medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
On Tuesday, January 18, 2011, at 9:44 am, Jim Bugslag wrote:
> >>Beatrice d'Este II da Ferrara (Blessed) (d. 1262)
>
> >> Today is Beatrice's dies natalis. A cult arose very quickly. The water
> >>used to wash her body was said to have caused miracles and until its
> >>dissolution in 1512 the sisters would repeat the washing as needed
> in order
> >>to have a supply of the wonder-working liquid. A new tomb in the monastery
> >>cloister became a pilgrimage destination; condensation from it
> continues to
> >>be collected several times a year for distribution to the faithful.
> A propos of an earlier thread, this provides one explanation of why
> one would wash a dead body. I wonder how this continual washing
> affected the miraculous corpse?
It probably had at least something to do with the body's dissolution in 1512. The body had been in a somewhat humid environment all along: the convent was on an island in a branch of the Po now called the Po di Volano. The convent survives as Sant'Antonio di Polesine, having acquired the adjacent church of that name from the Augustinians at the end of the thirteenth century. Though no longer on an island and located just within the Renaissance city wall, it is still very close to the water. As the mummies of Naples' Castel Nuovo show, one can have well preserved bodies near water if one maintains a very dry interior environment. But I'm guessing that that did not happen here. On this map Sant'Antonio in Polesine is marked as no. 15:
http://www.fe.infn.it/~ciullo/PAX/ferrara_map_guest.png
Two views of the originally thirteenth-century church of Sant'Antonio in Polesine:
http://tinyurl.com/ye727ey
http://tinyurl.com/yccnqt7
Best again,
John Dillon
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