 |
 |
medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture Today (29. May) is the feast day of: 1) Conon (Conus) of Iconium and his son (d. early 270s, supposedly). A late antique Greek Passio (BHG 360; there are other versions, BHG 360a and 360b) makes C. and his twelve-year-old son monks at Iconium (today's Konya, in Anatolia) who were martyred under Aurelian. After a brief prologue, this Passio falls into two parts. In the first, C. causes the waters of a flooding river to part, thus permitting people who had been stranded by the flood to return to the other side; the river then floods a large surrounding area and C. orders it to return to its ordinary course. In the second, C. and his son refuse to sacrifice to the Roman gods and are tortured on the order of an official named Domitianus; after a torment of fire fails, D. orders that their hands be smashed with a wooden mallet, whereupon C. and son receive the divine grace of passing immediately into eternal life. A Latin translation of this text survives in several versions (BHL 1912-1913), one of which was edited by Papebroch in the _Acta Sanctorum_ along with the aforementioned Greek text. In it the older saint's name is rendered as Conus. A fuller version of the story (torments included racking) was known in the ninth century to Ado, who summarized it when listing C. and son under today's date. C. and son also found a place in Usuard and in subsequent martyrologies and the like. They were in the RM until its revision of 2001. In Orthodox churches they are now celebrated on 6. March, one day after the feast of Conon the Gardner. By 1079 there was a monastic church at Acerra (in the Terra di Lavoro, ca. 14 km. northeast of Naples) dedicated to a saint Conus. An expanded version of C. and son's Latin Passio, thought by Papebroch to be thirteenth-century or later, was in the early modern period used for an Office of C. and son at Acerra (and perhaps it is still is so used). In this version, C. is said to have destroyed pagan temples and to have converted many pagans; the son, aged twelve when his widowed father began to teach him letters, is at the time of his martyrdom seventeen and a deacon. When an attempt to execute them by fire fails they are sawn to pieces. C. and son are the patron saints of Acerra (NA). Papebroch guessed that their medieval cult there had been associated with a transfer of their relics. But in 1688 Acerra must not have such, as in that year it received an ulna of C. from Rome. Its church of C. and son, rebuilt neoclassically in 1826 after a collapse, contains cult statues of the martyrs that are said to be of the fifteenth century (though their haloes and costumes are clearly more recent): http://www.diocesidiacerra.it/eventi/scuono06/sancuono.jpg http://www.diocesidiacerra.it/eventi/scuono06/scuono06.htm Though probably blackened by age, etc., these are now said to be dark to represent the martyrs' burning and blackening with smoke. As protectors of their little city, Cuono and Conello (as C. and son are called at Acerra) have various modern miracles to their credit. In 1872, when during an eruption of nearby Vesuvius their statues were paraded a wind quickly arose and blew away a threatening ash and ember cloud. Some relate that, during the Allied bombing of Acerra in World War II, C. was seen on the roofs of the houses diverting the bombs from the inhabited area (the parallel with the similarly named Conus of Diano is rather striking). 2) Sisinnius, Martyrius, and Alexander (d. 397). According to their bishop, St. Vigilius of Trent, from whom we have two letters announcing their suffering, Sisinnius, a Cappadocian or a Greek, and the brothers Martyrius and Alexander (nationality unknown) went up into the Val di Non to evangelize the inhabitants, built a church a there, and made converts. After a few years had passed, they refused to permit a member of their congregation to take part in a spring lustration for the fertility of the fields. This enraged the apparently still largely non-Christian locals, some of whom that evening attacked and severely beat S. and who returned with others on the following day and hauled all three off to their deaths in front of an image of the ancient Italian god of agriculture, Saturn. S., M., and A. are known collectively as the Martyrs of the Val di Non (in Italian, "i Martiri Anauniensi"). Successive cathedrals of Trent have housed relics of them since at least the eleventh century. Other of their relics are in Milan's Basilica di San Simpliciano (one of Vigilius' two letters is addressed to St. Simplician, St. Ambrose's successor in the see of Milan; the other, rather fuller, is addressed to the bishop of Constantinople, St. John Chrysostom). In Milanese legend the martyrs are said to have flown in the form of doves from the church of San Simpliciano to Legnano just before the battle there between troops of the Lombard League and those of Friedrich Barbarossa on 29. May 1176 and to have perched on the city's great war cart at throughout the entire affray, guaranteeing victory to the Milanese and to their league-fellows. There have been annual commemorations at San Simpliciano since at least 1393. Herewith a few pages with views of the Basilica dei Martiri at Sanzeno (TN) in the center of the Val di Non, a church built over the remains of its predecessors by prince-bishops of Trent from 1480 until 1552 to commemorate these protomartyrs of the diocese: http://www.comune.sanzeno.tn.it/sacro/basilica.html http://tinyurl.com/37f7p9 http://trentino100.tripod.com/duomo.html and here's a closer view of its fifteenth-century portal: http://trentino100.tripod.com/demoweb/Immagine%20092.jpg 3) Senator of Milan (d. 475?). One of the sainted late antique bishops of Milan, S. has a verse epitaph by St. Ennodius of Pavia (_Carm_. 2. 87) that praises his virtues and his eloquence and that emphasizes his having been a learned exegete of the Old Testament. S.'s _elogium_ in the Milanese breviary of 1539 repeats this matter in simple prose. He succeeded bishop St. Benignus and was buried in Milan's now mostly nineteenth-century church of St. Euphemia. Many presume him to have been the Milanese priest named Senator who accompanied St. Abundantius of Como in 450/51 on a mission to the emperor in Constantinople on behalf of pope St. Leo I that was part of the run-up to the council of Chalcedon. Since Euphemia was also the saint of Chalcedon and patron of the ecumenical council held there, it is further supposed by some that S. was also at Chalcedon, that he brought back to Milan a relic of E., and that he used it to dedicate the church in which he was later buried. 4) Bona of Pisa (d. 1207). An exact contemporary of yesterday's Ubaldesca, B. is another early lay saint from Pisa. According to B.'s Vita (BHL 1389, etc.), she was born in that city's Chinzica quarter; her father was a Pisan merchant and her mother a woman from Corsica (then mostly under Pisan control). When she was three her father, who had gone to the Holy Land, abandoned them permanently for another woman by whom he had children. In her early teens B. undertook a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in order to find him. Though she was unsuccessful in that regard, she found that she rather liked travel. And so, while spending most of her life as a recluse at Pisa under the spiritual direction of the Augustinian Canons of the church of St. Martin in Chinzica, she undertook nine pilgrimages to Santiago de Compostela and made visits to the tombs of the Apostles at Rome. A trip to the sanctuary of St. Michael on the Gargano Peninsula brought B. to Apulia. The Benedictine congregration founded by St. John of Matera had its headquarters at the nearby monastery of Santa Maria di Pulsano; B. was not only connected with this congregation's monastery of St. Michael outside of Pisa but encouraged the establishment of a new Pulsanese house near Pisa dedicated to the saint of Compostela, James the Greater. B. was buried at San Martino in Pisa, where she remains today (her body has been exhumed at least three times). Both the Augustinians and the Pulsanese Benedictines furthered her cult (the letters A and B used to designate variants of her Vita signify 'Augustinian' and 'Benedictine', respectively). By the late twelfth century Pisa had a lay confraternity dedicated to her. She was canonized in 1920. In 1962 John XXIII declared her the patron of Italian travel hostesses. Pisa's church of San Martino was rebuilt in 1587 but still shows some aspects of its later medieval self (the post-Bona church erected in 1331). An illustrated, Italian-language account is here: http://www.stilepisano.it/immagini/Pisa_Chiesa_di_San_Martino.htm Here's a view of B.'s effigy reliquary there: http://tinyurl.com/ywjwdy 5) Gherardesca (Bl.; d. ca. 1270). According to her Vita (BHL 3421) by her confessor, Bl. Gregory of Pisa, G. ran away from her seemingly well-to-do Pisan home at the age of seven and attempted to join a convent. When she was older she married to please her family. Unable to bear children, B. persuaded her husband to enter the Camaldolese monastery of San Savino at Pisa (of which a relative was abbot) and had herself admitted to the same community as a recluse. There she had visions which she communicated to Gregory and which he wrote up very vividly in his Vita of her. The Camaldolese have traditionally referred to B. as Saint; she's in the RM as a Beata. An English translation of B.'s Vita is here: http://monasticmatrix.usc.edu/cartularium/article.php?textId=525 and here's Stile Pisano's page on the abbey of San Savino: http://www.stilepisano.it/immagini2/index.htm Best, John Dillon (last year's post lightly revised) ********************************************************************** 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