medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Today (2. September) is the feast day of:
1) Theodota and her sons Evodius, Hermogenes, and Callistus (d. ca. 304, supposedly). The fourth-century Syriac Martyrology records under this day a feast of the three sons of Theodota, martyred at Nicomedia. The (pseudo-)Hieronymian Martyrology enters T. and her sons three times, once under 13. March, once under 2. August, and once under today; none of its entries furnishes a location for these saints and only the entry under 13. March gives the number of the sons. That entry also adds that the entire group was martyred by fire, a detail that also occurs in a brief Passio (BHG 1781; Latin version: BHL 8096). A more elaborate Passio of these saints (BHL 8093ff.) that forms the third part of the Passio of the St. Anastasia of 25. December names one of the sons as Evodius and gives Nicaea as their place of martyrdom.
The names of the other two sons come from a mangled, apparently composite entry in the (ps.-)MH under 25. April and from Byzantine synaxary notices under 1. September. In all of these Evodius is called Evodus. In the early medieval historical martyrologies and in the RM until its revision of 2001 the group was celebrated on 2. August, with a location in Nicaea (the latter kept by the editors of the new RM when they returned the celebration to the day given in our earliest surviving source). Along with St. Anthony of Padua, T. is a patron saint of Felline, a _frazione_ of Alliste (LE) on Italy's Salentine peninsula. At Felline she is called Deodata (a development from pronunciations of her name in Greek), is thought to have been a patron of the town's medieval Greek-speaking population, and is celebrated in a festival on 10. and 11. June.
Scenes from the Passio of Theodota and her sons, as depicted in a later fifteenth-century (1463) copy from Paris of Vincent of Beauvais' _Speculum historiale_ in its French-language version by Jean de Vignay (Paris, BnF, ms. Français 51, fol. 64v):
http://tinyurl.com/2e4886c
2) Antoninus of Apamea (d. 4th cent., supposedly). The later eighth-century Weissenburg codex, actually at Wolfenbüttel, of the (pseudo-)Hieronymian Martyrology records under 3. September a martyr A. who suffered at territory of Apamea in Syria under Constantius (i.e. Constantius II, 337-61). A Greek synaxary notice fills out details, presumably from a lost Passio. This account makes A. a young stonemason who violently reproached pagans of a nearby town for their idolatry, who later returned and smashed their idols, who was asked by the bishop of Apamea to build a church dedicated to the Trinity. and who in the course of this labor was slain by some of the aforementioned pagans (who were very angry). Syrian and Armenian sources tell us of a memorial basilica to A. at Apamea; Theodoret bears witness to A.'s feast there. This church is thought to have been destroyed when the city was under Persian rule in the seventh century.
The (ps.-)HM records A. under today's date as well, noting his translation to Gaul. Today is also his feast in the Mozarabic Calendar. By the ninth century the monastery in today's Tarn-et-Garonne later known as Saint-Antonin-du-Rouergue claimed to have A.'s head and other of his skeletal remains. By the Middle Ages a town in the county of Foix that had once been Fredelas was calling itself Appamia or Pamia (from _Apamia_, a medieval Latin spelling of Apamea) and claiming to be the place where its own allegedly native saint A. had been martyred. Pamia is now Pamiers (Ariège) and its likewise youthful A. has a rich legendary history of evangelizing in southern France and in Spain.
Two illustrated, Spanish-language pages on the iglesia de San Antolín de Bedón in Llanes (Asturias), the originally early thirteenth-century church of a much older and now abandoned Benedictine monastery:
http://www.arteguias.com/monasterio/san-antolin-bedon.htm
http://tinyurl.com/25yrhjf
Other exterior views:
http://tinyurl.com/2f9fv95
http://tinyurl.com/25hscpt
http://tinyurl.com/282gx4m
http://tinyurl.com/2ezrt9j
http://tinyurl.com/2fy87f6
http://tinyurl.com/2d569b8
http://tinyurl.com/27odr3a
Interior views:
http://tinyurl.com/2coccbd
http://www.flickr.com/photos/shavy/439929673/
Palencia's catedral de San Antolín is mostly of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. An aerial view:
http://tinyurl.com/2ul86kv
Numerous exterior and interior views are here:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Catedral_de_Palencia
The cathedral is built over what is said to be an eleventh-century crypt, called that of St. A. and the putative resting place of some of his remains. An illustrated, Spanish-language page on it:
http://tinyurl.com/3xuy6mo
A bit of the crypt is even older (Visigothic):
http://tinyurl.com/5j832p
http://tinyurl.com/3ynprqd
http://tinyurl.com/397t9bz
In the Middle Ages, Pamiers' cathédrale Saint-Antonin was dedicated to Sts. John the Baptist and the Evangelist and, later, to the BVM. Massively rebuilt in the seventeenth century, it retains a fourteenth-century belltower:
http://tinyurl.com/5or98l
and a portal partly of the twelfth century and partly of the fourteenth:
http://tinyurl.com/5uczbz
A. as depicted in an early fifteenth-century (ca. 1414) breviary for the Use of Paris (Châteauroux, Bibliothèque municipale, ms. 2, fol. 318v):
http://tinyurl.com/25zf86x
3) Justus of Lyon (d. late 4th cent.). J. (in French, Just) has two Vitae, of which the longer (BHL 4600) seems to have been written shortly before 850 while the often very similar shorter one (BHL 4599), though undated, could be an abbreviation of that text. According to both accounts, J. had been deacon of Vienne before becoming a beloved bishop of Lyon, had after a period of civil unrest given up his episcopacy, and had, together with a young lector of Lyon named Viator, become an hermit in Egypt, where ultimately both died and whence his body was later translated to Lyon for burial. The longer account places J.'s abdication after his participation in a council in Italy (thought to have been that of Aquileia in 381).
Some have thought that the unusual nature of a translation over so great a distance in the late fourth century makes it more probable that the wilderness to which J. retired after his abdication was a lot closer to Lyon than Egypt. But the example of the also late fourth-century Paulinus of Trier (31. August) shows that such a long-distance translation was at this time by no means impossible for a large Gallic town. Today is the date given by the Weissenburg codex of the (pseudo-)Hieronymian Martyrology as that of J.'s laying to rest at Lyon and of the (seemingly early seventh-century) dedication of his basilica. St. Ado of Vienne, followed by Usuard, notes that Viator's remains were translated to Lyon along with those of J.
An illustrated, French-language pages (with expandable images) on the late antique extramural basilica of J. at Lyon and on its now vanished medieval successor:
http://qse.free.fr/spip.php?article22
http://qse.free.fr/spip.php?article23
Expandable views of J. as depicted in a late fifteenth-century breviary for the Use of Langres are here (Chaumont, Bibliothèque municipale, ms. 33, fol. 326v):
http://tinyurl.com/5owrkz
4) Nonnosus (d. ca. 565). Pope St. Gregory the Great tells us at third hand (_Dialogi_, 1. 7) that N. was prior of a monastery located at the top of Mount Soracte near Rome, that he bore with equanimity the harshness of his abbot, and that his gentle nature often softened through humility said abbot's wrath. Gregory also tells us that N. was a thaumaturge. When the brothers needed space on the mountain for a vegetable garden, N. by his prayers displaced from the chosen site a rock so large that fifty teams of oxen could not move it.
Still according to Gregory, on another occasion N. dropped a glass lamp that he had been washing, causing it to shatter. Fearful of abbatial ire, he placed all the fragments before the altar and withdrew in prayer; upon returning, he found the lamp to be whole again. On yet another occasion, when the monastery had run out of oil, N. had the brothers collect what little oil could be pressed from the at this time not very rich or numerous fruit of monastery's olive trees and place that in a small vessel before the altar. Everyone withdrew. N. prayed, called the brothers back, and instructed them to pour a tiny bit of the oil into each of many vessels, all of which on the next day were found to be full.
And that's what is known about Nonnosus, the mid-sixth-century prior on Mount Soracte, whose virtues and doings are commemorated in the RM under today and who has often been referred to as an abbot, though there is nothing in Gregory to confirm this. Gregory observes that the miracles of the rock and of the lamp have parallels operated by earlier Fathers, Gregory (the Thaumaturge) and Donatus (perhaps D. of Arezzo, if the later ascription to him of a parallel miracle is not merely inferred from the present passage). He does not add (because it is so obvious?) that the miracle of the oil is paralleled in its manner of multiplication by Jesus' miracle of the loaves and the fishes.
N. entered the roster of the saints not from Italy but rather from the German-speaking world, where he appears in the later twelfth-century _Magnum Legendarium Austriacum_ and in various later sources listing him under today. By way of contrast, the _Catalogus Sanctorum_ (ca. 1375) of the Italian Petrus de Natalibus lists N. under saints whose feast day is not known. He is especially venerated at Freising, where he is a patron saint and where a twelfth-century Invention of his relics was grounded in a tale of a translation, about a century earlier, from the monastery to which the friend of N. who informed Gregory's informant is said to have belonged.
A more plausible origin for this transalpine cult came to light in 1987 with the discovery in the Pfarrkirche St. Tiburtius in Molzbichl (Kärnten) in Austria of a late antique inscription identifying the burial site of a deacon Nonnosus who had died at an extremely advanced age on 2. September 533. This development in turn clarified an eleventh-century (ca. 1055) addition to the festal calendar of the monastery of St. Emmeram in Regensburg listing under this day a feast of Nonnosus, deacon and confessor. Together these data permit the view that the details of Gregory's Nonnosus (whose day of death is unknown) were at some time grafted on to the cult of his Vita-less synonym from Carinthia (whose _dies natalis_ is today).
The inscription at Molzbichl is shown here:
http://tinyurl.com/mupz9j
A closer but only partial view is here:
http://www.spittal-drau.at/carantana/
For further information see Karl Amon, Karl Heinz Frankl, and Peter G. Tropper, eds., _Der heilige Nonnosus von Molzbichl_ (Klagenfurt: Verlag des Kärntner Landesarchivs, 2001; = _Das Kärntner Landesarchiv_, no. 27).
The monastery on top of Mount Soracte was dedicated to pope St. Sylvester from at least the early eighth century onward. This house lasted until the nineteenth century: remaining now are its restored originally twelfth-century church and some fragments of other structures. A brief, illustrated, Italian-language account of what's now called the eremo di San Silvestro and of its crypt is here:
http://www.avventurasoratte.com/storia%20cultura.htm
Exterior views:
http://tinyurl.com/yhqgtb
http://tinyurl.com/kne5t
http://tinyurl.com/2dn8otj
Elsewhere on the mountain hikers can view a formation called the Sasso di San Nonnoso ('St. Nonnosus' Rock'):
http://www.prolocosantoreste.com/NuoviFile/sasso-s.nonnoso.jpg
If you wish to believe it, this could be the very rock that once impeded the creation of the brothers' vegetable garden.
5) Albert of Pontida (Albert of Prezzate; d. 1095 or 1099) and Guy of Pontida (Guido or Vito of Pontida; d. later 11th cent.). Albert was a soldier who after being seriously wounded undertook a pilgrimage to Compostela and who in 1079 together with his companion Guy founded a Cluniac house at what today is Pontida (BG) in Lombardy. Guy became its first prior; upon his death he was succeeded by Albert. Both were interred in the priory church and remained there until after the latter's destruction by fire in 1373, when their remains were taken to Bergamo. They were returned to Pontida (now operating as a Benedictine monastery) in 1911.
Fragments of Albert's sarcophagus have been set into the altar of the modern basilica at Pontida:
http://tinyurl.com/65vhnc
They are also shown in this engraving:
http://www.ora-et-labora.net/image012.jpg
An expandable image of the relief with the equestrian figure is here:
http://www.artandarchitecture.org.uk/images/conway/aa32cf67.html
Best,
John Dillon
(last year's post revised)
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