medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
According to her pseudo-Athanasian Bios (BHG 1694), Syncletica (d. 4th or early 5th cent.) was the wealthy and beautiful daughter of a prominent family of Macedonian origin living in Alexandria in Egypt. Rejecting all suitors, she chose to exercise a life of holy virginity. Upon the death of her parents she gave her inheritance to the poor, cut her hair, and -- along with her blind sister -- withdrew to a family tomb outside the city. There she attracted female adherents and gave spiritual advice. In her later years this Desert Mother suffered patiently from painful illnesses afflicting her voice and her face. Syncletica died at the advanced age of eighty-four. A collection of sayings in the _Apophthegmata Patrum_ is ascribed to her. Today is her day of commemoration in the Roman Martyrology and her usual feast day in Byzantine-rite churches (in the originally tenth- and eleventh-century Synaxary of Constantinople she is entered under 4. January).
Some period-pertinent images of St. Syncletica of Alexandria:
a) as depicted in the late tenth- or very early eleventh-century so-called Menologion of Basil II (Cittą del Vaticano, BAV, cod. Vat. gr. 1613, p. 297):
http://tinyurl.com/hrgc6sr
b) as depicted (probably; at lower right in the panel at lower right) in an earlier fourteenth-century pictorial menologion from Thessaloniki (betw. 1322 and 1340; Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Gr. th. f. 1, fol. 23v):
http://image.ox.ac.uk/images/bodleian/msgrthf1/23v.jpg
c) as depicted by the Master of Ippolita Sforza in a later fifteenth-century copy of Domenico Cavalca's _Vite de' santi padri_ (1465; Paris, BnF, ms. Italien 1712, fol. 172v):
http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8438663z/f352.item.zoom
Best,
John Dillon
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