medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Today (20. February) is the feast day of:
Leo of Catania (7th or 8th cent.). From 591 to 604, Gregory the Great wrote a number of letters to a bishop of Catania of this name and also referred to him in letters directed to others. In one of the latter (14. 1 Ewald-Hartmann), L. is said to act severely against illdoers, possibly magicians (_maleficos_). This L. is perhaps the historic referent of the otherwise legendary saint Leo, bishop of Catania in the eighth century, the hero of a somewhat truncated and seemingly early ninth-century Italo-Greek Bios (BHG 981).
That text, which has a Latin translation in the _Acta Sanctorum_ and a modern critical edition by Augusta Acconcia Longo in _Rivista di Studi Bizantini e Neoellenici_, n.s. 26 (1989), 3-98, makes L. an overseer of church property at Ravenna who in the absence of acceptable local candidates was chosen to fill the see of Catania, who struggled mightily with an evil thaumaturge named Heliodorus (whom he eventually had burned alive), and who cured a woman of a hitherto incurable bloody flux (cf. Luke 8:43-48). Most of this Bios concerns the struggle with Heliodorus (a.k.a. Liodorus), in which L. operates holy magic to overcome the achievements of his diabolically inspired opponent. In the Latin version, which is a bit fuller, L. also destroys a pagan cult statue surviving from the days of the emperor Decius.
L.'s cult travelled to Constantinople (in Byzantine synaxaries he's remembered on 21. February) and elsewhere in the Greek-speaking world. His Bios has an elegant expansion (BHG 981b) sometimes referred to, from the location of the previously Athonite codex from which it was published, as the Moscow version of L.'s Bios. There are several other reworkings and numerous other texts drawing upon this tradition, including Greek hymns by the ninth-century Joseph the Hymnographer and the eleventh-century Bartholomew of Grottaferrata and Latin hymns from L.'s late medieval Office at Catania.
Heliodorus has survived at Catania in the name (U Liotru) of the mostly basalt late antique elephant which in the Middle Ages stood over one of the city gates and which led Arabic-speakers to refer to Catania as Medina el-fil ('City of the Elephant'). The city's official symbol since 1239, in the eighteenth century he was made part of a sculptural confection adorning a fountain in the Piazza Duomo:
http://tinyurl.com/nr9mf
http://web.tiscali.it/andreacatania/catania/gallery/CT06.jpg
http://web.tiscali.it/andreacatania/catania/gallery/CT05.jpg
The church of San Leone at Saracena (CS) in Calabria, rebuilt in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, has been dedicated to today's L. since the thirteenth century. Here's a view of its fourteenth-century belltower:
http://tinyurl.com/ytmlm9
At today's Rometta (ME) in northeastern Sicily (once famous, when it was still Rametta, for being the last holdout against Muslim occupation in Sicily), the former abbey church of San Leone vescovo
http://tinyurl.com/2b4hoe
is an early sixteenth-century rebuilding of the twelfth-century chapel of a Cistercian grange. The dedication to L. reinforces a local tradition that identifies a grotto on the site as one in which he had resided as a hermit.
L. is the patron saint not only of Saracena and of Rometta but also of Longi (ME) and of Sinagra (ME), both also in northeastern Sicily. In all of these once Greek-speaking towns he is the subject of a popular cult today, evidenced -- in addition to the usual patronal festivals -- by the presence of cult figures, such as this seated L. in an _edicola_ (votive shrine) at Longi:
http://www.longiweb.it/Il_Culto.htm
and in the mat painting and the figurine from Saracena shown at bottom here:
http://www.laboratoriofra.it/MattonelleArtistiche.php
Best,
John Dillon
(last year's post, lightly revised)
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