medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture

Today (22. October) is the feast day of:

1) Mark of Jerusalem (d. prob. mid-2d cent.). We know about M. from a very brief mention in Eusebius (_Historia ecclesiastica_, 4. 6. 4), who notes that after Hadrian's conquest in 136 of Jerusalem (which latter he rebuilt and renamed Aelia Capitolina) and his expulsion of the Jews from that city M. was its first non-Jewish bishop. He enters the martyrologies in the ninth century with St. Ado of Vienne, who entered him under this day (seemingly arbitrarily). Ado's elogium of M., which was taken over practically verbatim by Usuard, calls him very famous and very learned and adds that he was martyred not long afterward. Either Ado invented all this or he had a source that has disappeared without leaving another trace.

A Hadrianic installation in Jerusalem contemporary with M.: the Roman Gate under the Damascus Gate in the Old City:
http://tinyurl.com/yhuukh5
http://tinyurl.com/34hj8kz
An English-language account of the gate:
http://tinyurl.com/yfoy3dv


2) Abercius of Hierapolis (d. late 2d cent.). A. is the first known bishop of Hierapolis in Phrygia, a town that overlooked the hot springs of what is now Pamukkale in southwestern Turkey's Denizli province. What appears to be most of A.'s epitaph in verse on a monument erected before 216 (the year in which this text was adapted for another person's epitaph in a nearby town) survives in two pieces now in the Museo Cristiano Pio Lateranense. This speaks of his travels to Rome and in Syria and of his engagement (expressed in part allegorically) with Christian communities during his journeys.

A.'s partly legendary late fourth- or early fifth-century Bios (three versions: BHG 2, 3, and the brief 3z) has him overturning a temple statue of Apollo in Hierapolis in protest against an imperial decree from Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus requiring universal sacrifice to pagan gods, later journeying to Rome where (in an early instance of a familiar hagiographic topos) he cures the daughter of the emperor (still Marcus Aurelius), and, later still, restoring the baths at Hierapolis and endowing them with a spring that arose at his prayers.

A. appears in Byzantine synaxaries and menologia from the tenth century onward. He has an expanded Bios by Symeon Metaphrastes (BHG 4). A church dedicated to A. existed medievally in the patriarchal palace in Constantinople and a major relic of him was seen by many pilgrims in the church of the Holy Savior in Constantinople's monastery of St. George of the Mangana. If one is to believe the fourteenth-century Russian traveler known as the Russian Anonymus, at the time of his visit to Constantinople healing services honoring A. were conducted every Wednesday and Friday in the city's church of Christ Philanthropus.


In A.'s day Hierapolis was still being rebuilt after a major earthquake in the first century CE; most of the ruins one now sees at this UNESCO World Heritage Site are probably or certainly postdate him. But this late first-century CE municipal gate, dated by an inscription to the principate of Domitian (81-96), will have been familiar to him:
http://tinyurl.com/3cslxr
An English-language history of the site, with links toward the bottom to sub-pages on specific places of interest:
http://www.turizm.net/cities/hierapolis/

A. as depicted in the earlier fourteenth-century frescoes (ca. 1313-ca. 1320) of the diaconicon in the King's Church (dedicated to Sts. Joachim and Anne) at the Studenica monastery near Kraljevo (Raška district) in southern Serbia:
http://tinyurl.com/ycpehtj

A. as depicted in an October calendar portrait in the earlier fourteenth-century frescoes (1335-1350) in the narthex of 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/264nf8f


3) Philip and Hermes of Heraclea (d. ca. 304). P. and H. have an originally late antique Latin Passio (BHL 6834) considered trustworthy because of 1) the bare-bones nature of its embedded selective transcripts of their interrogations by Roman officials and 2) the absence of anachronisms indicating invention. According to this text, P. was bishop of Heraclea in Thrace and H., who had been a city magistrate and was well thought of by the Romans, was his deacon. Their refusal to surrender their holy books to the civil authorities led to P.'s scourging and to H.'s being given a great blow to the face, causing blood to flow. Their subsequent refusal to sacrifice to the gods of the state (including, of course, the geniuses of the emperors) led to their imprisonment, to P.'s torture, and to the execution of both by fire at Adrianople.


4) Valerius of Langres (d. 4th or very early 5th cent.?). Our sole source for the life of the reputed martyr V. (in French: Vallier, Valère) is a legendary Passio seemingly of the eleventh century (BHL 8496). This makes him an archdeacon of Langres under its famous St. Desiderius (Didier; d. ca. 356) but has him killed by barbarian invaders under the legendary Vandal king Crocus after the irruption into Gaul of the Vandals and Sueves (in 405). The Passio forms part of the so-called Crocus-cycle of Gallic Passiones; as a guide to actual events it is hopeless.

Medievally, V. was venerated widely in Burgundy, especially at Langres and at the Benedictine abbey of Saint-Pierre at Molosme. The latter came into possession of his putative relics at some time prior to 992 and which still had them in 1307, when the head was placed in a bust reliquary and the remainder in a new châsse. At the abbey of Notre-Dame at Molesme V. is absent from the calendar of ca. 1175 but present in that of ca. 1250, when he was honored with a twelve-lesson feast.

V. before Crocus as depicted in a late fifteenth-century (after 1481) breviary for the Use of Langres (Chaumont, Bibliothèque municipale, ms. 33, fol. 481):
http://tinyurl.com/yfw2zc8

Two views of the originally "romanesque" église Saint-Vallier at Norges-la-Ville (Côte-d'Or), often said to go back in some unspecified way to the ninth century:
http://tinyurl.com/yg3wdbc
http://tinyurl.com/ylqsp9a


5) Symmachus of Capua (d. 449?). This less well known saint of the Regno is the traditional founder of the cathedral of (Old) Capua, now the since rebuilt basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore at Santa Maria Capua Vetere (CE) in Campania, and was so identified in an inscription in its apse mosaic (destroyed in 1754). He is dated to the first half of the fifth century by a very probable identification with the holy bishop Symmachus whom the priest Uranius in his letter on the passing of St. Paulinus of Nola says visited the latter shortly before his death in 431. A church dedicated to S. is attested at present-day Capua from 1326 and his feast on this day occurs in a later medieval calendar from the same city. S. is the patron saint of Santa Maria Capua Vetere. He has yet to grace the pages of the RM.


6) Donatus of Fiesole (d. ca. 875/76). The Irishman Donatus was bishop of Fiesole (an ex-Roman hilltown just outside of Florence) by the year 844. By the time of the synod of Ravenna in 877 he had been replaced by a bishop Zenobius. His Vita (BHL 2305), which appears to have been written by someone who had not known him, is transmitted in eleventh- and twelfth-century legendaries compiled in the diocese of Fiesole. But it is based in part on diocesan records and, though the indiction given is problematic, there is little reason to question its statement that at Piacenza D. obtained confirmation of his diocese's immunities from Charles the Bald (who was in Italy in 875 and again in 877).

Preserved in the Vita is a brief epitaph for D. written in the first person in which D. says (or is made to say), _Regibus italicis servivi pluribus annis, / Lothario magno, Ludovicoque bono_ ("I served the kings of Italy for many years, Lothar the great and Louis the good"). This claim of service to Carolingian kings together with his having been said in the Vita to have received at Capua an important grant for his diocese from an Augustus who must be Louis II has led some to assert that D. accompanied Louis II in his southern descent of 866 (when L. took Capua by force from rulers who had ceased to recognize their Salernitan overlord).

According to the Vita, the well educated D. had left Ireland as a young man for a life of religion on the Continent and was traveling northward after a pilgrimage to Rome when he was elected bishop of Fiesole by popular acclaim. He was remembered both for his holiness (the Vita adduces several miracles) and for his learning. The epitaph has him teaching grammar, versification, and saints' lives to his students; the Vita includes several brief poems said to be his. One of those saints whose lives he taught was Brigid of Kildare, to whom he is said in the Vita to have had a special devotion and whose _Vita metrica_ (BHL 1459) has an introduction by him (opinions are divided on the question of D.'s authorship of the metrical Vita itself).

D. was buried in Fiesole's old cathedral near the foot of the hill. After the coming-into-use of the present cathedral of St. Romulus (begun in the 1020s) this became the church of a Benedictine abbey now generally known as the Badia di Fiesole. A brief history of the Badia and of its church (rebuilt in the fifteenth century) is here:
http://www.firenzealbergo.it/info/churches/badia_fiesolana.aspx
A distance view of the Badia and of Florence below it:
http://tinyurl.com/y2wlfp
Somewhat closer views:
http://tinyurl.com/32wc5t6
http://tinyurl.com/339pxnq
Facade:
http://tinyurl.com/2895ada
http://i.pbase.com/o6/92/758692/1/94536446.PV8dFiTb.6007.jpg
Interior (from 1461-1464):
http://tinyurl.com/2cmp4k4
http://tinyurl.com/2bups8h
The refectory:
http://digital.casalini.it/retreat/2001_docs/immagine.jpg
A thirteenth-/fourteenth-century crucifix formerly belonging to the Badia, now in Fiesole's chiesa di San Domenico:
http://sandomenicodifiesole.op.org/graphics/crocDon.jpg

In 1817 D.'s remains were translated up the hill to a chapel in the cathedral of San Romolo. Herewith an illustrated, Italian-language account of this "new" cathedral (restored in the later nineteenth century):
http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duomo_di_Fiesole
More exterior views:
http://tinyurl.com/yzjwdw5
http://tinyurl.com/ygonxcc
http://www.comune.fiesole.fi.it/contenuti/foto/neve/04.jpg
More interior views:
http://flickr.com/photos/idlelight/12631940/
http://www.travelblog.org/Photos/3556.html?popped=1
http://tinyurl.com/ylt3gq

D.'s cult has left its mark in the names of several relatively nearby locales that were formerly possessions either of the abbey or of the diocese. At one of these, San Donato di Poggio, a _frazione_ of Tavarnelle Val di Pesa (FI), the seemingly originally eleventh-century church of San Donato, incorporating traces of a predecessor, was restored in the nineteenth century.
Exterior views:
http://tinyurl.com/23awbeh
http://www.bardotti.com/sand.jpg
http://tinyurl.com/284jly2
http://www.comune.tavarnelle-val-di-pesa.fi.it/PICTURE/32A9FB98.JPG
http://tinyurl.com/3a2bmer
Interior (sanctuary):
http://tinyurl.com/23uj99h
Baptismal font (earlier sixteenth-century) by Giovanni della Robbia:
http://www.fotosearch.com/bigcomp.asp?path=AGE/AGE014/C04-272897.jpg

Also seemingly originally of the eleventh century, though rebuilt in the early modern period, is D.'s church at San Donato in Fronzano, a _frazione_ of Reggello (FI).
Exterior:
http://tinyurl.com/yz9dr6e
Interior:
http://tinyurl.com/ylea8zg
Surviving fifteenth- and sixteenth-century frescoes:
http://tinyurl.com/ygwacqn
http://tinyurl.com/yhsymd6

Elsewhere in Tuscany, the diocese of Fiesole extends up the Arno into the Casentino. Despite the latter's proximity to Arezzo (the home of another St. Donatus), the medieval churches around which arose today's San Donato a Brenda and San Donato a Coffia (both in today's Pratovecchio [AR]) will have honored the Donatus of Fiesole.

D. (at right) as depicted in a later fifteenth-century painting by Andrea del Verrocchio and Lorenzo Credi of the Madonna and Child with saints in the cathedral of Pistoia (PT) in Tuscany:
http://tinyurl.com/yhw965z


7) Bertharius (d. 883). This less well known saint of the Regno was a southern Lombard and the thirteenth abbot of Montecassino. His name is a latinization of Lombard 'Berthari'/'Perctarit'. In 877 B. obtained the abbey's exemption from episcopal supervision. In 883 he and some of his monks (the rest having been sent away for their safety) were slain by Muslim raiders in the abbey's recently walled and fortified lower town, Eulogimenopolis (Greek for 'Benedict's city'), the future San Germano and today's Cassino (FR) in southern Lazio.

B. is the author of at least two surviving sermons of some stylistic note. See Anselmo Lentini's discussion in his edition, "Il sermone di S. Bertario su S. Scolastica," _Benedictina_ 1 (1947), 197-232. B.'s poem on the miracles of St. Benedict is edited in the _Monumenta Germaniae Historica_'s _Poetae latini aevi carolini_, vol. 3, pp. 389-402 with addenda on p. 754. The hymn on St. Benedict beginning _Sancta lux, fratres_, once ascribed to him, is now considered the work of that most prolific of medieval writers, Anonymous. Herbert Bloch offers a measured appreciation of B. in his "Monte Cassino's Teachers and Library in the High Middle Ages," in _La scuola nell'occidente latino dell'Alto Medioevo_ (Spoleto: Centro italiano di studi sull'Alto Medioevo, 1972; the Centro's _Settimane_, no. 19), vol. 2, pp. 563-605, esp. pp. 572-73.

A distance view of the abbey with the ruins of its medieval fort, the Rocca Janula, in the middle distance:
http://tinyurl.com/3baekn
The Rocca Janula is one of several fortifications originally built under abbot Aligernus (r. 949-85) once the monks had reoccupied the abbey in the tenth century.
Some expandable views of a building that, in somewhat better shape, _was_ present at Cassino in B.'s day: its Roman amphitheatre:
http://tinyurl.com/2mryk9

Best,
John Dillon
(last year's post revised and with the addition of Abercius of Hierapolis)

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