medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
On 11/05/11, Marjorie Greene wrote:
> My mistake... it's Saint Bernard who allegedly used his stole - at least as far as I can determine.This page:
> http://www.sacred-texts.com/etc/ddl/ddl16.htm
> has a wealth of information whose accuracy I cannot affirm since the source and the author remain unidentified.
> MG
The source and the author are named on that very page. Does knowing that this is a chapter of Ernest Ingersoll's _Dragons and Dragon Lore_ (NY: Payson and Clarke, 1928) enable an affirmation of its accuracy?
For an index to all the chapters as presented in this digitization, see:
http://www.sacred-texts.com/etc/ddl/index.htm
Of course, Bernard of Clairvaux isn't the only saint who has been said to use a stole either to subdue or to lead off a diabolic serpent. Marjorie's previously cited Marcellus of Paris (see <http://tinyurl.com/83k68d6>; given the plurality of Marcelli venerated in France, calling this one simply 'Saint Marcel' is a bit unhelpful) is said in his sixth-century Vita by Venantius Fortunatus to do just that (BHL 5248, where the vestment in question is called an _orarium_). The hagiographies of saints of Brittany and Normandy furnish numerous examples, e.g. Samson of Dol, Armel / Armagil, Paul Aurelian, Vigor of Bayeux, Nicasius and Quirinus of Rouen, Romanus of Rouen (for most of these, see Samantha Kahn Herrick, _Imagining the Sacred Past: Hagiography and Power in Early Normandy_ [Harvard University Press, 2007], pp. 83-86 and 106 with associated end-notes; for this particular aspect of Romanus of Rouen, see Felice Lifshitz, _The Norman Conquest of Pious Neustria: Historiographic Discourse and Saintly Relics, 684-1090_ [Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1995], p. 152, n. 38).
Similarly, in the late eighth- or early ninth-century Italo-Greek version (BHG 981) of the Bios of Leo of Catania that saint uses his outstretched hand and stole to hold his diabolically inspired adversary Heliodorus in a fire until Heliodorus is burned to death. I haven't looked but it does seem possible that Greek hagiography offers earlier examples of the use of a stole to suppress a diabolic agent (the latter not necessarily imagined as a serpent).
Can anyone say when the use of a stole is first attested as part of a Christian ritual of exorcism?
Best,
John Dillon
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