medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture

Today (30. September) is the feast day of:

1)  Antoninus of Piacenza (d. 303, supposedly).  The cult of the martyr A. is attested to as early as the late fourth century, when St. Victricius of Rouen refers to him as the protector of Piacenza (_De laude sanctorum_, 11).  Reliable information about him is lacking.  In about 570 a group of pilgrims traveling under his protection made a tour from Constantinople to the holy places (and other tourist destinations) in Palestine and Egypt; the surviving account, an engaging piece of lowbrow travel literature not dissimilar in some respects from what a blogger of today might write and post, is known as the _Itinerarium Antonini_ (though its author is better referred to as the Pilgrim of Piacenza).  A. is entered for today in the (pseudo-)Hieronymian Martyrology.  He is also so entered in the second edition of Usuard's martyrology, where however he designated a confessor.

The absence of any entry for A. in the martyrologies of Florus of Lyon and St. Ado of Vienne, coupled with Usuard's calling him a confessor, leads one to suppose that in the ninth century he had no legendary identity in Francia (as seems also to have been the case with St. Magnus "of Trani"; 20. August).  Indeed, all manuscripts of the legendary _Inventio corporis sancti Antonini martyris_ (BHL 580, 580a, 581), whose oldest witness is of the ninth century, that are listed in the Bibliotheca Hagiographica Latina Manuscripta are in Italian repositories.  According to the Inventio, A. was a member of the Theban Legion who found martyrdom near today's Travo (PC) in Emilia and whose remains were discovered by Piacenza's later fourth-century bishop St. Savinus.  Travo has a church dedicated to him that is said to go back to the eleventh century, though that would be hard to guess from this view:
http://www.piacenza-pc.it/comuni/travo/travo.htm
A discussion of the building history of this church will be found at the end of this Italian-language notice of Travo:
http://www.cmbobbio.pc.it/sezione.asp?idse=18

A.'s major medieval monument lies some 27 kilometers away in the also Emilian city of Piacenza (in Roman times, Placentia), whose basiilica di Sant'Antonino is said to go back to the early fifth century.  In an earlier form it was Piacenza's cathedral until the later ninth century.  In its present appearance it is an eleventh-century church with later modifications.  The latter include the twelfth-century main portal, the octagonal upper portion of the belltower (thirteenth-century, on an eleventh-century base), and the enormous enclosed porch or atrium erected on one of the transepts in 1450.  An illustrated, English-language account of this church is here:
http://www.piacenzamusei.com/s.php?i=0044
Other views (all exterior):
http://rete.comuni-italiani.it/foto/2008/59247/view
http://www.pbase.com/klaudio/image/28993142
http://www.flickr.com/photos/franfiorini/418811768/sizes/l/
http://rete.comuni-italiani.it/foto/2008/108126/view
http://static.panoramio.com/photos/original/10277116.jpg
More views (incl. several of the interior) are in the second, third, and fourth rows here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/malona/sets/72157605760156889/
The Italia nell'Arte Medievale page on this church:
http://tinyurl.com/3zpczt

A. in a full-page illumination in an early fifteenth-century _Golden Legend_ now in the Special Collections Department of Glasgow University Library (Hunterian MS Gen 1111):
http://tinyurl.com/bfvwl
Executed in Flanders, this book is thought (from the fact that A.'s illumination is larger than any of the 101 others) likely to have been commissioned by a religious house in Piacenza.
Piacenza's Museo Capitolare Sant'Antonino has this fifteenth-century panel painting of the same subject:
http://www.piacenzamusei.com/images/imageg05/110.jpg
and this earlier fifteenth-century altar frontal (ca. 1430) with scenes from A.'s Vita:
http://www.piacenzamusei.com/images/imageg01/110.jpg

A.'s cult is widespread in northern Italy.  In addition to Piacenza and he is also the patron saint of Sant'Antonino Ticino (VA) in Lombardy.  In both places he is celebrated on 4. July.


2)  Gregory the Illuminator (d. betw. 328 and 335).  According to fifth-century Armenian accounts of a partly legendary nature, G. (also G. the Enlightener; in Armenian, Grigor Lusarovich) was the son of a Parthian nobleman executed for having killed his king, a Persian.  A child at the time, he was spirited away by well-wishers to Caesarea in Cappadocia, where he was raised as a Christian.  As an adult G. moved to (in some accounts: returned to) Armenia, married, had children, proselytized, was imprisoned underground for years after a persecution of Christians, was released, and converted king Tiridates III to Christianity.  After T. had made Armenia officially Christian, G., who was consecrated by Cappadocian bishops, became its metropolitan and established his church along Greek and Syriac lines.  He is said to have become a solitary near the end of his life and to have died in a mountain cave.

In the earlier ninth-century Marble Calendar of Naples today is shared by St. Jerome (no. 3, below) and by G.  The latter's cult seems to have been brought to Naples not much earlier, along with putative relics of him, by Eastern-rite monks who founded what is still the city's monastery of San Gregorio Armeno (Benedictine since the later eleventh century).  In 2000 pope John Paul II gave to the Catholicos Kamekin II at Etchmiadzin in Armenia relics of G. from the monastery in Naples; in the following year he made a similar gift to the Armenian Catholicos of Cilicia.  Still in the Regno, G. has been patron of Nardò on Apulia's Salentine Peninsula since, it is said, the ninth century and is now also patron the the diocese of Nardò-Gallipoli.

In this view of the east facade of the tenth-century church of the Holy Cross on Akdamar (Aghtamar, Akhtamar) Island in Lake Van (Van province) in eastern Anatolia, the second full-length relief from the viewer's left is of G.:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/daniefotos/1831948988/sizes/l/
There is a better photo of this relief in the _Bibliotheca Sanctorum_, vol. 7, col. 179.

Views of the church of St. Gregory of Tigran Honents (the name of the merchant who commissioned it), completed in 1215, at Ani in today's province of Kars in Turkey:
http://flickr.com/photos/efendi/1745101/in/set-44391/
http://flickr.com/photos/efendi/1745088/in/set-44391/
http://tinyurl.com/4p7984
More views here, incl. two of the interior (NB: this is the "church of St. Gregory" whose thumbnails occur _above_ those of the Cathedral):
http://tinyurl.com/4snhqn

Views of the originally earlier thirteenth-century (1237-1241) church of St. Grigor Lusarovich at Goshavank ("monastery of Gosh") in the village of Gosh (Tavush province) in Armenia:
http://tinyurl.com/yfuwb34
http://tinyurl.com/yl3knsw
http://tinyurl.com/ykyufsy
Another view of the two Khachkars (cross-stones) in front of the church:
http://tinyurl.com/yh7y42x

G. as depicted in an early fourteenth-century fresco (ca. 1310) in the church of the Aphendiko at Mistra (or Mystras):
http://tinyurl.com/ybp4vuq
In the view, G.'s fresco is the one in the middle:
http://tinyurl.com/23f4avw

G. as depicted in an earlier fourteenth-century mosaic (ca. 1312) in a cupola of the museum of the former church of the Pammakaristos (Fetiye camii) in Istanbul:
http://tinyurl.com/3jn9s7

G. (at right) as depicted in a September calendar portrait in the earlier fourteenth-century frescoes (betw. ca. 1312 and 1321/1322) of the nave of the monastery church of the Theotokos at Gračanica in, depending on one's view of the matter, Serbia's province of Kosovo and Metohija or the Republic of Kosovo:
http://tinyurl.com/3ag5alj

G. (at right) as depicted in September calendar portraits in the earlier fourteenth-century frescoes (betw. 1335 and 1350) of the narthex in the church of the Holy Ascension at the Visoki Dečani monastery near Peć in, depending on one's view of the matter, either the Republic of Kosovo or Serbia's province of Kosovo and Metohija:
http://tinyurl.com/33884jk


3)  Jerome (d. 420).  The doctissimi of this list require no introduction to this Doctor of the Church.


4)  Honorius of Canterbury (d. 653).  Just about all that is known definitely about this fifth archbishop of Canterbury comes from St. Bede the Venerable's _Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum_.  One of the Roman monks sent as missionaries to England by pope St. Gregory I, he succeeded archbishop St. Justus at some point between 628 and 631 and was consecrated by his fellow missionary St. Paulinus, bishop of York.  H. collaborated with Paulinus and with king Eadwine in Northumbria in persuading pope Honorius I to grant metropolitan status to York as well (which the pope did in June 634, sending pallia both to H. and to P.).  When the northern mission collapsed after a hostile regime change in Northumbria H. translated P. to the see of Rochester.  Today is H.'s _dies natalis_.  He was buried at Canterbury in the west porch of the monastery church of Sts. Peter and Paul.


5)  Eusebia of Marseille (?).  An inscription formerly placed over a late antique sarcophagus in the crypt of the abbey of St. Victor in Marseille (in the later nineteenth century it was in what's now the Musée d'Archéologie Méditerranéenne in that city) identified this as the resting place of the nun Eusebia, a great handmaiden of God: _Hic requiescit in pace Eusebia religiosa, magna ancilla Dei_.  The inscription, which by itself does not indicate a cult, has been dated as early as the seventh century; a later dating to perhaps the early eighth century is suspect as being perhaps influenced by a local tradition of long standing that makes E. an abbess of the monastery of St. Quiricus in Marseille who perished in an undated Muslim raid along with thirty-nine other nuns of that house (they are said, in a medievally not unparalleled form of feminine resistance to the threat of personal violence, to have cut off their noses in anticipation of being captured and raped).

Candidates for the raid in question include one from ca. 738 (the one usually favored, perhaps only because it's closer in time to the inscription) and another from the late ninth century.  But it is not clear that the E. of the inscription actually perished in this fashion. 

The cult of E. and her companions seems mostly early modern.  It has left scant trace in medieval records and its brief narrative texts begin only in the seventeenth century.  Perhaps reflecting E.'s presence without companions in a catalog of St.-Victor's relics from 1460, the RM commemorates E. alone. 


6)  Amatus of Nusco (d. 1093).  Less is known about today's less well known saint of the Regno than was true when the Bollandists asserted in Augusti tomus VI. of the _Acta Sanctorum_ that 31. August 1193 was the _dies natalis_ of this first bishop of the Campanian town of Nusco (AV), the "balcony of Irpinia" (so called because of its elevated position on the watershed between the valleys of the Ofanto and the Calore).  The Bollandists' guide in this matter, Felice Renda's sixteenth-century Vita of A., has since been shown to be a piece of fiction falsely claiming him for Montevergine (of which Renda was at the time prior) and making him a disciple of the latter's founder, St. William of Vercelli.  And A.'s will of September 1093, which has survived in the cathedral archives of Nusco and which also was long a subject of controversy, was proven authentic in 1881 by the distinguished Neapolitan archivist Bartolomeo Capasso.  Here's a view of it:
http://tinyurl.com/4xlnru
Archdiocesan records at Salerno show that Nusco was one of the latter's suffragan dioceses created during the time of archbishop Alfanus I (d. 1085).  The ordinary assumption is that A. was consecrated by this famous Campanian churchman.

Both Renda's Vita and its fifteenth-century predecessor by Francesco de Ponte (BHL 359) are now considered largely legendary, though how legendary remains a matter of dispute.  Errico Cuozzo's unpersuasive attempt to identify A. with the historian Amatus of Montecassino remains valuable as a useful summary of the pertinent documentation and hagiographic traditions: "Amato di Montecassino e Amato di Nusco: una stessa persona?", _Benedictina_ 26 (1979), 323-48.  Three Sapphic hymns from A.'s Office at Nusco have survived and are certainly medieval but have been little studied.  Nusco's cathedral of Santo Stefano, now a co-cathedral of the diocese of Sant’Angelo dei Lombardi - Conza - Nusco - Bisaccia, has been largely rebuilt in early modern times.  A.'s remains are preserved in the crypt (perhaps thirteenth-century but redecorated much later):
http://tinyurl.com/2ecsllv

Also in the crypt are these relatively recently uncovered fourteenth- or fifteenth-century Nativity scenes in fresco:
http://tinyurl.com/5xsfz7

Best,
John Dillon
(last year's post lightly revised and with the addition of Eusebia of Marseille)

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