medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture

Today, April 19,  is the feast of:

Timon (1st century) was from Jerusalem, and was made a deacon by the apostles, one of the first seven. He died in Corinth, according to tradition crucified by persecutors.

Mappalicius and companions (d. 250) We know from the letters of St. Cyprian of Carthage about Mappalicius and his seventeen named companions, all victims of the Decian persecution in Africa. He had previously distinguished himself as unwilling to reconcile with those who during this persecution had apostatized; these included his mother and his sister. He died under torture during an interrogation. The early sixth-century Calendar of Carthage records a feast for Mappalicius on this day.  Until its revision of 2001 the RM commemorated him on April 17.  In Italian (this would work in English too, though perhaps not as obviously) some onomastically attuned wits have decided to honor M. as the patron saint of the Global Positioning System (GPS). Mappalicius is the patron saint of Jonquières (Vaucluse) in Provence.

Vincent of Calahorra (d. 303) This martyr is said to have suffered under Diocletian. If we may trust his legend, his feet were attached to a rope which was passed over a pulley, and he was drawn up and then dashed head foremost upon flints, and afterwards consumed in a great fire.

Expeditus (?) Expeditus was one of a group of martyrs executed in Armenia. It seems to be a "pious fiction" that popular devotion to him started when a crate of holy relics sent from Rome to Paris got misidentified thanks to the label "expedito" written on the carton. Expeditus is the patron saint to be invoked by procrastinators. He appears in art trampling a crow (which cries out "cras, cras" (tomorrow), to which the saint triumphantly replies "hodie!")
   St. Expedit is also invoked - at least in Normandy, in cases of medical emergency, and by schoolchildren hoping for quick exam results. His statue in Lisieux seems to be patterned on that of the Augustus of Primaporta, with the addition of the trodden raven and the orator's raised hand holding a cross inscribed "hodie". The legend has it that he was a Roman officer particularly good at getting supplies through.

George of Antioch in Pisidia (d. c816) As bishop of Pisidian Antioch, George took part in the Second Council of Nicaea in 787 and signed its Acta. The emperor Leo V exiled him for his refusal to carry out iconoclast measures in 815. He is said to have died shortly after his removal.

Gerold of Großwalsertal/-of Vorarlberg (d. 978) Geroldus was the son of an Austrian comital family. When middle-aged, he decided to become a hermit in the Walsertal. On 1 January 949 the emperor Otto I restored property in today's Land Vorarlberg in Austria to a man of God named Adam who previously been deprived of his possessions for having taken part in a plot against him. A tenth-century entry in the Necrology of the abbey of Einsiedeln in Switzerland records an Adam, not expressly said to have been a monk, who died on 16 April 949. In the abbey's later medieval tradition Adam was called Gerold, its priory at his former hermitage was called St. Gerold, and he was venerated liturgically as a saint. Medievally Gerold's feast fell on various days; today's observance was established only in the seventeenth century. St. Gerold (the place) is located at today's Blons, Bezirk Bludenz.  The priory dates from before 1313, when a predecessor of its present church was consecrated. Excavations in 1965/66 produced remains of an earlier "romanesque" church (said to have been destroyed in 1311) with what had been Gerold's tomb.

Alphege/Ælfheah/Elphege (d. 1012)  The English Alphege started his career as a monk, then a hermit, and then as abbot of Bath. As an abbot Alphege never tolerated the slightest relaxation of the rule since he believed that a small concession could undermine the regular observance of a religious house. Thus, he used to say that it was better for a man to remain in the world than for him to become an imperfect monk.  In 984 he became bishop of Winchester and in 1006 archbishop of Canterbury. This was the period when Sweinn of Denmark was busily conquering England; the Danes laid siege to Canterbury and held Alphage as a prisoner for 7 months after they had taken it. It happened like this: in September or early October 1011 Viking raiders seized Canterbury and ordered a huge money payment to be made to them on the following Easter. When this was paid they turned around and asked for another sum as Alphage's ransom. Alphage forbade this second payment (or else lacked the wherewithal to pay). A few days later, on 19 April, a bunch of drunken Danes started pelting him with animal bones, then killing in injured man with an axe. This was bad press for King Sveinn, who turned the body over for Christian burial. His son Cnut, who became king of England, defused the bad PR situation by furthering Alphage's cult as a saint. He was buried at London and translated back to Canterbury in 1023 on the orders of king Cnut. He has a late eleventh-century Vita by Osbern of Canterbury, commissioned by archbishop Lanfranc. His cult remained strong throughout the Middle Ages.

Leo IX, pope (d. 1054) The Alsatian Bruno of Eg(u)isheim and Dagsburg (also Bruno of Toul) came from a comital family with connections to the German kingly house. He was educated at the cathedral school of Toul and at the court of Conrad II. As a young man he commanded the Alsatian contingent on campaign in Lombardy. At the ripe old age of twenty-four he was named bishop of Toul, of whose cathedral he was already a canon, and was exempted from paying the usual cash donation to the king. Thus untainted by simony, Bruno proceeded to serve as a reforming bishop of Toul for about twenty years. He was elected pope on the nomination of Henry III in 1048 and consecrated in 1049, taking the name Leo.
   Leo was a very active pope, presiding over numerous synods and repeatedly taking strong stands against simony, lay investiture, and nicolaism. He traveled widely, consecrating many churches and granting privileges to numerous monasteries.  His diplomatic dealings with Constantinople were disastrous, sparking the East/West Schism, as were also his interventions in the temporal affairs of the Italian south. Defeated militarily by the Normans at Civitate in northern Apulia in 1053, he became a political prisoner at Benevento for eight months. Already ill upon his release (though his captors had treated him with great respect), the aged pontiff died shortly after his return to Rome.  Miracles were reported at his tomb.  Bl. Victor III canonized him through elevation in 1087.
   Here's a reproduction of the eleventh-century miniature at Bern, Burgerbibliothek, Cod. 292, fol. 92r (pseudo-Wibert of Toul, _Vita Leonis_, BHL 4818), showing Leo consecrating the church of St-Arnaud at Metz : http://www.rejsenoter.dk/Rom/RomHist/OT1231.jpg
      An expandable view of that miniature is here: http://tinyurl.com/y7ulxs8
   At the bottom of the right-hand column of this page in a twelfth-century copy of the same Vita (Cologny, Fondation Martin Bodmer, Cod. Bodmer 127, fols. 190v - 201r, at fol. 191r) one may see Leo expelling a devil: http://www.e-codices.unifr.ch/de/cb/0127/191r/medium
   Leo in what is said -- on the Wikipedia page whence this image was taken (so _caveat lector_) -- to be an eleventh-century manuscript:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Leon_IX.jpg , but the drawing seems very similar to the style of those in the late twelfth-century cartulary chronicle of San Clemente a Casauria (Paris, BnF, ms. Latin 5411): http://tinyurl.com/yyv3z9x and
   http://www.giannidimuzio.it/chronicon_casauriense.htm
   This page reproduces a miniature from a fifteenth-century Greek codex, now in the Biblioteca nazionale in Palermo, depicting Cerularius and Leo:
http://www.30giorni.it/us/articolo.asp?id=2857
   In this view of a probably fifteenth-century mural painting in the romitorio di Selva Oscura outside of Bassiano in southern Lazio, Leo is the saint at far right: http://tinyurl.com/c5egbj

Bernard of Sithiu (Blessed) (d. 1182) According to his Vita by John of St.-Bertin, Bernard was a nobleman of the diocese of Maguelonne in the Narbonnais who was exiled for having committed great crimes and was forced to become a penitent in expiation thereof (he participated in a protest that resulted in the death of an unpopular governor), going barefoot and chafed by seven bands of iron constricting different parts of his body. He wandered widely, traveling as a pilgrim to Jerusalem and even to India, but ultimately wound up in the vicinity of the abbey of Sithiu/St.-Bertin at today's Saint-Omer (Pas-de-Calais). There he lived for four years in great misery and privation, visiting the sick and operating miracles. After his death on this day more miracles occurred, the abbey promoted his cult, many faithful visited his tomb, and the miracles continued.

Werner of Oberwesel (Blessed) (d. 1287).  According to the very late thirteenth- or early fourteenth-century Trierer episcopal chronicle Gesta Boemundi, Werner (also Werner of Bacharach; in Latin, Wernerus, Wernherus) was a poor Christian boy who while working in the house of a Jew at what is now Oberwesel (Rhein-Hunsrück-Kreis) in Rheinland-Pfalz was set upon and cruelly murdered by Jews who after tearing him to pieces concealed his bloodless body in a thicket at some distance from the town.  Werner's body, untouched by birds or beasts, was discovered by a farmer plowing nearby.  Popular suspicion that the perpetrators were Jews was quickly confirmed by a Christian serving woman who worked in the house in question and who said that she had observed the crime through a crack in a wall.
   Still according to this account, a generalized massacre of the town's Jews then took place; only those few who had been able to find shelter in castles and strong points of the nobles escaped.  His body was brought to Bacharach (a larger town upstream along the Rhine that had already killed all its Jews in 1283), where a splendid chapel - we learn elsewhere that this was an expansion of one honoring Sts. Cunibert and Andrew - was erected to house it.  Many miracles confirmed his sanctity; crowds of pilgrims from near and far rushed to his tomb.  A contemporary Passio written not quite fourteen years after the event, repeats the blood libel, adds details (many making Werner a type of Christ), and is silent about the pogrom - for which Oberwesel was punished by king Rudolf I.
   This cult, centered on Bacharach, appears to have been very popular locally for about fifty years and, to judge from its Middle Dutch and Middle High German narratives, to have enjoyed wider fame even in the later fourteenth century.  It was revived in the 1460s, when the Vita was rewritten at Bacharach (BHL 8861) and an ultimately unsuccessful canonization campaign was launched.  With the approval of the archdiocese of Trier, Werner was celebrated liturgically throughout the early modern period and beyond.  He was removed from the archdiocesan liturgical calendar in 1963.

Conrad (in Italian, Corrado) of Ascoli Piceno (blessed) (d. 1289) Conrad, born in c1234, entered the Franciscan order in 1253. Conrad was only a boy when he knelt before a peasant lad called Jerome Masci and greeted him as destined to become pope. The prophecy was fulfilled when Jerome became Pope Nicholas IV. Conrad and Jerome became fast friends. Together they entered the Franciscan order and they also received their doctorates at Perugia on the same day. Conrad preached and taught, at first in Rome and then in Paris. Together with his friend, the later Pope Nicolas IV, Conrad mediated in a number of conflicts. He also worked as a missionary in Libya. Many miracles were reported at Conrad's tomb in Ascoli Piceno, but he wasn't formally beatified until 1783.
   It would be hard to deduce from the foregoing that Conrad, although he is now also celebrated in and about Piacenza (esp. in Carpaneto, the seat of his family, the Confalonieri), is primarily a Sicilian saint, that his cult originated in Noto and at nearby Avola, that a canonization inquiry began here almost immediately after his death (though his cult was approved by Leo X in 1515, he was formally beatified by Paul III only in 1544 and elevated to sainthood by Urban VIII in 1615), and that our information about him during his lifetime derives from documentation collected early in the aforementioned campaign. 
   After becoming a Franciscan tertiary in northern Italy he is said to have traveled on pilgrimage to Rome and thence to the Holy Land; thereafter he spent the remainder of his life in the insular kingdom of Sicily, first in Malta and then for thirty years in the Hyblaean Mountains of the Val di Noto. At both the beginning and the end of this period he was again a hermit but for the majority of this time he tended the sick in the city of Noto's hospital of St. Martin. The year of his death is variously given as 1351, 1354, or between 1351 and 1354.  Conrad (whose name in Sicilian is a three-syllabled Currau) is the patron of Noto and of Avola.  His cult is widespread in southeastern Sicily and he is a fixture in the region's folklore. He is sometimes referred to in the scholarly literature as Conrad of Noto.




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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