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medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture Today (5. June) is the feast day of: 1) Marcian, Nicander, Apollonius, and companions (?). M., N., A.. et socc. are a group of martyrs from Egypt recorded for today in the (pseudo-)Hieronymian Martyrology, whence their entries, also for today, in the Carolingian martyrologies of Florus, Ado, and Usuard. They have a complex of legendary Passiones forming part of that of the Ten Martyrs of Egypt (BHG 11194, 1194ab; BHL 5260, etc.). These do not agree on the persecution in which the individual saints are said to have suffered; their reliability has been variously assessed. M. and N. _may_ be the saints of these names who in another Passio are reported to have been martyred at Durostorum in Moesia and who in the fourth-century Syriac Martyrology are entered for today. 2) Dorotheus of Tyre (d. 362?). We first hear of D. in the continuation of the Chronicle of George the Synkellos that goes under the name of Theophanes the Confessor. According to this text, put together in the very early ninth century from earlier sources, D. was a learned bishop of Tyre who had been exiled and tortured under Diocletian, who attended the First Council of Nicaea and who then regained his see, who left writings both in Latin and in Greek including a history of bishops of Byzantium and other places, and who at the age of 107 was martyred at Odyssopolis by officers of Julian the Apostate, then engaged in secret persecution of Christians. D. is absent from Eusebius' _Chronicon_ and from the early list of the bishops of Tyre. A fairly widely held scholarly opinion not shared by the editors of the RM is that, as Cyril Mango and Roger Scott put it, "Dorotheos of Tyre does not seem to have ever existed" (Mango and Scott, tr., _The Chronicle of Theophanes Confessor_ [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997], pp. 40-41). There are brief accounts of D. in Greek liturgical manuscripts of the ninth or tenth century onwards and he has an entry in the Synaxary of Constantinople. 3) Eutichius of Como (d. 539). E.'s name is often normalized classically as 'Eutychius'. But his marble tombstone, now preserved in the Civici Musei di Como, shows the common late antique practice of using an 'i' in names of Greek origin where the vowel in Greek had been upsilon. The inscription on this stone, which was found in the 1870s in Como's church of St. Abundius, tells us that E. was a bishop, that he was aged 57 at his death, and that he was laid to rest on the nones of June in the year 539. The liturgical tradition of Como makes E. a native of that city and a man given to solitary prayer. E. was laid to rest among his predecessors the ancient basilica of Sts. Peter and Paul, the predecessor of today's Sant'Abbondio. In the later Middle Ages (legendarily, in the thirteenth century; in fact, perhaps only in the fifteenth century) E. was translated to Como's church of San Giorgio in the neighborhood (medievally, a suburb) where he is said to have been born. A lay confraternity and an adjacent pilgrim hospice were named for him. E. used to repose in a marble sarcophagus of the late thirteenth or fourteenth century whose three historiated panels are illustrated in photographic reproduction atop his entry in the _Bibliotheca Sanctorum_ (vol. 5, cols. 321-22). A partial view heads the non-expandable thumbnails on p. 2 of this six-page, Italian-language account of San Giorgio: http://www.sistemalagodicomo.it/chiese.php?n=C&s=Como&id=408&p=1 And another, depicting E.'s legendary translation to San Giorgio, is the third on this page, which also has views of the modern tomb in which E. (or some of what's left of him) has reposed since 1933: http://www.sistemalagodicomo.it/chiese.php?n=C&s=Como&id=408&p=3 San Giorgio also has a reliquary case housing what is said to be part of the chin of St. Thomas Becket and some bones said to be those of E. Three views follow: http://tinyurl.com/623ecv http://tinyurl.com/64acjh http://tinyurl.com/5vf2gv 4) Dorotheus of Gaza (d. ca. 570). The ascetic writer D. was born in Antioch on the Orontes. An enthusiastic student in his youth, he had an excellent education, after which he became a monk under the Palestinian desert fathers Sts. Barsanuphius and John of Gaza (J. the Prophet). Briefly a hermit, he then founded and directed a monastery of his own. D. composed monastic works in a variety of genres and established a hospital next to his monastery. He was the teacher of St. Dositheus, who died young and whose Bios he wrote (BHG 2117, 2118, 2119; Latin version: BHL 2334). 5) Boniface of Mainz (d. 754). B., whose original name was Wynfreth, was born in Devon. He is sometimes referred to as B. of Crediton (Ian Wood's account of him in the _Oxford Dictionary of National Biography_ adds, "apparently without justification"). A largely successful missionary and eccclesiastical organizer in today's Germany and The Netherlands, he was the first archbishop of what became the see of Mainz. B. and a large body of followers were martyred at Dokkum in today's Dongeradeel in Netherlandic Friesland. In accordance with his wishes he was buried at Fulda, in whose cathedral crypt he now reposes: http://tinyurl.com/5ju79u OK, so that wasn't very medieval. Herewith two views, courtesy of the Bischöfliches Dom- und Diözesanmuseum in Mainz, of what is said to be the oldest (later ninth-century) representation of B.: http://www.bonifatius-route.de/links/priesterstein.jpg http://tinyurl.com/69p9ns Here's B. as depicted in the Sacramentary of Fulda (Göttingen, Universitätsbibliothek, cod. theol. 231; ca. 975), baptizing a convert and, lower register, being martyred: http://tinyurl.com/5bgx3y And here's a portrait of B. (upper register, center) with the saints of Eichstätt in the Pontifical of bishop Gundekar II (1057–1075): http://tinyurl.com/6fq63c Various pages on this site (esp. the home page and the one marked 'Kirche') have views of the Stiftskirche Sankt Bonifatius in Freckenhorst (Kr. Warendorf) in Westphalia, consecrated on this day in 1129: http://www.bonifatius.info/ Two more view (west front; cloister): http://tinyurl.com/5mray3 http://tinyurl.com/6kavcl A later fourteenth-century seated B. (with an opening for a relic) now in the Museum Hameln at Hameln in Niedersachsen: http://tinyurl.com/6lvh5k And in 2004 one could get this B. in marzipan and honey in the diocese of Fulda, which latter was then celebrating the 1250th anniversary of B.'s martyrdom: http://tinyurl.com/6p8xtx 6) Eoban, Adelar, and companions (d. 754). The companions in martyrdom of Boniface of Mainz (see above). E. was the first bishop of Utrecht; in the later Middle Ages A. was considered the first bishop of Erfurt. They have had feasts of their own (sometimes including their companions other than B.) in these dioceses as well as in that of Fulda. E. was the name-saint of the fifteenth-/sixteenth-century Latin poet Helius Eobanus Hessus. Best, John Dillon (Marcian, Nicander, Apollonius, and companions, Eutichius of Como, Dorotheus of Gaza, Boniface of Mainz, and Eoban, Adelar, and companions lightly revised from last year's post) ********************************************************************** 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