medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture

Today (26. July) is the feast day of:

1) Joachim and Anne (d. 1st cent.). J. and A., the parents of Mary the mother of Jesus, are first attested in the later second-century infancy gospel generally known as the _Protevangelium Jacobi_. One may read about them in three English-language translations here:
http://www.thomasephillips.info/gospelofjames.htm#Infancy
Their cult seems initially to have been limited to Palestine and Syria. In the middle of the sixth century the emperor Justinian I built a church at Constantinople dedicated to A.; this was restored by Justinian II in 705.

In the East J. and A. have been traditionally celebrated on 9. September, with a separate feast of the Dormition of A. occurring on 25. July. The earlier ninth-century Marble Calendar of Naples, notable for its admixture of Eastern and Western feasts, records both of these, with A. sharing 25. July with St. Eupraxia (as she still does in Orthodox churches). In the medieval Latin West it was usually A. alone who was celebrated liturgically and there her cult did not become really widespread until the fourteenth century. In art, on the other hand, J. and A. were often represented together: a fairly early example is the vestment bearing their portraits (and an Annunciation scene) reportedly presented by pope St. Leo III (795-813) to Santa Maria Maggiore.

Here's what is said to be A.'s left foot, preserved at the Skete of St. Anna (a seventeenth-century foundation) on Mount Athos:
http://www.rel.gr/photo/albums/leipsana/Ag_Anna_Arist_Podi.jpg

Sherry Reames' introduction to her TEAMS edition of _Legends of St. Anne, Mother of the Virgin Mary_ is here:
http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/44sr.htm

An expandable, black-and-white image of A.'s seventh(?)-century portrait in Rome's Santa Maria Antiqua is here:
http://www.icon-art.info/masterpiece.php?lng=en&mst_id=1893
An expandable image of an eighth-century portrait of A. from Faras in Lower Nubia, now in the National Museum in Warsaw, is here:
http://tinyurl.com/5kl6d9

Expandable views of scenes by Giotto from the life of J. and A. (1305-1306), Cappella dei Scrovegni (Arena Chapel), Padua, may be reached from the menu at left here:
http://www.wga.hu/tours/giotto/padova/index21.html

A.'s dormition in the July Calendar and the portraits of J. and A. in the September Calendar in the early fourteenth-century (ca. 1320) frescoes in the nave of the church of the Theotokos (a.k.a. the King's Church), Gračanica monastery, at Gračanica in, depending one one's view of the matter, either the Republic of Kosovo or Serbia's province of Kosovo and Metohija:
http://tinyurl.com/lobppr
http://tinyurl.com/kojfqt

J. and A. in the September Calendar in M. in the earlier (second quarter) fourteenth-century frescoes in the narthex of the church of the Holy Ascension at the Visoki Dečani monastery near Peć in, depending on one's view of the matter, either the Republic of Kosovo or Serbia's province of Kosovo and Metohija:
http://tinyurl.com/nffb5x

A. and J. in the fourteenth-century frescoes of the monastery of Sv. Ioan Bogoslov (St. John the Theologian) at Zemen in western Bulgaria:
http://tinyurl.com/6ghcnw
While we're here, a page on the monastery itself:
http://www.bulgarianmonastery.com/zemen_monastery.html
and one, with English-language text commencing a little more than halfway down the page, on its frescoes:
http://www.pravoslavieto.com/manastiri/zemenski/index.htm

Two fourteenth-century wall paintings of A. teaching Mary to read, both in English churches:
http://www.paintedchurch.org/corbysan.htm
http://www.paintedchurch.org/chalfsv.htm
Another version of the same scene, this time from a fourteenth-century English altar frontal now in Paris at the Musée national du Moyen Âge (Musée de Cluny):
http://tinyurl.com/5fc6s8

Here's an expandable view of J. and A. embracing (ca. 1470), by the Master of Joachim and Anne, in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam:
http://tinyurl.com/5k29w6
Here, with A. at left and J. behind her, is an expandable view of a painting (ca. 1490) by Geertgen tot Sint Jans of the Holy Kinship (the extended Marian family), also in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam:
http://tinyurl.com/589vf6

A subtype of Holy Kinship portraiture is the representation either of A. holding Mary holding Jesus or else of A. holding both of them (in German, Anna selbdritt; in Italian, Anna metterza). Some examples:
a) Statue (first attested from 1307; the oblong cavities are thought to have once held reliquaries) in the Nikolaikirche at Stralsund in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern:
http://tinyurl.com/5pmpfe
http://tinyurl.com/6kw2ew
b) Wall painting (fourteenth-century) in the parish church at Velemér in Hungary:
http://tinyurl.com/mxfoa
c) Panel painting (1424 or 1425) by Masaccio (perh. with Masolino da Panicale) in the Uffizi in Florence:
http://tinyurl..com/63ftg5
d) Fresco (ca. 1450), oratorio di San Lorenzo all’Alpe Seccio at Boccioleto (VC) in Piedmont:
http://tinyurl.com/5vpt6a
e) Manuscript illumination (3d quarter of the fifteenth century) by Willem Vrelant, Horae BVM (Free Library of Philadelphia, ms. Widener 5, fol. 13v):
http://tinyurl.com/5ma2el
f) Reliquary statue (1472; silver, partly gilt, partly painted) from Ingolstadt, by the goldsmith Hans Greiff for Anna Hofmann, now in the Musée national du Moyen Âge (Musée de Cluny) in Paris:
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3410/3333169121_29790d3d48_b.jpg
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3611/3334027462_51bb5e429d_o.jpg
g) The central figure in a wooden altar from ca. 1475 in the Annenkapelle of the Annenkirche in Alt Krüssow (Lkr. Prignitz) in Brandenburg:
http://www.altekirchen.de/Bilder/Alt-KruessowAnna.jpg
http://www.altekirchen.de/Bilder/Alt-Kruessow.486x650.jpg
The church and the piece as a whole:
http://www2.hu-berlin.de/sachkultur/Anna/kruessow.htm
h) Fresco (ca. 1485), cappella della Madonna delle Grazie, chiesa di San Pietro Vecchio at Favria (TO) in Piedmont:
http://tinyurl.com/5kktww
The artist responsible for that last example also produced, a little below it and subsequently painted over, this portrait of A. alone:
http://tinyurl.com/56bgfl
i) Wooden statue (late fifteenth-century), Pfarrkirche St. Florian, Funnix (an Ortsteil of Wittmund), Niedersachsen:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ana_sudani/2389383082/sizes/l/
A view of the interior of the church to show the sculpture's approximate size:
http://tinyurl.com/mxf8cc
j) Sculpture (ca. 1490-95) by Tilman Riemenschneider in the Mainfränkisches Museum in Würzburg:
http://www.metmuseum.org/special/tilman/saint_anne.L.htm

Further images of A. will be found here:
http://www.aug.edu/augusta/iconography/anne.html

2) Simeon of Polirone (d. 1016). According to his Vita et Miracula (BHL 7952-7953) by a monk of the abbey of St. Benedict at Polirone near Mantua, seemingly written in the pontificate of Benedict IX (1032-45), S. (in Latin, Simeon Padolironensis) was an Armenian by birth who had lived in the East in a Greek-rite monastery and subsequently in the wilderness as a hermit before going on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, Rome (where his unusual devotional practices, compounded by language difficulties, got him into trouble), Aquitaine (where he visited St. Martin at Tours), Galicia (where he visited St. James at Compostela), and other places before entering the aforementioned abbey where he died and where numerous miracles were reported at his grave.

The abbey had been founded fairly recently (1007) by the comital family of Canossa who continued to be its major patrons throughout the eleventh century. S.'s canonization is said to have been authorized by Benedict VIII (1017-1024) on condition that the reports of miracles were true; Leo XI (1048-1054) permitted the abbey an Elevation of S.'s remains and the dedication of a church to him.

The abbey complex of Polirone, at today's San Benedetto Po (MN) in Lombardy, is extensive. A website devoted to it is here:
http://tinyurl.com/lg9qef
The last five views on this page are of the abbey's Cloister of St. Simeon:
http://tinyurl.com/lox6zx
Another view:
http://static.panoramio.com/photos/original/3902074.jpg
The abbey's Oratory of Saint Mary has a partially preserved and recently restored mid-twelfth-century (1151) mosaic floor shown here:
http://tinyurl.com/p7pm9
Detail views:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/pedetemptim/3040597813/sizes/o/
http://static.panoramio.com/photos/original/4031769.jpg
http://tinyurl.com/n7xa4p
http://tinyurl.com/nlkxjz
http://tinyurl.com/n5vuln

3) Ugo degli Atti (Bl.; d. ca. 1270). U. (in Latin, Ugo de Actis) is also known from his place of birth as Ugo of Serra San Quirico. A scion of the leading comital family from the part of the pre-Appennine uplands of today's Ancona province of the Marche that includes both Serra San Quirico and Sassoferrato, he was the brother of Bl. Giuseppe degli Atti (de Actis; of Serra San Quirico; 25. August). After some study at Bologna, U. entered the nascent Silvestrine Benedictine congregation at its monastery of San Giovanni at Sassoferrato, where he was welcomed by the congregation's founder, St. Silvestro Guzzolini (26. November).

According to his late medieval Vita (BHL 4033b, 4033c), U. was known in his lifetime both for his preaching and for works of charity. He died on this day at Serra San Quirico but his remains were returned to Sassoferrato for burial in his monastery's church of San Giovanni Battista. U. was beatified in 1756. He is co-patron of Serra San Quirico (where, as also among the Silvestrines as a whole, he is celebrated tomorrow, 27. July) and patron "saint" of Sassoferrato, where he now reposes in the originally fifteenth-century church of Santa Maria del Ponte del Piano, whose Early Modern facade and belltower may be seen here just past Sassoferrato's bridge over the Sentino:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/10471154@N02/893775069/

Best,
John Dillon
(last year's post revised)

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