medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
The great martyr Mamas (also Mammas, Mames, Mammes, Mamete, Mamant, Mamante, etc., etc.) is a saint of Caesarea in Cappadocia of whom virtually nothing is known. Traditionally thought to have suffered under Aurelian (270-275) and considered a patron of herdsmen and of others who work with animals, he is venerated widely in Eastern Christianity and regionally or locally in various places in the Latin West.
According to St. Gregory of Nazianzus in one of his invectives against the emperor Julian (_Orationes_, 4. 24-26), a church in Caesarea dedicated to the Martyrs (not further identified) was begun by the not yet apostate but already evil Julian and by his genuinely pious half brother Gallus (so between 341 and 351), each working in rivalry to outdo the other in magnificence; whereas the part built by Gallus went according to plan, in a sign of divine disapproval that built by Julian was rejected by the earth, trembled, and collapsed. Sozomen, writing in the first half of the fifth century and accepting as factual the collapse of the Julianic portion of such an edifice, says that the church was dedicated to Mamas (_Historia ecclesiastica_, 5. 2. 9-14). Perhaps it was. Our first certain witness to Mamas' cult, St. Basil of Caesarea's _Homilia_ 23 (BHG 1020, 1020a; ca. 370), presents Mamas as an actual shepherd and shows that he was then celebrated on 2. September. A sermon on Mamas by Gregory of Nazianzus (_Orationes__, 44; BHG 1021) adds that he milked wild does, a detail that would become -- or perhaps already was -- a fixture in Mamas' legend. The latter presents him as a youthful hermit taming and tending wild animals on a mountain near Caesarea until he is martyred during a persecution; in its developed versions it associates him with a tame lion or lions (in his early Passio a savage lion avenges him after his torture but is made to stop by the saint before he dies) and has him martyred by being stabbed in the abdomen.
The accounts of Mamas by these widely read Cappadocian Fathers presumably had a lot to do with his transformation from a purely regional saint (in late antiquity he was Caesarea's local saint _par excellence_) to a universal saint first of the Greek-speaking church and later in the Christian East in general. The monastery named for him in Constantinople may be as old as the sixth century; in the late twelfth century its restoration under the emperor Isaac II Angelos was capped by the translation to it from Cappadocia of a relic referred to as Mamas' head. In an early example of the radiation of his cult in the Latin West, in the 560s the recently celebrated St. Radegund is said by her biographer Baudonivia to have obtained from the patriarch of Jerusalem a relic from the body of Mamas of Caesarea (specifically, the little finger of the right hand). Mamas' body is not otherwise reported to have been in Jerusalem. Also in what is now France, by the beginning of the thirteenth century the diocese of Langres had established a tradition, fortified by the possession of putative relics, of particular veneration of this saint. In 1209 it received a head relic of Mamas that according to a highly tendentious translation account (BHL 5199) had been seized from Mamas' monastery in Constantinople during the sack of 1204. This relic is still kept in the cathedral of Langres. In southern Italy, Mamas is entered under 2. September in the earlier ninth-century Marble Calendar of Naples, whose duchy had ceased to be East Roman less than a century earlier. How his cult arrived in the archdiocese of Milan and in parts of the Iberian peninsula, where it is also attested medievally, is less clear.
Mamas has a complicated hagiography. A now lost, very probably fourth-century Greek-language Passio seems to have given rise to two different legendary developments, one of which is represented in Latin translation by an early, fifth-century prose Passio (BHL 5191d; Mamas' so-called encyclical Passio). The other development was an also now lost Greek-language Passio that made Mamas a scion of senatorial nobility at Gangra, presumably the city of that name in Paphlagonia (now Çankırı in Turkey), where a monastery dedicated to him is reported from the tenth century; probably early in the sixth century this Passio was combined with elements from the other tradition to form an episodic Bios (BHG 1019). That Bios in turn underlies various reworkings and adaptations in Greek, Syriac, and Armenian. In the ninth century it was known in the Latin West, as it underlies both Mamas' metrical Passio by Walafrid Strabo (BHL 5197) and a notice of Mamas by St. Rabanus Maurus (BHL 5198d); in perhaps the twelfth century it was translated into Latin at Antioch on the Orontes (BHL 5198).
In the Synaxary of Constantinople Mamas has the first entry under 2. September. He is that day's saint as well in the Metaphrastic Menologion, in the calendars of modern Byzantine-rite churches, and in those of the Armenian Apostolic Church and the Coptic Orthodox Church (both theologically non-Chalcedonian). That is also the day on which he is currently celebrated in the Roman Rite at his church in Perreuse (Yonne) in Bourgogne. But in the Latin West Mamas has generally been celebrated on 17. August, the _dies natalis_ given for him in his Latin Passiones. This is his feast day in Langres and his day of commemoration in the Roman Martyrology.
Two views of Mamas' cranial relic in the treasury of the cathédrale Saint-Mammès in Langres:
http://www.liturgiecatholique.fr/local/cache-vignettes/L298xH450/crane-2-ffa9f.jpg
http://tinyurl.com/hgpq7b5
Some period-pertinent images of St. Mamas of Caesarea:
a) as depicted (martyrdom; holding his bleeding entrails) in the late tenth- or very early eleventh-century so-called Menologion of Basil II (Città del Vaticano, BAV, cod. Vat. gr. 1613, p. 5):
http://tinyurl.com/j8xu7xb
b) as depicted in an earlier twelfth-century legendary from the abbey of Cîteaux (ca. 1101-1133; Dijon, Bibliothèque municipale, ms. 642, fol. 57r):
http://www.culture.gouv.fr/Wave/savimage/enlumine/irht6/IRHT_094800-p.jpg
c) as depicted (at right; at left, St. Blasius the Cowherd) in the later twelfth-century frescoes (1164) in the church of St. Panteleimon (Pantaleon) at Gorno Nerezi (Skopje municipality) in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia:
http://tinyurl.com/jr9njoz
d) as depicted (at left, in colloquy with the governor of Cappadocia) in a French-language Passio as transmitted in a thirteenth-century collection of miracles of the BVM, saint's legends, and other texts (Paris, BnF, ms. Français 818, fol. 269r):
http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b10507337z/f543.item.r=Fran%C3%A7ais%20818.zoom
e) as depicted (holding a lamb; on a lion) in a late thirteenth-century icon from the former monastery of Agios Mamas in Pano Amiantos (Limassol prefecture) in the Republic of Cyprus and now in the Icon Museum in the Panagia Katholiki church in Pelendri in the same Cypriot prefecture:
http://www.hellenicaworld.com/Cyprus/Events/ManieraCyprus/ManA165.jpg
f)as depicted (at right) in a thirteenth- or fourteenth-century fresco in the church of Agios Nikolaos in Kastania in Greece's Exo Mani (Messenia prefecture):
http://www.zorbas.de/maniguide/scans/kastnik.jpg
g) as depicted (on a lion; to the left of St. George) in a thirteenth- or fourteenth-century fresco in the narthex of the originally twelfth-century church of the Panagia Phorbiotissa at Asinou (Nicosia prefecture) in the Republic of Cyprus:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/7784598@N04/2152224538/sizes/o/
http://tinyurl.com/h433h3e
h) as depicted in a fourteenth-century fresco in the church of the Transfiguration in Kato Vianno, a locality of Viannos (Heraklion prefecture) on Crete:
http://tinyurl.com/3lof8sa
i) as depicted (at left; at right, St. John the Faster) in the September calendar portraits in the earlier fourteenth-century frescoes (betw. ca.1312 and 1321/1322) of the monastery church of the Theotokos at Gračanica in, depending on one's view of the matter, either Serbia's province of Kosovo and Metohija or the Republic of Kosovo:
http://tinyurl.com/zlg9k9e
j) as depicted (at right; at left, St. Tryphon) as depicted by Michael Astrapas and Eutychios in the earlier fourteenth-century frescoes (betw. 1313 and 1318; conservation work in 1968) in the church of St. George at Staro Nagoričane in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia:
http://tinyurl.com/jo745rv
k)as depicted (at lower right in the panel at upper left; martyrdom, four companions already slain) in an earlier fourteenth-century pictorial menologion from Thessaloniki (betw. 1322 and 1340; Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Gr. th. f. 1, fol. 7v):
http://image.ox.ac.uk/images/bodleian/msgrthf1/7v.jpg
l) as depicted in earlier fourteenth-century frescoes (1330s) in the nave of the church of the Hodegetria in the Patriarchate of Peć at Peć in, depending on one's view of the matter, either the Republic of Kosovo or Serbia's province of Kosovo and Metohija:
http://tinyurl.com/3qzrnlr
m) as depicted (at the entrance to his cave, reading in the presence of animals) in an earlier fourteenth-century copy of Vincent of Beauvais' _Speculum historiale_ in its French-language translation by Jean de Vignay (ca. 1335; Paris, BnF, ms. Arsenal 5080, fol. 275v):
http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b55000813g/f413.item.zoom
n) as depicted in the earlier fourteenth-century frescoes (betw. 1335 and 1350) in the parecclesion of St. Demetrius in the church of the Holy Ascension at the Visoki Dečani monastery near Peć in, depending on one's view of the matter, either the Republic of Kosovo or Serbia's province of Kosovo and Metohija:
http://tinyurl.com/42xgz9q
o) as depicted (at left; martyrdom; at right, St. John the Faster) in a September calendar scene in the earlier fourteenth-century frescoes (betw. 1335 and 1350) of the narthex in the church of the Holy Ascension at the Visoki Dečani monastery near Peć in, depending on one's view of the matter, either the Republic of Kosovo or Serbia's province of Kosovo and Metohija:
http://tinyurl.com/2uzkeke
p) as depicted (at the entrance to his cave, reading in the presence of animals) in a later-fourteenth-century copy of Vincent of Beauvais' _Speculum historiale_ in its French-language version by Jean de Vignay (ca. 1370-1380; Paris, BnF, ms. Nouvelle acquisition française 15941, fol. 73r):
http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8449688c/f153.item.zoom
q) as depicted (at right) in a late fourteenth-century fresco (ca. 1390-1400) in the originally eleventh-century but much rebuilt chiesa di San Mamete in Valsolda (CO) in Lombardy:
http://tinyurl.com/my2tlg
r) as portrayed in relief on a fourteenth- or fifteenth-century Georgian tondo, formerly in the Gelati Monastery in Kutaisi and now in The State Museum of Fine Arts of Georgia (views in different lighting):
http://www.photomuseum.org.ge/laboratory/01_en.htm
http://tinyurl.com/qed725
s) as portrayed (holding his entrails) in a fifteenth-century ivory statuette in the treasury of the cathedral of Langres:
http://tinyurl.com/nwc2ca
t) as depicted in the central panel of a mid-fifteenth-century triptych (ca. 1445-1456) in the Museo di Castelvecchio in Verona:
http://tinyurl.com/jswxzuc
u) as depicted (at left; at right, St. James major) in a mid-fifteenth-century panel painting, begun by Francesco Pesellino and completed by Filippo Lippi and workshop, from the Pistoia Santa Trinità altarpiece (commissioned, 1455; completed, 1460) in the National Gallery in London:
http://tinyurl.com/o6bvwr
v) as depicted (in prison, exposed to lions) by Filippo Lippi and workshop in a mid-fifteenth-century panel painting from the Pistoia Santa Trinità altarpiece (commissioned, 1455; completed, 1460) in the National Gallery in London:
http://tinyurl.com/px8kjr
w) as depicted (at center, holding his entrails) in a later fifteenth-century psalter for the Use of Langres (betw. 1463 and 1467; Vesoul, Bibliothèque municipale Louis-Garret, ms. 13, fol. 222r):
http://www.culture.gouv.fr/Wave/savimage/enlumine/irht5/IRHT_086535-p.jpg
x) as depicted (holding his bleeding entrails; a woman collects the blood in a vessel) in a later fifteenth-century missal for the Use of Langres (betw. 1476 and 1500; Langres, Bibliothèque municipale, ms. 2, fol. 266r):
http://www.culture.gouv.fr/Wave/savimage/enlumine/irht6/IRHT_097414-p.jpg
y) as depicted in a late fifteenth-century icon in the collection of the Metropolis of Morphou in Evrychou (Nicosia prefecture) in the Republic of Cyprus:
http://www.stprohor.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/2544.jpg
http://tinyurl.com/ztp4una
z) as depicted (with a lion; holding his entrails) in a late fifteenth-century breviary for the Use of Langres (after 1481; Chaumont, Mediathèque de Chaumont, ms. 33, fol. 355r):
http://www.culture.gouv.fr/Wave/savimage/enlumine/irht6/IRHT_096991-p.jpg
aa) as depicted (martyrdom) in a late fifteenth-century missal for the Use of Paris (ca. 1492; Paris, Bibliothèque Mazarine, ms. 412, fol. 364r):
http://www.culture.gouv.fr/Wave/savimage/enlumine/irht17/IRHT_08581-p.jpg
bb) as depicted (on a lion) by Philippos Goul in a late fifteenth-century fresco (1494) in the church of Timios Stavros tou Agiasmati near Platanistasa (Nicosia prefecture) in the Republic of Cyprus:
http://tinyurl.com/n8o3mb
cc) as depicted (with his lion before the Roman persecutor Alexander) as depicted in one of eight earlier sixteenth-century tapestries executed by Jean Cousin the elder (ca. 1543) for the cathedral of Langres (this one is in the Musée du Louvre in Paris):
http://tinyurl.com/nlvrc9
Best,
John Dillon
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