medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Today (22. June) is the feast day of:
1) Alban of England (d. ca. 304?). First known from continental references of the fifth century (Prosper of Aquitaine, Constantius of Lyon), A. is England's protomartyr. The earliest British account of him to survive is that of Gildas in the sixth century; this was shown in 2001 to have been based on a brief, legendary Passio that neither dates A.'s martyrdom nor locates it in any named town. In that Passio, A. is a pagan who during a persecution takes the place of a hunted Christian and is publicly executed on 21. June at a walled town; accompanying miracles cause the presiding official to halt the persecution and the admiring multitude to become Christians. An interpolation from after 445/46 records a visit by St. Germanus of Auxerre to A.'s martyrial basilica.
Gildas identifies A. as a man of Verulamium (now St Albans); Bede says that A. was martyred there. The Passio's topography corresponds reasonably well with that of late antique Verulamium and of the abbey dedicated to A. that arose outside it. Verulamium's Roman wall has now been dated to the later third century. Later versions of the Passio give today as A.'s _dies natalis_; Ado and Usuard entered him in their martyrologies under this date.
A.'s putative relics were enshrined at his abbey at St Albans from the late eighth century until its suppression in the sixteenth. In the later tenth century relics said to be his were deposited in Köln's church of St. Pantaleon, which has them still (less a bone transferred to St Albans in 2002) in the late twelfth-century reliquary shown here:
http://www.pantaleon-koeln.de/Galerie/Kirche/alban.JPG
http://www.pantaleon-koeln.de/Galerie/Kirche/alban1.JPG
http://www.pantaleon-koeln.de/Galerie/Kirche/alban2.JPG
http://www.pantaleon-koeln.de/Galerie/Kirche/alban3.JPG
http://www.pantaleon-koeln.de/Galerie/Kirche/alban4.JPG
A few views of the Cathedral and Abbey Church of St Alban at St Albans (Herts):
http://www.pbase.com/ohsharonho2/image/24304225
http://tinyurl.com/5sqtlv
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ishida/154612997/
http://tinyurl.com/3bn7ka
The Abbey's "Virtual Visit":
http://www.thegrid.org.uk/learning/re/virtual/cathedral/
One of a fifteenth-century pair of doors made for the abbey:
http://tinyurl.com/ysvpsp
Above and beyond the transfer of relics to Köln, A.'s cult spread fairly widely on the Continent where, though, there was also a cult of St. Alban of Mainz (21. June). Pretty certainly always dedicated to A. of England is the perhaps originally twelfth-century église paroissiale Saint-Alban at Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole (Lozčre) in Languedoc-Roussillon. An illustrated fact sheet on it is here:
http://tinyurl.com/2kct83
Other views:
http://location48.free.fr/lozere_eglise_saint_alban.jpg
http://tinyurl.com/227r4x
http://tinyurl.com/yw4nyd
Ditto for the twelfth-/fifteenth-century église paroissiale Saint-Alban at Bresdon (Charente-Maritime) in Saintonge. There's an English-language description here (scroll down to 'Bresdon'):
http://tinyurl.com/3bc3rz
Views:
http://tinyurl.com/2be7zm
http://tinyurl.com/28zd6r
http://tinyurl.com/2dsfgx
http://tinyurl.com/33oewu
http://tinyurl.com/2uz6rn
Likewise the twelfth-/thirteenth-century église Saint-Albain at Saint-Albain (Saône-et-Loire) in Bourgogne, restored in 1985. Three expandable views are here:
http://tinyurl.com/4ohqx5
An early twentieth-century view providing a better view of the choir:
http://tinyurl.com/427y9l
Other views:
http://tinyurl.com/3t258t
http://tinyurl.com/5vtrnp
A little less certainly initially dedicated to today's A. is the originally late fourteenth-/fifteenth-century Albanikirche in Göttingen:
http://tinyurl.com/2wd2be
http://tinyurl.com/2vvftu
This replaced an earlier church on the site first documented from 1254. A church in this general location (at some remove from the center of the later medieval town) is known from 953 and is said to have been dedicated to an A. since at least the early eleventh century. As Göttingen lies within the Saxon territory evangelized in a missionary enterprise begun by St. Boniface and by others from England, the prevailing belief today is that the A. in question was Alban of England.
2) Eusebius of Samosata (d. 380). E. was a bishop of Samosata (today's much smaller Samsat in Turkey's Adiyman province). He was instrumental in St. Basil's being nominated bishop of Caesarea and supported Nicene orthodoxy against Arians. In 374 the emperor Valens had E. exiled to Thrace. In 378, after the death of Valens at Adrianople, he returned to his diocese in upper Syria. Said to have been struck fatally on the head by a tile thrown by a woman of Arian persuasion, E. is considered a martyr.
3) Nicetas of Remesiana (d. ca. 414). The theologian and liturgist N. (in Romanian, Niceta) became bishop of Remesiana in the Latin-speaking Roman province of Dardania (now Bela Palanka in Serbia's Pirotski okrug) in about 370. The town was situated on an important Roman road running between Sirmium (Beograd) and Constantinople (Istanbul) and its diocese was a suffragan of that of Sardica (Sofia). N. was a friend of St. Paulinus of Nola (no. 4, below), whom he visited at least twice in Italy and who dedicated to him his _Carmina_ 17 and 27. Paulinus praises his apostolic efforts among the Dacians and the Goths.
N.'s manual for catechumens, the _Libelli instructionis_, survives only in part. One of the sections we do have, an explanation of the Nicene Creed, furnishes the earliest known instance of the phrase _communio sanctorum_ ("communion of the saints"). Dom Germain Morin's nineteenth-century conjecture that N. was the author of the hymn _Te Deum laudamus_, further developed by A. E. Burn early in the last century and promoted by F. J. E. Raby in _The Oxford Book of Medieval Latin Verse_ (1959; Raby had earlier denied the ascription), is suspect.
N. is entered for today in the (pseudo-)Hieronymian Martyrology and in the historical martyrologies from Florus of Lyon onward. In some Byzantine synaxaries he is entered under 15. September (the feast day of St. Nicetas the Goth). In Romania, where N. is the patron saint, he is celebrated on 24. June.
4) Paulinus of Nola (d. 431). Meropius Pontius Paulinus, today's well known saint of the Regno, belonged to a wealthy senatorial family of Bordeaux and was educated there by the poet and rhetor Ausonius. Before 381 he was Suffect Consul and in 380/81 he served as governor of Campania. In 385/86 P. was in Vienne, where St. Martin not yet of Tours cured him of an ocular impairment. In 393 he was baptized in Bordeaux together with his friend St. Sulpicius Severus. P. then abandoned his worldly career, married the dedicated Christian Therasia, sold his vast estates in Septimania, and went to live in Spain.
In 395 P. and T. moved to the vicinity of Nola in Campania, where at today's Cimitile (NA) they erected a monastery and basilican church in honor of St. Felix of Nola. From there P. carried on an extensive correspondence that included many Christian luminaries (among them Sts. Augustine of Hippo, Jerome, Martin of Tours, Sulpicius Severus, Honoratus of Lérins, Eucherius of Lyon, and pope St. Anastasius I), composing as well a substantial amount of Christian poetry. P.'s cult was immediate. We have a letter by the priest Uranius describing his passing (BHL 6558).
Cimitile became an important late antique and early medieval pilgrimage center. A brief, illustrated, English-language discussion is here, s.v. "Nola":
http://tinyurl.com/4ddw86
Views of the ancient parts of this site's Basilica di San Felice in Pincis showing some of the surrounding structure as well:
http://www.napoligold.com/coast/napolisud/soggetto/de24067.jpg
http://tinyurl.com/vkvao
http://www.fondazionepremiocimitile.it/img/02.jpg
Other views of San Felice are here:
http://xoomer.virgilio.it/panorami/cimitile.html
Apse and belltower (P. is traditionally credited with having introduced the use of church bells):
http://www.fondazionepremiocimitile.it/img/05.jpg
Better view (old postcard) of the belltower:
http://www.fondazionepremiocimitile.it/img/basilica1.jpg
5) Innocent V (Bl.; d. 1276). The Savoyard Peter of Tarentaise was elected pope on 21. January 1276 and took the name Innocent. The first Dominican pope, he was a theologian by training who had taught at Paris and collaborated with Sts. Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas. His commentary on the Lombard's _Sentences_ exemplifies the thirteenth-century transition from Augustinian to Aristotelian modes of thought. Today is his _dies natalis_.
6) John Fisher (d. 1535). Fisher is one of the best known Catholic martyrs of the English Reformation. A learned humanist, he was from 1502 spiritual director and confessor to Lady Margaret Beaufort (d. 1509; mother of Henry VII), who under his guidance founded St. John's and Christ's Colleges at Cambridge as well as the readerships in Divinity at Oxford and Cambridge that became the Lady Margaret professorships and of which he was the first incumbent of the one at Cambridge. In 1504 F. became bishop of Rochester and chancellor of the university of Cambridge. Shortly before his execution he was made a cardinal. Today is his _dies natalis_. Considered a martyr at the time of his death, F. was beatified in 1886 and canonized in 1935.
An expandable image of Hans Holbein the Younger's portrait sketch of F. is here:
http://tudorhistory.org/people/fisher/
Best,
John Dillon
(Alban of England, Eusebius of Samosata, Paulinus of Nola, Innocent V, and John Fisher revised from earlier posts)
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