medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
The missionary bishop Vicelinus (d. 1154; in German, Vizelin and Vicelin, also Wissel and Witzel) is known from a closely posthumous letter by Sido, the provost of the abbey of canons regular that Vicelinus had founded at today's Neumünster in the Holstein portion of what's now Schleswig-Holstein (BHL 8553), from a Vita metrica ascribed to the same Sido (BHL 8552), and especially from matter in the _Chronicon Sclavicum_ of Helmold of Bosau, a canon of the same house in the next generation who had known both Vicelinus and Sido. A native of Hameln, after several years of study at Paderborn he became in 1118 a teacher in the cathedral school at Bremen.
From 1122 until 1126 Vicelinus was a student at Paris. In the latter year he went to Magdeburg and was ordained priest by St. Norbert of Xanten. In short order he was entrusted by archbishop Adalbero II of Bremen with the task of preaching to those Obodrites (a Wendish tribal group) living in the area of Liubice / Alt-Lübeck. For the next twenty years Vicelinus and other canons working with him from their new monastery at Wippenthorp (soon called Neumünster) enjoyed varied and limited success complicated by hostilities between Germans settlers and the Obodrites and by Wendish uprisings against Saxon rule.
The success of the combined German, Danish, and Polish crusade against the Wends in 1147 changed matters. The conquered Wends were obliged to convert to Christianity and missionary dioceses were established or re-founded both to accomplish this and to care for the souls of Christian immigrants. One of these dioceses was the long vacant see of Oldenburg (later Lübeck); in 1149 Vicelinus became its first bishop in more than eighty years. Shortly thereafter invading Danes destroyed the settlement at Oldenburg and in 1151/52 the seat of Vicelinus' diocese was moved to the then newly built church of St. Peter at today's Bosau (Lkr. Plön). Herewith an illustrated, German-language page on the much rebuilt St. Petrikirche in Bosau:
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrikirche_zu_Bosau
Until the earlier seventeenth century this church had a round tower, as do several other fieldstone churches in Holstein with a rectangular choir and a small curved apse thought to date from Vicelinus' episcopacy or from shortly afterward. As a type, these are known as Vicelinus churches (_Vicelinkirchen_). An example with all its original sections still present is the one in Ratekau (Lkr. Ostholstein), begun in 1156:
http://tinyurl.com/36vf4t3
Vicelinus' church in Bosau will have looked much like this.
In 1150 and/or in 1152 Vicelinus suffered what appear to have been one or more partly paralytic strokes. He withdrew to Neumünster, where he died on this day two (or four) years later, where he was buried, and where he was celebrated as a saint. In 1332 the relics of this apostle of the Obodrites followed a slightly earlier northward translation of the canons themselves to Bordesholm in today's Schleswig-Holstein, where they (the relics, that is) were interred in the abbey church of the BVM. Herewith an illustrated, German-language page on the former abbey of Bordesholm, focusing on its originally fourteenth- to early sixteenth-century Klosterkirche St. Marien:
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kloster_Bordesholm
Best,
John Dillon
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