medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Today (11. December) is the feast day of:
1) Fuscianus, Victoricus, and Gentianus (d. late 3d cent., supposedly). F., V., and G. (in French: Fuscien, Victoric, Gentien) are saints of the diocese of Amiens and of the former abbey of Sanctus Fuscianus in Sylva (or de Nemore; en français, Saint-Fuscien-aux-Bois) that was situated at today's Sains-en-Amiénois (Somme) in Picardy. Their medieval cult is widely documented in northern France and especially at several places named in a legendary Passio (BHL 3224-3227) that associates them with St. Quintinus of Vermand and that has them persecuted by the same Roman official as he, one Rictiovarus (after whom an entire cycle of Passiones is named).
The Passio makes F. and V. evangelizers of the Morini, a people in today's Picardy and the Pas de Calais, has them arrested at today's Sains-en-Amiénois (Somme), taken to Amiens and tortured, executed at the site of the future Saint-Fuscien (Somme), and buried at Sains-en-Amiénois together with G., an elderly convert at the latter town who had been killed there while trying to prevent the arrest of F. and V. Not altogether surprisingly (they are, after all, martyred evangelizers of what would become France), later elaboration presents F. and V. as cephalophores. An Inventio (BHL 3229, 3229d) has the bodies of the three saints discovered miraculously by a sixth-century priest of Amiens, whereupon the bishop Honorius and king Childebert I found a church over their grave. From there F., V., and G. are thought to have been translated in the ninth century to the cathedral of Amiens, whose bishop Hilmeric gave a relic of F. to Saint-Riquier in 865.
In the cathedral, F., V., and G. were accorded translations into new reliquary shrines in 1096 and 1175. A statue in the jambs of the Saint-Firmin portal of Amiens' thirteenth-century cathédrale Notre-Dame is generally understood to represent F.:
http://www.learn.columbia.edu/Mcahweb/facade/l-11.html
Stephen Murray of Columbia University has proposed that the next two statues in that sequence of views (nos. 12 and 13) represent V. and G. See his account of the Portal of Saint Firmin here:
http://www.mcah.columbia.edu/Mcahweb/facade/body.html
An expandable view of a mid-twelfth-century manuscript illumination from Corbie showing F. and V. (nimbed) converting G. (not nimbed):
http://tinyurl.com/6eyqfh
The decollation of F. and V. as depicted in a later fifteenth-century copy (ca. 1470) of the _Legenda aurea_ in its French-language version by Jean de Vignay (Mâcon, Bibliothèque municipale, ms. 3, fol. 141r):
http://tinyurl.com/6afy87
G. was dropped from the RM in its revision of 2001 but is still venerated along with F. and V. at Saint-Fuscien (Somme), at Beaugency (Loiret), and especially at Sains-en-Amiénois (Somme), where the originally fifteenth- and sixteenth-century église Saints-Fuscien-Victoric-et-Gentien houses a late twelfth- or early thirteenth-century tomb of the three martyrs, thought to have been placed by the abbey in an earlier church at that location:
http://tinyurl.com/5ws7w7
http://tinyurl.com/6zkc2l
Another view of the tomb is here (along with one of the church's twelfth-century baptismal font):
http://tinyurl.com/ydov92z
Some views of the church:
http://tinyurl.com/ychw3cl
http://tinyurl.com/ydpov6u
http://tinyurl.com/y8b6ybs
http://tinyurl.com/yabej56
2) Damasus I, pope (d. 384). D. was a Roman deacon who succeeded pope Liberius in 366. His election was followed by violence between his supporters and those of a rival candidate whose adherents were ejected from the last of their churches only in the following year. D. spent much of his pontificate putting his personal stamp on the church of Rome by combating heresy, building churches, and erecting numerous inscriptions bearing his name both within the city and at martyrs' burial sites along major roads leading into it. He promoted internal concord and Roman primacy through the cult of Sts. Peter and Paul, appointed the first papal vicar of Illyricum, and encouraged St. Jerome to produce a freshly translated Latin Bible. It was probably on his watch that the Roman church began using prescribed prayers in the Latin language.
D.'s name survives in that of the early modern successor to his basilica dedicated to St. Lawrence, San Lorenzo in Damaso ("_in_ Damaso" because it was in a complex of buildings D. had erected, one of which housed the archives of the Roman church). His keenness to identify and to memorialize the resting places of martyrs resulted in the erection of some sixty tablets with verse inscriptions of his composition, many carved in a special letter form designed by the calligrapher Furius Dionysius Filocalus. Here's a view of D.'s epitaph for St. Agnes of Rome (_Epigrammata Damasiana_, ed. Ferrua, no. 37), inscribed in Filocalian letters and set up at the Basilica di Sant'Agnese fuori le Mura:
http://www.santagnese.org/fotoHR%5Ccarme_11-01-04.jpg
Two fairly recent articles of note on D.'s martyrial inscriptions are Marianne Sághy, "_Scinditur in partes populus_: Pope Damasus and the Martyrs of Rome", _Early Medieval Europe_ 9 (2000), 273-87, and Dennis E. Trout, "Damasus and the Invention of Early Christian Rome", _Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies_ 33 (2003), 517-536. For a somewhat broader survey of D.'s activity in Rome, see John Curran, _Pagan City and Christian Capital: Rome in the Fourth Century_ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), pp. 137-57.
Some portrayals of D.:
a) D. (at right) and St. Jerome as depicted in a later eleventh-century Gospels from northern Italy (Paris, BnF, ms. Latin 325, fol. 14r):
http://tinyurl.com/y9xspbo
b) D. (at left) and St. Jerome as depicted in the later thirteenth-century (ca. 1260) Brantwood Bible (London, British Library, Yates Thompson ms. 22), a manuscript of northern French origin:
http://tinyurl.com/yh6nub
c) D. (second from right among the seated figures) as depicted in the earlier fourteenth-century frescoes (betw. 1335 and 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/yjm8dha
This particular fresco portrays the Second Ecumenical Council (First Council of Constantinople; held in 381), which latter D. in fact did not attend:
d) A black-and-white image of D. as depicted among the portraits of the popes (1480-81) in the Sistine Chapel:
http://www.tuttipapi.it/TombeMausoleiRitratti/43-Damaso-I.jpg
3) Sabinus of Piacenza (d. ca. 395). S. (in Italian, Savino) is the traditional second bishop of the Emilian city of Piacenza. He may have been the Milanese deacon who under pope St. Damasus was sent to Antioch in 372 to reconcile competing factions in the government of that church and whose success in this effort is reported in the correspondence of St. Basil the Great. His election to the see of Piacenza (anciently Placentia) is dated by Lanzoni to the year 376. As bishop he upheld Nicene orthodoxy at the Council of Aquileia in 381, maintained a correspondence with his friend St. Ambrose of Milan, founded a church dedicated to the Holy Apostles, and presided over the Invention of the relics of the presumed martyr St. Antoninus of Piacenza.
St. Gregory the Great (_Dialogi_, 3. 10) relates a miracle story concerning S.: The Po having overflowed its banks, S. told a deacon to go to it and to order it to return to its channel. At this the deacon laughed. But the laugh was on him when the river promptly obeyed a written command to that effect that S. had arranged to be cast into its waters.
S.'s church of the Holy Apostles (which arose over an extramural cemetery going back to the first century CE) came in time to be called after him, presumably because his remains were entombed there. They now repose in the tenth-century crypt of that building's present-day successor on the site, Piacenza's largely eleventh- and twelfth-century basilica di San Savino, consecrated in 1107 and now sporting an early modern facade. Here's a view of the interior:
http://www.fujiso.com/bo1hp/pmi667.html
Capitals in the nave:
http://www.fujiso.com/bo1hp/pmi669.html
Chancel screen:
http://www.fujiso.com/bo1hp/pmi670.html
A detail of the late eleventh- or twelfth-century mosaic floor in the presbytery:
http://tinyurl.com/2fqnrg
This church has an impressive twelfth-century wooden crucifix. Two views:
http://tinyurl.com/5gy53h
http://tinyurl.com/5th4xo
An Italian-language page on the crypt (esp. on its partly preserved mosaic floor), with panoramic views:
http://tinyurl.com/2bjucna
A capital in the crypt:
http://www.thais.it/scultura/sch00450.htm
More views of the church (incl. views of the calendar mosaic in the crypt and of two reliefs with scenes of S.'s miracle):
http://tinyurl.com/27z7z9e
S.'s relics on display in the crypt:
http://tinyurl.com/2eamt2s
4) Daniel the Stylite (d. 493). According to his Bios (several versions; BHG 489 etc.), the Syrian D. was a monk who after an early meeting with St. Symeon the Stylite the Elder resolved to become similarly ascetic. In time, having become hegumen of his community, he passed the reins of governance on to a capable assistant, visited Symeon again and then headed to the vicinity of Constantinople, where he took up residence first at and then near the Constantinian church of St. Michael at Anaplus, resisted demons, and gained the confidence of the archbishop Anatolius. After nine years had passed D. received a vision of the now deceased Symeon and became in his turn a pillar saint.
D. spent thirty-three years and three months on his pillar, enduring extreme privation, performing miracles, and giving spiritual advice to those who either sought it (including the emperors Leo II and Zeno) or who did not but who needed it just the same (the initially pro-monophysite usurper Basiliscus, whom D. in a highly unusual departure from his perch was persuaded by an orthodox crowd to go visit). Leo II saw to it that D. got a more capacious column; he also (with difficulty, of course) persuaded D. after a particularly vicious ice storm to accept a shelter atop his parapet.
That shelter is shown in this icon of D. reproduced by the Ökumenisches Heiligenlexikon from an undisclosed source:
http://www.heiligenlexikon.de/Fotos/Daniel_Stylitis.jpg
as well as in this mid-sixteenth-century Moscow School icon on the deesis range of the Annunciation cathedral in the Moscow kremlin:
http://www.icon-art.info/masterpiece.php?lng=en&mst_id=1267
The shelter is not shown in D.'s depiction in these portrayals of him:
D. as depicted in the later tenth- or very early eleventh-century so-called Menologion of Basil II (Città del Vaticano, BAV, cod. Vat. gr. 1613, fol. 237r):
http://tinyurl.com/25ejfkw
D. as depicted in the earlier fourteenth-century frescoes (ca. 1312-1321/22) in the nave of the monastery church of the Theotokos at Gračanica in, depending on one's view of the matter, either Serbia's province of Kosovo and Metohija or the Republic of Kosovo:
http://tinyurl.com/2wcqhtn
D. as depicted in the earlier fourteenth-century frescoes (ca. 1330) of the church of St. Catherine in Thessaloniki:
http://tinyurl.com/37m6kgp
D. as depicted in the earlier fourteenth-century frescoes (1330s) of the church of the Hodegetria in the Patriarchate of Peć at 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/y8hyqrz
D. as depicted in the earlier fourteenth-century frescoes (betw. 1335 and 1350) in the nave 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/y8szqrm
Detail (D.):
http://tinyurl.com/ybhaole
D.'s sainthood was widely recognized in his lifetime. The archbishop Euphemius gave him a public funeral and had him buried underneath an oratory adjacent to his pillar. His Bios, written by a young disciple shortly after his death, is deservedly a classic. The standard English-language translation is in Elizabeth Dawes and Norman H. Baynes, tr., _Three Byzantine Saints: Contemporary Biographies translated from the Greek_ (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1948; later reprints).
5) Nikon the Dry (d. early 12th cent., supposedly). What is related about N. comes from the thirteenth- to fifteenth-century Patericon of the monastery of the Kievan Caves. According to this account, he was native of Kyiv/Kiev and a monk of the aforesaid monastery who was captured by Cumans when they raided Kiev (this happened in 1096). Enslaved for three years, N. was treated harshly by his pagan master. When after three years he foretold his escape he was deliberately lamed by the cutting of his tendons below the knees. Nonetheless, N. vanished before his guards' very eyes and miraculously was returned to his monastery's church of the Dormition while a service was under way. The joyful monks compelled an initially reluctant N. to relate what had happened to him.
Still according to these Fathers' Tales, when later a peace had been struck with the Cumans N.'s former master heard that N. was back at his monastery and, motivated to curiosity, went to visit him. He found N. emaciated from his starvation and from the loss of blood caused by his wounds (this is why he is called "the Dry") but in good spirits, received baptism from him, and became his monastic disciple. N. was buried in the Near Caves; his very drawn flesh remained incorrupt. Thus far the Kievan Patericon.
N. has yet to grace the pages of the RM.
Best,
John Dillon
(last year's post revised and with the addition of Nikon the Dry)
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