medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Yesterday (14. May) was also the feast day of:
Justa, (Justina), and Henedina (d. ca. 131, supposedly). A cult of a
saint named Justa is attested medievally at several places on Sardinia,
most notably at the city of Santa Giusta (OR) near Oristano in what
until 1410 was the judicate of Arborea. But she has no Vita or Passio
earlier than the one by the early modern canon of Oristano, Antonio
Martis. Published in 1616 and supposedly drawn from an ancient document,
this was shown in the eighteenth century to be instead a melange of oral
tradition and of matter from the Acta of another saint of this name.
Martis' account makes Justa a virgin martyr put to death under Hadrian
along with her maids Justina and Henedina at the very spot where later
was built the crypt of the cathedral of the town of Santa Giusta. A
variant known to the sixteenth-century Sardinian historian Giovanni Fara
made the saints confessors rather than martyrs and identified Justina
and Henedina as Justa's sisters.
In the early seventeenth century, during the Corpi Santi episode when
remains of presumed early Christian martyrs were being unearthed all
over Sardinia, relics identified as those of J., J., and H. were found
in Cagliari's Cripta di Santa Restituta:
http://tinyurl.com/8f9lj
and were re-located next to those of Restituta herself. Presumed
destroyed during the bombing of Cagliari in 1943, they were found in
1997 -- still in their seventeenth-century chest -- in Cagliari's church
of Sant'Anna. In 2004 they were translated to Santa Giusta and placed
in that city's ex-cathedral dedicated to this saint. Thumbnail views of
these remains are here:
http://tinyurl.com/eovfz
and here:
http://www.isolanews.it/cultura/200405/15/40a60be80246c/urna4.jpg
Santa Giusta's Basilica di Santa Giusta, consecrated in 1144, was the
cathedral church of a homonymous diocese incorporated into that of
Oristano in 1503. In 1226 it was the site an all-island synod (the last
until the twentieth century) whose constitutions, preserved in the
Biblioteca Universitaria di Cagliari's codex S.P.6 bis. 4.7, are a major
document in the history of the church in medieval Sardinia. The
building is thought to have been erected in the 1130s and 1140s and has
not been rebuilt. An Italian-language account of it, with bibliography,
is here:
http://tinyurl.com/pn8w2
Exterior views (expandable) are here:
http://www.madeinsardinia.org/Oristano_%20Santa_Giusta/index.html
Others, and one interior view, (not expandable) are here:
http://www.ilportalesardo.it/monumenti/orsantagiusta.htm
Until the latest revision of the Roman Martyrology, today honored all
three of these poorly documented saints. Why Justina was banished from
the RM is not entirely clear. Probably, this resulted from the modern
scholarly view that she is merely Justa's doublet with a diminutive
name-form. Whether she is still celebrated liturgically in either the
diocese of Oristano or the archdiocese of Cagliari is also not clear at
this remove. Scholars have doubted as well the independent existence of
both Justa and Henedina, thinking them African saints (Justa of
Carthage; Heredina of Abitina) venerated in Sardinia since late
antiquity and outfitted with factitious new identities after their old
ones had vanished locally with the passage of time. But Justa, at
least, seems securely embedded in the culture of Sardinia. And
Henedina, spelled 'Enedina', is (presumably as a result of Spanish rule
on Sardinia in the later Middle Ages and the Early Modern period) the
name saint of so many Hispanophones that it might be thought impolitic
to drop her from the RM.
Best,
John Dillon
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