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medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture Today (9. May) is the feast day of: 1) Pachomius the Elder (d. 346). The offspring of a Coptic-speaking pagan family from the vicinity of Thebes, P. encountered Christianity during what is said to have been brief, enforced service in the Roman army. After his release he had himself baptized and withdrew to a wilderness near his home where an older hermit instructed him in the faith and in ascetic practice. After a few years of this P. gathered together scattered hermits and founded in about 320 at Tabennîsi in the same general area what became known as the world's first fully developed cenobitic monastery. By the time of P.'s death his community had grown to include nine houses, including two for women (both supervised by an older, experienced monk). P. has early Lives in Coptic and in Greek; a somewhat later brief Bios was in the sixth century translated into Latin (BHL 6410) by Dionysius Exiguus. By the early fifth century, when St. Jerome translated them into Latin, there existed in both Greek and in Coptic a collection of letters ascribed to P. as well as a collection of administrative rules that went under P.'s name. Early monasteries in the West (notably the one at Lérins) followed these ordinances. 2) Gerontius, venerated at Calvi (d. 501, perhaps). G. is the saint of a monastery near today's Cagli (PU) in the Marche that is thought to have been founded in the seventh or eighth century. He has a legendary Passio of perhaps the tenth century (BHL 3489) that identifies him as a bishop of Ficocles, today's Cervia (RV) in Emilia-Romagna. According to this text, P. was decapitated by enemies when returning from Rome in 501; the monastery arose at the site of his martyrdom. Herewith two views of Cagli's rebuilt former monastery church of San Geronzio: http://tinyurl.com/rt39p http://tinyurl.com/mbo9r 3) Adalgar of Bremen (d. 909). A. was a monk of Corvey who in 865 became an assistant to archbishop St. Rimbert (Rembert) of Bremen-Hamburg and who in 888 succeeded him in that see. He dealt with repeated attacks on his diocese by Northmen and, far more successfully, with ongoing attempts by the archdiocese of Köln to assert metropolitan authority over his bishopric. Today is his _dies natalis_. 4) Beatus of Thun (??). B. is a local saint of the area around Lake Thun in Canton Bern. Although his cult is at least as old as the thirteenth century, he has no Vita prior prior to the wholly legendary one by the Franciscan humanist Daniel Agricola, first printed in 1511. This makes him an Englishman named Suetonius (Agricola probably got the name from Tacitus' _Agricola_) who after his conversion to Christianity by St. Barnabas changed his name to Beatus and who not long afterwards went to Rome where he received from St. Peter himself the task of evangelizing Switzerland. Borrowing from the Vita of the also shadowy St. Beatus of Vendôme (BHL 1064-66), Agricola has B. effect conversions through his preaching and his miracles, slay a dragon in a cave (the corpse is thrown into Lake Thun), and settle down to a life of prayer and penitence along with his companion Achates (derived, no doubt, from Aeneas' friend of that name in Vergil's _Aeneid_). B.'s Vita is an obvious confection but his veneration by pilgrims at a cave near today's Beatenberg in the Bernese Oberland is documented from 1231 onward. A perhaps fifteenth-century pilgrim badge found there is shown here (image is expandable): http://tinyurl.com/267fge A German-language discussion with views of the cave (the St. Beatus-Höhlen, a tourist attraction) and depictions of B. is here: http://www.lochstein.de/hoehlen/Ch/beatus/beatus.htm Best, John Dillon ********************************************************************** To join the list, send the message: join medieval-religion YOUR NAME to: [log in to unmask] To send a message to the list, address it to: [log in to unmask] To leave the list, send the message: leave medieval-religion to: [log in to unmask] In order to report problems or to contact the list's owners, write to: [log in to unmask] For further information, visit our web site: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/medieval-religion.html