medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Today (21. March) is the feast day of:
1) Beryllus of Catania (??). B. is the traditionally recognized protobishop of Catania. His first surviving mention comes in the eighth-century, romance-like Bios of St. Pancras of Taormina (BHG 1410), which rather unbelievably has him sent as an evangelist by St. Peter himself. If B. really did exist, a third-century date seems more probable. But I have not seen Maria Stelladoro, "S. Berillo e l'apostolicità della chiesa di Catania", _Studi sull'Oriente Cristiano. Accademia Angelica-Costantiniana di Lettere, Arti e Scienze_ 5, no. 1 (2001), 133-52.
B. is a secondary patron of the Archdiocese of Catania, which latter celebrates him liturgically today.
2) Serapion of Thmuis (d. shortly after 362). S. was a celebrated bishop of Thmuis in Lower Egypt, today's Tell-et-Tmai. He gets a brief chapter (no. 99) in St. Jerome's _De viris illustribus_, where one learns about his authorship of treatises and letters, and a notice in Sozomen's _Historia Ecclesiastica_ (3. 14. 42), where he is said to have led a delegation of Egyptian bishops to Constans II on behalf of St. Athanasius of Alexandria. His commemoration today is a result of Baronio's conflation of him with an Alexandrian martyr of this name listed for this day in the (pseudo-)Hieronymian Martyrology and in those of Florus, Ado, and Usuard.
3) Nicholas of Flüe (d. 1487). N., who was canonized in 1947, is the patron saint of the Helvetic Confederation (perhaps better known to some as Switzerland). A well-to-do farmer and local official in Unterwalden, he farmed in today's municipality of Flüeli near Sachseln in canton Obwalden. When N. was fifty he experienced a vision that led him to become a contemplative. Leaving his pious wife Dorothea, who is said to have supported N. in his decision, and their ten children, N. set off for Straßburg/Strasbourg to hook up with the Friends of God but, prompted by a vision confirming previous advice that as a Swiss he would be unwelcome there, returned to Flüeli where he established himself as a hermit. After a year, the locals built him a chapel. N. now ate very little, experienced many visions, and became widely known as a holy man. His advice to the Diet of Stans in 1481 is supposed to have prevented the Confederation from dissolving through civil war.
In around 1487 a book of N.'s meditations, ascribed to an illiterate Bruder Klaus ('Brother Nick'), appeared in Augsburg. This book, commonly known from the designation of its learned reporter/editor as the Pilgertraktat ('Pilgrim Treatise'), contains a woodcut imagistically representing the topics treated in the book's initial section:
http://www.nvf.ch/imag/medipilg_gr.jpg
What is thought to be an earlier depiction (ca. 1480/81) of the same scheme is the painted cloth known as the Sachsler Meditationsbild:
http://www.nvf.ch/imag/medibild_gr.jpg
That printing of ca. 1487 also presents the woodcut portrait of N. shown here:
http://www.nvf.ch/brunnenvision.asp
The site of N.'s hermitage and related buildings at Flüeli-Ranft is a major pilgrimage venue. One can visit N.'s rebuilt enclosure:
http://www.misterioso.ch/varia/FLUELIRANFT/niklvoflueseite4.html
and a couple of early modern chapels, of which the upper one, to which N.'s enclosure is attached, represents N.'s own early chapel:
http://tinyurl.com/2bg2s9
http://tinyurl.com/yr9ut4
http://www.misterioso.ch/varia/FLUELIRANFT/niklvoflueseite3.html
whereas the apse of the lower one actually looks as though it might have been built in the sixteenth century:
http://tinyurl.com/2avp4s
http://tinyurl.com/2hveu6
In the nearby village one may visit a house in which N. is said to have been born and another said to be the one in which he lived with his family before becoming a hermit:
http://www.misterioso.ch/varia/FLUELIRANFT/niklvoflueseite2.html
In Swiss churches, N. is celebrated liturgically on 25. September (his patronalia). Today is his _dies natalis_.
Best,
John Dillon
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