medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture

Today, April 17,  is the feast of:

Anicetus (d. c160-166) The Syrian Anicetus was elected bishop of Rome in c. 152. His pontificate was spent fighting Gnostics and Marcionists.  It was also in his episcopate that the first controversy over Easter began; Polycarp of Smyrna even visited Anicetus in Rome to discuss the issue. Unfortunately, the matter was not resolved. He was celebrated as a martyr for centuries (on what seems to have been a general concurrence that all early popes *must* have been martyrs); since he wasn't a martyr, his cult was suppressed in 1969.

Simeon Barsabae and companions (d 341) Simeon became bishop of Seleucia-Ctesiphon in 324. When Sapor II started persecuting Christians in 340 he ordered the churches closed and demanded double tax from all Christians. Most of Simeon’s flock was poor, so he refused to collect the money as ordered. He was brought to the king and refused to convert to Zoroastrianism, so was imprisoned, with about 100 other Christians. All were executed.

The Persian martyrs (d. 344) 120 Persian Christians, mostly priests and monks, with some holy women too. They were executed as Christians and probably also as Roman collaborators.

Innocent/Innocentius of Tortona (d. c350, perhaps) is a legendary early bishop of Tortona in Piedmont. According to his brief Vita BHL 4281 (not later than the eleventh century), he was a young man not present in town when its legendary bishop St. Marcianus and most of the other leading Christians were martyred under Diocletian and Maximian.  Escaping, he went to Rome while the legendary deacon Maliodorus became Tortona’s bishop. When Maliodorus died Pope Sylvester sent Innocent back to succeed him as bishop.  Innocent sought for the body of St. Marcianus, which had been concealed. When its location had been divinely revealed, he conducted a formal Inventio of the relics, provided a tomb for Marcianus with an appropriate inscription, and in the course of one year erected on the site a basilica which he had consecrated at the time of the Inventio.
   Still according to this Vita, Innocent led his church in destroying both a Jewish synagogue and the town's chief pagan temple and in erecting churches in their place; the Jews, not wishing to convert to Christianity, were scattered through various provinces. Innocent restored the town's public water system and built an aqueduct for the use of a monastery he had founded for his sister. He performed many miracles and died on this day.  Moving on to what's verifiable, Innocent's feast today is recorded in late medieval liturgical books from Tortona and from Milan as well as in various late medieval expanded versions of Usuard's Martyrology.
   Innocent is presumably the Innocenzo who is the patron of Sezzadio and the titular of various churches of Sant'Innocenzo in southern Piedmont.  One of these, a cemetery church at Castelletto d'Orba, has a fifteenth-century triptych of Innocent and is considered noteworthy for its construction technique.  Here's a view: http://www.ilmonferrato.info/ov/cstlor/pieve.jpg

Donnan and companions (d. 617 or 618) Donnan was an Irishman, a follower of St. Columba. Like many other Irish abbots, he took boat with fifty-two disciples, and sailed away in quest of some lone isle where they might be with God in solitude. Having first visited S. Columba at Iona, they went north, and settled in the island of Ewe (Eigg) [hence the Irish St Ewe] in Loch Ewe on the Western coast of Ross-shire in the Inner Hebrides. He and his fellow monks were murdered in a raid on Easter day or Easter vigil, just after Mass. The monks were shoved into the refectory, which was then set on fire. According to one account, the queen to whom Eigg belonged arranged the raid so she could return their settlement to the more profitable sheep pasture it had been before their arrival. Their feast on this day is recorded in the Martyrology of Tallaght and in other Irish and Scottish martyrologies. A cult quickly grew around them.

Wando/Wandon (French) (d756) was probably born in Germany in the late seventh century and became a monk of the abbey of Fontenelle (later St-Wandrille) in Normandy. In the late seventh century he assisted St. Wulfram in the evangelization of Frisia. Early in the following century (before 716) he became abbot. He was on the wrong side politically during the accession to power of Charles Martel, who removed him from office and sent him to the monastery of St. Servatius in Maastricht. After twenty-eight years there, Pepin the Short recalled him. Though nominally abbot, the aged Wando left administration to his prior and devoted his efforts to enriching both the abbey's library and its liturgical apparatus. He was around ninety and blind when he died on this day in 754. Although he is listed in late manuscripts of the (pseudo-) Hieronymian Martyrology, his cult seems to have been limited to the abbey and to its dependencies. We know about him chiefly from his Vita (BHL 8803).  Commemorated in the Benedictine Martyrology, he has yet to grace the pages the RM. 
   Wando's Fontenelle was destroyed by Northmen c858. The abbey was reestablished about a century later. Its medieval buildings were badly damaged in the sixteenth-century wars of religion.

Elias, Paul, and Isidore (d. 856) According to St. Eulogius of Córdoba, the elderly priest Elias, who was of Lusitanian origin, and the two young monks Paul and Isidore, were for their faith martyred in Córdoba on this day. Their bodies were left on a gibbet for several days before being thrown into the Guadalquivir. Usuard, who had visited Córdoba in 858, entered them in his Martyrology.

Robert of La Chaise-Dieu (d. probably 1067) The Auvergnat Robert was a canon of St-Julien at Brioude and a descendant of St. Gerald of Aurillac. After founding a hospice for the poor he entered Cluny, where he was a monk under St. Odilo. But he grew discontent with the life there. He thought of becoming a monk of Cluny but was talked out of it. Then he went on pilgrimage to Rome and on his return became a hermit in Brioude, where he founded in 1043 on a relatively nearby elevation the Benedictine abbey of La Chaise-Dieu (Casa Dei; God's House) and became its first abbot. During his remaining lifetime he is said to have attracted numerous postulants - Chaise-Dieu developed into a major congregation with over 300 abbeys and priories in France, Italy, and Spain. A local ult is reported c 1095. In 1351 Pope Clement VI canonized him, Prior to rising in the Church, Clement had been a monk of La Chaise-Dieu and in the 1340s built the present abbey church (also the site of his tomb).

Gervin of Oudenburg (d. 1107) Gervin lived as a hermit at various places, including Oudenburg in western Flanders. The monks of the Benedictine monastery there elected Gervin their abbot in 1095. After 10 years he abdicated and returned to his hermitage.

Robert of Molesme (d. 1111) We know about Robert, the founder of Cîteaux, chiefly from early accounts of the rise of the Cistercian Order. Said to have been a noble from Champagne, he entered religion at Moutier-la-Celle in the diocese of Troyes.  After an unhappy experience as abbot of the monastery of St. Michael at today's Tonnerre in Bourgogne he returned to Moutier-la-Celle, was later prior of its dependency of St-Ayoul at today's Provins in Île-de-France, and then assumed direction of a group of hermits whom he formed into a Benedictine community and settled in 1075 at Molesme, also in Bourgogne. In 1098, dissatisfied with the behavior of his community, he gathered a few followers (including Sts. Alberic of Cîteaux and Stephen Harding), left Molesme without permission of his bishop, and founded a new monastery in the diocese of Chalon-sur-Saône that soon was named Cistercium (Cîteaux). Ordered back to Molesme, he spent the remainder of his long life at that house. Today is his dies natalis.  Honorius III confirmed his local cult in 1221 and in the following year extended it to the entire church. When the abbey of Molesme was closed in the French Revolution his relics were moved to the town's originally later thirteenth-century parish church of Ste-Croix.

Bartholomew of Simeri (d. 1130)  Bartholomew organized the Greek monasticism in Calabria and Sicily, himself living a life of great asceticism.

Stephen Harding (d. 1134) One of the three founders of the Cistercian order, Stephen Harding was an Englishman who joined the French monastery of Molesmes. He then went with Abbot Robert, Prior Alberic, and several other monks to found Citeaux in 1098.  In 1109 Stephen became the third abbot of the new foundation. While abbot of Citeaux, a mysterious disease appeared amongst the monks, which depleted their numbers greatly. Stephen then began to wonder if he were really doing the will of God. Addressing a dying monk the abbot asked him to bring back word from beyond the grave to let him know the divine will. Soon after his death the monk appeared to Stephen and said that his way of life was pleasing to God and recruits would soon come who "like bees swarming in haste and overflowing the hive, would fly away and spread themselves through many parts of the world." Soon afterwards, at the monastery gates appeared a troop of thirty men who announced to the porter that they had come to offer themselves to the religious life. They were all of noble lineage, mostly in their early prime, and they had as their leader a young man of singular beauty whose name was Bernard.
   Stephen wrote the Carta Caritatis, the document that laid the foundation for how the Cistercian monasteries should work together as a single order. It was during his administration that the Cistercians began their meteoric rise. He was canonized in 1623. From a British author:
   "His order [the Cistercians] seems to have thriven in S. Stephen's native air; most of our great abbeys - Tintern, Rievaulx, Fountains, Furness, and Netley, which are known by their beautiful ruins, were Cistercian. The order took to itself all the quiet nooks and valleys, and all the pleasant streams of Old England, and gladdened the soul of the laborer by its constant bells. Its agricultural character was peculiarly suited to the country, though it took its birth beyond the seas."

Rudolf (1287) Another case of a boy said to have been massacred by the Jews.” There is too much reason to fear that in all cases the charge was rashly made, and as rashly believed, and that the excuse it offered for pillage was too often the motive for the attribution of the crime."

Jacobo Cinthier/James of Cerqueto, Hermit of St Augustine (1367): Jacobo was born in Umbria in c1294, and entered the Augustinian order in c. 1312. He became one of the most important preachers of the order, highly honored for his love of prayer and great humility. During his open-air preaching it was noticed that the frogs would cease their croaking at his bidding to allow his words to be heard.

Clare of Pisa (d1420) Clare belonged to the prosperous and politically powerful mercantile family of Gambacorta and was born in either Venice or Florence. She was married at the age of twelve but her husband passed away only three years later in an epidemic of the plague. By that time she had met St. Catherine of Siena. Though an early attempt to become a Poor Clare was frustrated by her family – her brothers appeared at the gates of her convent to demand her return, and the terrified nuns let her down over the wall and into their hands. Although she was kept prisoner in her father's house for five months, neither threats nor starvation could shake her determination. At last her father relented. He not only allowed her to enter the Dominican priory of Holy Cross, where she took the name Clare (Chiara), but promised to build another house of which she eventually became prioress and later, abbess. She patronized the arts and made her house a center of Observant reform. Considered a saint while she was yet alive, she received a cult after her death.  




Happy reading,
Terri Morgan 
--
From the Book of Kerric: 
"It requires great strength to be kind, whereas even the very weak can be brutal. Likewise, to speak hard truths fearlessly is often the hallmark of greatness. Bring me one who is both gentle and truthful, ...and I will show you an iron oak among hawthorns, a blessing on all who know them."

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