medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Today (9. October) is the feast day of:
1) Dionysius of Paris, Rusticus of Paris, and Eleutherius of Paris (d. later 3d cent., supposedly). D. (Denis, etc.) is the fairly legendary protobishop of Paris, named by St. Gregory of Tours (_Historia Francorum_, 1. 30) as one of seven missionaries sent to evangelize Gaul during the reign of the emperor Decius (249-251) and as one of two of these who later were martyred (in D.'s case, by decapitation). He is entered for today, along with the priest Eleutherius and the deacon Rusticus, in the (pseudo-)Hieronymian Martyrology and in the martyrologies of Florus of Lyon and St. Ado of Vienne. D.'s numerous Passiones (BHL 2171ff.) make R. a priest and E. a deacon and in this they are followed both by Usuard and by the RM.
BHL 2171 claims an apostolic origin for the churches of the various early missionaries (D. of course included) by placing their mission in the first century under pope St. Clement I. This tradition was known to the author of the first Vita of St. Genovefa of Paris (BHL 3334; ca. 520). Genovefa, in turn, is said to have erected at some time in the later fifth century a church over D.'s tomb at Catulliac in Parisian territory some miles north of the city proper and close to the royal villa at Clichy. In the sixth century St. Venantius Fortunatus knew of D.'s church there, which was beginning to receive important burials, and of another dedicated to him in Bordeaux. In the early seventh century the church at Catulliac was being tended by a monastic community that would evolve into the famous abbey of Saint-Denis. It was also drawing pilgrims in such numbers that Dagobert I (the first king to be buried there) founded an adjacent fair on D.'s feast day.
The identification of D. with Dionysius the Areopagite begins with his eighth-century Passio BHL 2178, a product of the abbey that also presents D. as a cephalophore. His ninth-century Passio by abbot Hilduin elaborates D.'s legend and uses matter from the late antique philosopher Dionysius (in mss. called the Areopagite), thus making D. also a theologian. Slightly later Byzantine synaxary notices of D. the Areopagite (3. Oct.) likewise collapse the three D.'s into one. By this time D. had become a "national" saint in Francia and his cult was radiating elsewhere. In the twelfth century abbot Suger translated relics believed to be those of D., R., and E. from the crypt of his rebuilt abbey church to underneath its main altar. In the later Middle Ages D. was one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers, invoked in cases of illness of or injury to the head.
VISUALS
A. Buildings:
Two English-language multi-page sites on the abbey of Saint-Denis and on its church:
http://tinyurl.com/4r5kol
http://tinyurl.com/3hfcg6
Another, in French:
http://tinyurl.com/5yml7d
Views of the eleventh-/twelfth-century tower of the St. Dionysius Kirche in Elsen, a Stadtbezirk of Paderborn (the remainder of the medieval church was replaced in 1851 by the present structure):
http://tinyurl.com/yhvh7q(http://tinyurl.com/yhvh7qd)(http://tinyurl.com/yhvh7q%28http://tinyurl.com/yhvh7qd%29)(http://tinyurl.com/yhvh7q%28http://tinyurl.com/yhvh7qd%29%28http://tinyurl.com/yhvh7q%28http://tinyurl.com/yhvh7qd%29%29)
http://tinyurl.com/yguc7zs
Views of the originally eleventh- to fifteenth-century collégiale Saint-Denis / Sint-Denis kerk at Liège / Luik, restored in 1987:
http://tinyurl.com/3gvd24
Views of the originally eleventh- to fifteenth-century church of St Denys at Rotherfield (E. Sussex):
http://www.stdenysrotherfield.org.uk/images/Church_photo.JPG
http://tinyurl.com/meksec
http://www.achurchnearyou.com/album.php?V=5117
Views of York's originally twelfth- to fifteenth-century church of St Denys, Walmgate:
http://tinyurl.com/4vckbn
http://www.achurchnearyou.com/album.php?V=18965
http://www.yorkstories.co.uk/york_walks-4/walmgate.htm
http://www.docbrown.info/docspics/yorkscenes/yspage23.htm
Views of the mostly thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Stadtkirche St. Dionys in Esslingen am Neckar in Baden-Württemberg, a dependency of Saint-Denis from 777 to 1213, starting with the exterior:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/arenate/580224763/
http://static.panoramio.com/photos/original/18768994.jpg
http://tinyurl.com/yk57n2m
http://tinyurl.com/yjkpe6r
http://tinyurl.com/yjyp39m
http://tinyurl.com/4u8ag(http://tinyurl.com/4u8agy)(http://tinyurl.com/4u8ag%28http://tinyurl.com/4u8agy%29)(http://tinyurl.com/4u8ag%28http://tinyurl.com/4u8agy%29%28http://tinyurl.com/4u8ag%28http://tinyurl.com/4u8agy%29%29)
Interior:
http://tinyurl.com/4u8agy
http://tinyurl.com/ylrcmn6
http://tinyurl.com/3fbfnrp
http://tinyurl.com/43fqnwg
A German-language page on, and some views of, the mostly fourteenth- and fifteenth-century (restored, mid-nineteenth-century) Basilika St. Valentinus und Dionysius (or Dionysius und Valentinus; so attested in a papal bull from 1490) in Kiedrich (Lkr. Rheingau-Taunus-Kreis) in Hessen, a rebuilding of a predecessor seemingly dedicated to D. alone:
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Valentinus_%28Kiedrich%29
http://tinyurl.com/3fm4d5p
http://tinyurl.com/5re398l
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3518/3958830455_d14c057016.jpg
http://tinyurl.com/7jvxnx
http://tinyurl.com/4xtlm92
http://www.flickr.com/photos/hen-magonza/4849701484/
Several well illustrated, German-language pages on the building history of this church are accessible from here (click on the the links marked 'Abschnitt'):
http://tinyurl.com/6xf5xzb (http://tinyurl.com/6xf5xzb%C2%A0)(http://tinyurl.com/6xf5xzb%C2%A0%29)(http://tinyurl.com/6xf5xzb%C2%A0%29%28http://tinyurl.com/6xf5xzb%C2%A0%29%29)
Some views of the originally fifteenth- and earlier sixteenth-century Pfarrkirche St. Dionysius in Rheine (Lkr. Steinfurt) in Nordrhein-Westfalen, a successor to churches of the same dedication that had existed there since at least 838 as a dependency of the imperial abbey of Herford:
http://tinyurl.com/3bh3b55
http://www.nahraum.de/user/5029/86330_0.jpg
http://tinyurl.com/3w25bhh
Ground plan:
http://www.dionysius-rheine.de/kirchengeschichted.htm
Some late medieval appointments:
http://tinyurl.com/6xzjlym
http://tinyurl.com/3tedwyr
Four illustrated, German-language pages of views (at the first page, click on the hotlinks below the photograph) on the sculptures surviving in this church from a probably mid-fifteenth-century altarpiece with scenes of Christ's Passion start here:
http://tinyurl.com/3qx4h32
A fifteenth-century Anna Selbdritt / Anne Trinitaire repainted ca. 1910:
http://tinyurl.com/6aq2ufu
An illustrated, German-language page on this church, which was restored in 1870 and again in 1957:
http://tinyurl.com/3o6p6nx
An illustrated, German-language page on the originally mid-fifteenth-century Kirche St. Dionys-Wurmsbach in Rapperswil-Jona (canton Sankt Gallen), a replacement for a predecessor of the same dedication:
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirche_St._Dionys-Wurmsbach
Views, etc. of the originally mid-fifteenth-century (ca. 1457) iglesia de San Dionisio at Jerez de la Frontera (Cádiz):
http://tinyurl.com/45zrjs
http://tinyurl.com/3svh9d
B. Portrayals:
D. as portrayed in a mid-eleventh-century relief in the entrance hall to the Kirche St. Emmeram in Regensburg, originally the church of a monastery claiming to possess D.'s remains:
http://www.fantomzeit.de/wp-content/uploads/wibald03.jpg
D. between R. and E. as portrayed in a mid-twelfth-century walrus ivory plaque from a portable altar now in the Musée du Louvre, Paris:
http://worldvisitguide.com/oeuvre/photo_ME0000021320.html
Two other views, both expandable:
http://tinyurl.com/5ue9chx
http://tinyurl.com/5rr2goz
D. (at center) as portrayed in the jambs of the left portal of the south porch (betw. 1194 and 1230), Notre-Dame de Chartres:
http://tinyurl.com/4o6rjl
Detail view (D.'s head):
http://tinyurl.com/4zncmm
D. (at far right) as portrayed in an earlier thirteenth-century statue on a choir screen in Bamberg's Dom St. Peter und St. Georg (consecrated, 1237):
http://tinyurl.com/3u59qkq
Another view:
http://tinyurl.com/69dhonr
D. (at left) as depicted in an earlier thirteenth-century window (1228-1231) of the south transept clerestory, Notre-Dame de Chartres (not to miss the important bibliography cited on this page):
http://tinyurl.com/3v5epn
D. as depicted in a later thirteenth-century window (ca. 1280) in the Stadtkirche St. Dionys in Esslingen am Neckar:
http://tinyurl.com/yfa8loy
D. (at left; at right, St. Piatus of Seclin [1. Oct.]) as depicted in the late thirteenth-century (ca. 1285-1290) Livre d'images de Madame Marie, a book originating in Hainaut (Paris, BnF, ms. Nouvelle acquisition française 16251, fol. 84v):
http://tinyurl.com/y8v48ko
An expandable view of the martyrdom of R., D., and E. as depicted as in a late thirteenth-century copy of French origin of the _Legenda aurea_ (San Marino, CA, Huntington Library, ms. HM 3027, fol. 142v):
http://tinyurl.com/23ssysn
D. (seated, commissioning his Vita) as depicted in the richly illuminated _Vie de saint Denis_ (despite its customary name, a text in Latin verse) presented to Philip V in 1317 by an abbot of Saint-Denis (Paris, BnF, ms. Français 2090-2092):
http://tinyurl.com/yk9773y
Other illuminations in the same ms.:
http://tinyurl.com/ygdrryr
http://expositions.bnf.fr/fouquet/grand/f634.htm
D. (seated) as portrayed in a polychromed (? or just monochromed in red), earlier fourteenth-century (ca. 1320) walnut-wood statue from Köln now in that city's Schnütgen-Museum:
http://tinyurl.com/6hah44t
E. R., and D. as portrayed in an earlier fourteenth-century (ca. 1326-1350) marble sculpture formerly part of a retable and now in the Musée du Louvre, Paris:
http://worldvisitguide.com/oeuvre/photo_ME0000034865.html
Scenes of D.'s life and and suffering as depicted in an earlier fourteenth-century (ca. 1326-1350) collection of French-language saint's lives (Paris, BnF, ms. Français 185, fols. 202r, 203v, 204r, 204v, 205v, 206v, 207v), the last also depicting the martyrdom of R. and E.:
http://tinyurl.com/ylrytq7
http://tinyurl.com/yllhhq9
http://tinyurl.com/ykgrryk
http://tinyurl.com/yfrz7hr
http://tinyurl.com/yzbemgu
http://tinyurl.com/yfnbkse
http://tinyurl.com/ylppvlk
D. as depicted in an earlier fourteenth-century copy (1348) of the _Legenda aurea_ in its French-language version by Jean de Vignay (Paris, BnF, ms. Français 241, fol. 275v):
http://tinyurl.com/ykxkqol
D. as depicted in the fourteenth-century rood screen of St Andrew, Hempstead (Norfolk):
http://tinyurl.com/4q7jgt
D. as depicted in a panel of a later fourteenth-century glass window in the north transept of the Basilica St. Valentinus und Dionysius in Kiedrich (Lkr. Rheingau-Taunus-Kreis) in Hessen:
http://tinyurl.com/3pgesej
The panel's context in the window:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/hen-magonza/4849130575/
D. between R. and E. as depicted in the early fifteenth-century (ca. 1410) Hours of René of Anjou (London, BL, MS Egerton 1070, fol. 104r; image expandable):
http://tinyurl.com/6bwo4km
D. as depicted in the Vendôme Chapel window (c. 1415), Notre-Dame de Chartres:
http://tinyurl.com/4vu3v2
D. (at left, receiving communion from Jesus while imprisoned, and at right, undergoing martyrdom along with E. and R.) as depicted by Henri Bellechose on an early fifteenth-century altarpiece (paid for in 1416) now in the Museé du Louvre in Paris:
http://tinyurl.com/3rey5zj
D. as depicted in a full-page illumination of French or English workmanship (ca. 1430-1440) in a Book of Hours (Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum, ms. 5, fol. 35v):
http://tinyurl.com/yhcuuh5
Detail view (D.'s severed head):
http://tinyurl.com/ylooxrf
Statue seemingly of D. (fifteenth-century) but also identified as St. Alban of Mainz (21. June), in the Musée National du Moyen Âge (Musée de Cluny), Paris:
http://tinyurl.com/3sgqcg
D. as portrayed in a later fifteenth-century, polychromed limestone statue (ca. 1460-1470) now in the Bode-Museum, Berlin:
http://tinyurl.com/4gvkeg
D.'s martyrdom and cephalophory as depicted in a later fifteenth-century copy (ca. 1480-1490) of the _Legenda aurea_ in its French-language translation by Jean de Vignay (Paris, BnF, ms. Français 245, fol. 135r):
http://tinyurl.com/yg4vhdu
D. as depicted in a hand-colored woodcut in the Beloit College copy of Hartmann Schedel's _Nuremberg Chronicle_ (1493) at fol. CIXv:
http://tinyurl.com/9ghdm8w
D. (at left, with St. Emmeram and St. Wolfgang) as portrayed on a pilgrim's badge of ca. 1500 from the abbey of St. Emmeram in Regensburg and now in Berlin's Kunstgewerbemuseum:
http://www.baitwakil.de/img/pzimg/586.jpg
The museum's data sheet on this object:
http://tinyurl.com/6etuld6
D.'s _gesta_, martyrdom, and cephalophory as depicted in the late fifteenth- or early sixteenth-century wall paintings (restored, early twentieth century) in the Kirche St. Dionys-Wurmsbach in Rapperswil-Jona (canton Sankt Gallen):
http://tinyurl.com/yjlyrwb
http://tinyurl.com/ykffc89
D. (at left; at right, St. Margaret) as depicted by Vicente Macip in the central panel of his early sixteenth-century altarpiece (ca. 1510) in the capilla de San Dionisio y Santa Margarita in Valencia's catedral de la Asunción de Nuestra Señora:
http://tinyurl.com/3bbdu8b
Last year Gordon Plumb posted links to several depictions of D. in glass (other than those linked to above):
http://tinyurl.com/8b5ymsa
2. Domninus of Fidenza (d. ca. 304, supposedly). D. is the martyr and patron saint of Fidenza (PR) in Emilia, anciently Fidentia and for most of the Middle Ages (and indeed until 1927) Borgo San Donnino. His legendary Passio (several versions; BHL 2264, etc.), now dated to probably 840, makes him a chamberlain (_cubicularius_) of Maximian who crowns him daily, converts to Christianity, flees Milan, is pursued by the emperor's servants, is arrested, and on the via Claudia about a dozen miles distant from Julia Chrysopolis (variously thought to be a late antique name name either for Parma or for Fidentia) is executed by decapitation on this day on a bank of the river Stirone, whereupon he picks up his severed head, crosses the river, and lies down at his burial site a stone's throw away from the bank on the other side. Miracles follow and a cult arises.
Later versions of D.'s Passio relate a finding of his remains under Constantine and their translation to a martyrial basilica erected for them. A still later version adds a much later finding and translation when D.'s church was being rebuilt. Remains believed to be D.'s now repose in the crypt of the twelfth- and thirteenth-century formerly archipretal church of Borgo San Donnino (it became a cathedral in 1601). An English-language account of this building, which has some very fine sculptural decoration by Benedetto Antelami and others, is here:
http://tinyurl.com/3trrvyy
Some exterior views:
http://tinyurl.com/3trrvyy
http://mw2.google.com/mw-panoramio/photos/medium/1727423.jpg
http://web.tiscali.it/italfilatel/cattre.jpg
http://tinyurl.com/yzfwh4p
http://tinyurl.com/yfjjugc
http://www.cattedrale.parma.it/allegato.asp?ID=209118
http://tinyurl.com/2c6xow5
http://tinyurl.com/2c3umln
The cathedral's relief showing D. as cephalophore (at far right, crossing the river):
http://tinyurl.com/yks2af4
Two reliefs on the right tower:
http://tinyurl.com/yzr257k
http://tinyurl.com/yfdphgp
Italia nell'Arte Medievale's two pages of (mostly) expandable views of the exterior sculptures:
http://tinyurl.com/2snehd
http://tinyurl.com/2q96k2
Some interior views:
http://www.mondimedievali.net/edifici/Emilia/images/fidenz02.jpg
http://tinyurl.com/2f7all5
http://tinyurl.com/2fq5oho
http://www.clonline.org/image/20anniFrat/fidenza/fidenza1.jpg
http://www.clonline.org/image/20anniFrat/fidenza/fidenza2.jpg
A ground plan:
http://tinyurl.com/2c74xyn
The crypt:
http://tinyurl.com/2c98egk
The ancient sarcophagus in which D.'s putative remains reposed for much of the Middle Ages:
http://tinyurl.com/26qu7ll
http://tinyurl.com/23scwy3
http://tinyurl.com/2895nr7
But are those relics really D.'s? According to a later fourteenth-century addition to the liturgical calendar in the chapter book of the abbey of Santa Maria di Gualdo Mazzocco near Campobasso (CB) in Molise, D. was celebrated there on 10. October (_Via claudia natalis sancti dopnini martiris_) and his body had been translated at some unspecified time to the monastery of St. Matthew in Sculgola. That house, a priory of the aforesaid abbey, lay in the vicinity of today's Casalvecchio di Puglia (FG) in northern Apulia. Where these relics came from is unknown, but a good guess would be the church dedicated to a St. D. known to have existed in the vicinity of Telesia, the predecessor of today's Telese Terme (BV) in Campania, from at least the late ninth century until at least 1122. Whether this D. were initially identical with today's D. -- perhaps brought to greater Benevento when the latter was a duchy of the Lombard kingdom of Italy -- is an open question.
The D. celebrated on this day appears in the (pseudo-)Hieronymian Martyrology without indication of place and is absent from the martyrologies of St. Bede, Florus of Lyon, and St. Ado of Vienne. Our earliest testimony to his association with Julia Chrysopolis is either probably from the ninth century (the Passio) or certainly so (Usuard, who seems to have known the Passio). Domninus is both a fairly common late antique name and a hagiographically significant name in that it is a diminutive of _Domnus_, a standard late antique equivalent of _Sanctus_. It is impossible to tell whether the saints D. now or formerly celebrated on 9. or 10. October are all the same saint in origin or else originally distinct saints who came to be celebrated on these dates under the influence of the (ps.-)HM. In addition to the Emilian D. (and possibly to the Beneventan D. referred to above) there is also:
3) Domninus of Tifernum Tiberinum / Città di Castello (d. later 6th or early 7th cent., supposedly). This Umbrian saint is first heard from in Arnulf of Arezzo's eleventh-century Vita of St. Floridus (the bishop locally credited with Tifernum Tiberinum's recreation through _incastellamento_ as Città di Castello) where he is an upright and simple resident of Perugia who together with Floridus, then a deacon, and with the priest St. Amantius flees that city before its Gothic sack (in the 540s), survives his companions, and lives out his life as a holy hermit in a wood called Robianum. A much rebuilt little church on the traditional site of D.'s hermitage in Città di Castello's _frazione_ of Sasso houses his putative remains in a reliquary placed there in 1543.
Three saints figured on a twelfth-century altar frontal in Città di Castello's Museo del Duomo are traditionally identified as (left to right) D., Floridus, and Amantius:
http://tinyurl.com/2vrjymb
4) Savinus of Lavedan (d. perh. 6th or 7th cent.). From at least the thirteenth-century onward S. was the principal saint of a Benedictine abbey at today's Saint-Savin (Hautes-Pyrénées) that previously had been dedicated to St. Martin. His brief, evidently medieval Vita (BHL 7446), which was first printed Philippe Labbé's seventeenth-century _Bibliotheca bibliothecarum_ without indication of date or authorship and of which no manuscript witness is known to survive, seems to have been written for this abbey.
The Vita presents S. as having been born in Barcelona and as having traveled to Gallia to visit relatives in Poitou, where he was received and educated by his paternal uncle, a man of comital rank. But S. gave up worldly status and possessions and sought entry in a monastery of St. Martin (Jean Bolland guessed that Ligugé may have been meant, though the place name as printed is very different) only to withdraw at his mother's behest. Three years later he became an hermit in the mountains of Bigorre in association with an abbot Fronimius and a few monks and rapidly became their teacher. The monks returned to their brethren and S. built himself a tiny hermitage where he lived very ascetically, even going barefoot in the winter snows. He passed peacefully into the next life and at his funeral proved his sanctity by effecting the cure of a blind man at his bier. Thus far the Vita, which Martin Heinzelmann (_Francia_ 10 [1982], pp. 689-670) judges, on what basis we are not told, to go back to a good tradition and to be trustworthy in its content. Others may form a different impression.
A few exterior views of the originally twelfth-century église abbatiale Saint-Savin at Saint-Savin-en-Lavedan (restored in the mid-nineteenth century):
http://tinyurl.com/3omxyw5
http://tinyurl.com/3jtrl3h
http://tinyurl.com/3gqju4l
http://tinyurl.com/5spw5bd
More views (expandable; incl. some of the interior) are here:
http://www.monestirs.cat/monst/annex/fran/migdp/ssavin.htm
Further detail views of the main portal are accessible from here (but it's not at all clear that the saint in the tympanum is really S. and not Martin):
http://tinyurl.com/3wbqzja
The church contains two large painted panels, seemingly of the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century, depicting scenes from S.'s life and miracles (the latter include several not in the Vita):
http://vppyr.free.fr/pages_saints/vpp_st_savin.htm
Closer views of some of these:
http://www.loucrup65.fr/pgie3440.htm
5) Deusdedit of Montecassino (d. 834). Today's less well known saint of the Regno became abbot of Montecassino in 828. Reputed for learning and for piety, he was ejected a mere six years later by the then prince of Benevento, Sicard, who coveted the abbey's lands and revenues. Sicard also had D. imprisoned. D., who did not last long, died on this date from what is said to have been a combination of abuse and starvation. He was buried at the abbey, where -- as reported by the late ninth-century Cassinese monk Erchempert in his little history of the southern Lombards -- his tomb soon became a site of miraculous cures.
Best,
John Dillon
(matter from last year's posts lightly revised)
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