of Regno (in Latin, Elzearius; in Italian, Elzeario and Elziario; in French, Elzéar and Alziaire; in Occitan, Auzias) comes chiefly from a canonization brief of 1327 by his confessor, François de Meyronnes, from a summary of his unfinished canonization trial of 1351, and from testimony at the later canonization trial of his widow, Bl. Delphine of Puimichel (or of Signe; d. 1360). A scion of one of the great noble families of Provence, he studied at the abbey of St. Victor in Marseille, where an uncle was abbot. In 1299, when E. was thirteen, he wed in an arranged marriage the sixteen-year-old Delphine, whose intention to remain virginal he is said to have honored.
In 1309 E. inherited from his father the county of Ariano in the mostly mainland kingdom of Sicily (_vulgo_, the kingdom of Naples) whose Angevin rulers were also the counts of Provence. In 1310 he traveled to southern Italy; in the years that he followed he held important positions at court under king Robert and took part in the defense of the kingdom against the emperor Henry VII. In 1316 E. and Delphine, who had joined him in Naples, became Franciscan tertiaries and undertook in a more formal way than previously a life of penitence, prayer, and charity. Surviving documents show E. attempting to extend his rule of chastity to his Provençal castles of Ansouis and Puimichel. E. died on this day in 1323 while serving at Paris on a mission from Robert to arrange the marriage between Robert's heir apparent, Charles, duke of Calabria, and Marie de Valois. Buried in the Franciscan church of Apt (Vaucluse), E. was canonized in 1369 by his godson, Urban V.
E. is a patron saint of his county town, today's Ariano Irpino (AV), whither he is very dubiously said to have brought from Naples the remains of St. Heliena of Laurino (22. May; since translated to Laurino [SA]). In this view of the late fifteenth- and very early sixteenth-century facade of Ariano's cathedral of Maria Santissima Assunta e San Ottone, the statue in the niche on the viewer's left, erected in 1502, is of E.:
http://tinyurl.com/yawnqlf
Since 1791 E. and Delphine have reposed in the ex-cathedral of Sainte-Anne in Apt. The église paroissiale Saint-Martin at Ansouis has relics of them kept in the busts shown here:
http://tinyurl.com/y8qbukx
At Ansouis E. and D. are celebrated jointly on 28. September. Herewith some views of their fête of 2008:
http://diocese-avignon.fr/spip/Fete-de-Saint-Elzear-et
Best,
John Dillon
(last year's post very lightly revised and with the addition of Caius of Milan)
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