medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
We know about the perhaps sixth-century John from a brief, early medieval Vita (BHL 4420) whose earliest witness is said to be of the tenth century. According to this legendary account, he was a Syrian holy man who traveled the world looking for a divinely appointed place in which to settle and found it at a farm in Umbria called Agellum ("Little Field") where a handmaiden of the Lord offered him hospitality and where a sign that John had proposed to the Lord when he was leaving Syria was given unto him. Understanding that this was the area in which he was to settle, John set out to look for a particular spot. He had not gotten very far when an angel appeared to him, brought him under a tree, and told him that there he would have a great congregation and find rest.
This was in December, it was especially cold, and all the earth was barren. But the tree under which John rested flowered as though it were a lily. Passing hunters observed John, took him for a spy, and interrogated him. John related to them how he had come to Italy. The hunters marveled at his manner of dress, which was very strange to them. They seem also to have threatened him, for John then pleaded with them not to hurt him as he had come to that spot in the service of his lord Jesus Christ. The hunters then noticed the flowering tree, realized that this indeed was a man of God, and reported John's presence to St. John the bishop of Spoleto.
John the bishop then went out to meet the newly found holy man. They embraced tearfully and John narrated his story to the bishop. In God's mercy a multitude of people was gathered. These built for John a _monasterium_ and he lived there all the days of his life, residing in that spot for forty-four years and dying in peace. Thanks to him even today the blind are given sight, the possessed are rid of their demons, and the leprous are cleansed; under Christ's protection the Divine Office has been celebrated there right up to the present. Thus far John's Vita.
Since in texts from early medieval Italy the word _monasterium_ very often signifies "small church", calling John an abbot, as both the Bollandists and the Roman Martyrology do, is something of a stretch. John was evidently the saint of some rural church in the diocese of Spoleto and it was the latter and not some abbey that perpetuated his cult. His Syrian origin, while certainly possible, could be -- as in the parallel instance of St. Isaac of Spoleto -- no more than a local variant on the common trope of "the saint who has come to us from afar".
After Charlemagne's conquest of the Lombard kingdom of Italy many saints of the duchy of Spoleto entered the Frankish orbit, among them John, whose Vita underlies his differing entries in the ninth-century martyrologies of Florus, St. Ado, and Usuard. The majority of the Vita's close to twenty-five surviving witnesses are not in Italian repositories and many of these are certainly not of Italian origin. The ultramontane spread of John's cult led to a great variety of spellings of the apparently unfamiliar and still unidentified locale of his church. To the Bollandists John is "Iohannes ab. Penariensis" and elsewhere in modern scholarship he is referred to as John of Parrano and John of Panaca (the latter preserves an early modern conjecture assigning him to a village of that name near Spoleto). John is still celebrated liturgically on this day in the archdiocese of Spoleto - Norcia.
Best,
John Dillon
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