medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture

12. November is also the feast day of:

1)  Nilus of Ancyra (d. ca. 430 or a little later).  The standard scholarly view of N. (also known as N. of Sinai) for close to a century now is that he was a disciple of St. John Chrysostom who became hegumen of a monastery at Ancyra (now the Turkish capital city Ankara) and who wrote some of the many texts attributed to him in the _Patrologia Graeca_ (rather more of these are now attributed to Evagrius of Pontus). 

Early medieval identification of N. with the Nilus who wrote accounts of the martyrs of Sinai commemorated on 14. January (BHG 1301-1307 plus later re-workings) led to the creation of a composite figure who in synaxary accounts and in the _Historia Ecclesiastica_ of Nicephorus Callistus (d. ca. 1335) is presented as a high official at Constantinople under Theodosius the Great.  In these tellings N. gave up his brilliant worldly career and, with her consent, his wife; together with his son St. Theodulus he then became an hermit on Mt. Sinai.

N. as depicted in an early thirteenth-century fresco (1208 or 1209), repainted in 1569, in the church of the Presentation of the Theotokos in the Studenica monastery near Kraljevo (Raška dist.) in Serbia:
http://tinyurl.com/27wrkf6

N. as depicted in a late thirteenth- or very early fourteenth-century fresco, attributed to Manuel Panselinos, in the Protaton church on Mt. Athos:
http://tinyurl.com/3654f5d
Detail view:
http://tinyurl.com/333nu4h

N. as depicted in the earlier fourteenth-century frescoes (betw. ca. 1312 and 1321) in the narthex 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/2un22g2

N. (center, betw. Sts. John Climacus and Gerasimus) as depicted in the late fourteenth-century frescoes of the monastery of church of St. Andrew at Matka in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia:
http://tinyurl.com/29a422m


2)  Machar of Aberdeen (d. ca. 599, supposedly).  M. (in Latin, Mauricius as well as Macharius) is the legendary protobishop of Aberdeen.  Our chief sources for him are a Middle Scots life in the late fourteenth-century Scottish Legendary and the hymn and lections for his his feast as given in the late fifteenth-/early sixteenth-century Aberdeen Breviary (printed 1507).  On the basis of their partial agreement it is thought that these texts derive from a now-lost, episode-rich, and quite legendary Vita of the saint.  M. is supposed to have been the son of an Irish king and his wife; angels were seen singing at his cradle and his parents in gratitude determined that he should live in God's service.  When M. was still a boy a younger brother was born stillborn; a touch from M. revived him.

When M., whose name from birth had been Mocumma, was somewhat older he was given to St. Columba to be raised.  M. was a perfect adept; when at last he was ready for a life in the church Columba give him a new name, Machar.  M. was first into the boat at the setting off of Columba's first voyage to what now is Scotland and he was with his master at the founding of the monastery on Iona.  Afterward, fleeing his growing fame (for he could effect cures), he went off on his own to evangelize among the Picts, both in the Isle of Mull and on the mainland.  Divinely prompted to build a church where a river bent around in the shape of a pastoral staff, M. found such a place on the Don not far from the sea and there established the first church at the site of the future Aberdeen.

M. did not stay there very long.  Instead, he continued his work as an itinerant evangelist.  After a while Columba came to him and asked that he accompany him on a pilgrimage to Rome.  M. agreed and the two did go to Rome, though the journey was arduous.  There the pope created M. bishop of the Picts and gave him yet another name, Mauritius.  On the return trip M. and C. stopped off at Tours to venerate St. Martin.  M. stayed at Tours, where he on account of his exceptional holiness he quickly was made bishop at the behest of the incumbent and where after three years he died, having at his deathbed received a vision of Christ and the Twelve Apostles and also Sts. Martin and Columba ready to receive his soul in heaven.  The people of Tours both buried him next to St. Martin and honored his grave with an expensive shrine.  Ever since M. has worked miracles for those who turn to him.

Thus far the legend.  Few on this list will be surprised to learn that no record of M.'s time on the continent appears to have survived there, whether at Rome, Tours, or anywhere else.  That part of the story is of course an explanation of Aberdeen's not possessing the body of its great saint.  If anyone in the later Middle Ages were so impolite as to ask why M. appears to have no shrine at Tours, one could always answer that the Northmen had destroyed it when they sacked Tours long ago.

M.'s hymn and lections in the Aberdeen Breviary begin here:
http://digital.nls.uk/pageturner.cfm?id=74628770  

The Cathedral Church of St Machar in the Old Aberdeen section of Aberdeen is a mostly late fourteenth- and fifteenth-century fortified church belonging to the Church of Scotland.  It replaced an originally earlier twelfth-century predecessor.  Herewith two illustrated, English-language pages on it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Machar%27s_Cathedral
http://tinyurl.com/25fepv7

Single views (exterior):
http://image05.webshots.com/5/3/34/24/61033424QDVbSv_fs.jpg
http://tinyurl.com/2ay3hgz
http://www.flickr.com/photos/pelegrino/2373946567/
http://tinypic.com/f53dkj.jpg
http://www.flickr.com/photos/45135207@N00/4005833706/
http://images.inmagine.com/img/pixtal/pt201/CD201049.jpg

Single views (interior):
http://tinyurl.com/2achq7p
http://tinyurl.com/2c78wy5
http://tinyurl.com/29am2mx
http://tinyurl.com/2bk8wh9
The tomb of bishop Gavin Dunbar (d. 1532) in the transept:
http://tinyurl.com/2bazuuu
http://www.flickr.com/photos/33563858@N00/494943581


3)  Helen of Anjou (d. 1314).  The wife of one king of Serbia (St. Stefan Uroš I, r. 1243-1276) and the mother of two others (St. Stefan Dragutin, r. 1276-1282; St. Stefan Uroš II Milutin, r. 1282-1321), H. (in Serbian, Jelena Anžujska) was a Roman-Rite Catholic who importantly promoted organized religion throughout a nation that though partly Roman Catholic was majority Orthodox.  According to her contemporary hagiographer the Serbian Orthodox archbishop St. Danilo II, H. was a nobly born Frenchwoman.  Her exact parentage is unknown.  Her modern appellation "of Anjou" is down to her contemporaries Charles I and Charles II of Sicily having referred to her in letters and documents as a relative by extraction (_consanguinea_, _cognata_).  The most recent suggestion of note makes H. the daughter of an Hungarian nobleman and of his wife, a member of the Angevin-connected family of Courtenay and thus also a relative of the Latin emperor of Constantinople Baldwin II (d. 1273).  (T
hey were all Capetians, capisc'?).
   
H. married Stefan Uroš I in about 1245, when he was already king.  In his rhetorically effective Life of H. (it is transmitted in the collection known as the _Lives of the Serbian Kings and Archbishops_) Danilo presents her as a pious woman  who shortly after the death of her husband suffered a severe illness and who, prompted by this reminder of her own mortality, turned to a life of charity and prayer, encouraged her sons to perform acts of charity, gave generously to the poor, founded monasteries, and provided for the support of the clergy.

Under her sons H. had the rule of Zeta (essentially today's Montenegro plus the area of today's Albania around Shkodër/Shkodra), an officially Catholic part of the kingdom with a Catholic bishop at Kotor and a Catholic archbishop at Bar.  Danilo praises her governance there and we know that she built the monastery church of St. Nicholas at Shkodër, where she spent most of her final years as a nun.  Elsewhere in Serbia H. founded the country's first school for girls at her residence at Brnjaci in today's Zubin Potok in Kosovo, founded the monastery of Gradac, and participated with her sons in other foundations and acts of support for the Serbian Orthodox Church.  According to Danilo she was at Brnjaci when she succumbed to her final illness, surrounded by leading nobles and Orthodox clergy of the kingdom.

H. was buried at Gradac, where three years later she received a formal Elevatio.  Like her husband and her two kingly sons (not to mention others of their Nemanjić dynasty), she is a saint of the Serbian Orthodox Church.  Like them, she has yet to grace the pages of the RM.  H.'s biography by Danilo may be read in an annotated German-language translation in Stanislaus Hafner, tr., _Serbisches Mittelalter: Altserbische Herrscherbiografien (Graz: Styria, 1962-1976), vol. 2, pp. 99-144 (plus notes on pp. 290-297 and important contextual matter in Hafner's introduction).

H. (at left) as depicted as a nun in an earlier fourteenth-century fresco (betw. ca. 1319 and 1321/1322) in the narthex 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/35vsevt
http://tinyurl.com/3yjdfga
Detail (H.):
http://tinyurl.com/35tazmm

H. (at right) as depicted as a nun in an earlier fourteenth-century fresco in the church of St. Achilles of Larissa (Sv. Achillius) at Arilje (Zlatibor dist.) in central Serbia, a foundation of king Dragutin:
http://tinyurl.com/29myjtr
Detail (H.):
http://tinyurl.com/yce744p

An illustrated, English-language page on the monastery of Gradac in Brvenik, a village in the municipality of Raška in central Serbia (but some 20 km. away from Raška proper):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gradac_monastery
An illustrated, multi-page, English-language site on this monastery founded by H. in the later thirteenth century:
http://www.srpskoblago.org/Archives/Gradac/index.html
A single view of the monastery church of the Virgin Annunciate:
http://tinyurl.com/2f2ak2x
Another set of views:
http://members.virtualtourist.com/m/p/m/48387e/
TAN: Gradac is again an active monastery.  For many views of current activities, see:
http://www.manastirgradac.org.rs/aktuelnosti.html

Best,
John Dillon

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