medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Today (7. November) is the feast day of:
1) Amarandus (?). All we know about A. (also Amaranthus) comes from St. Gregory of Tours, who relates in the _In gloria martyrum_ (56, 57) that he was a martyr whose tomb had been found in an uninhabited location at Albi, that his cult had been renewed there (_non sine miraculis_), and that the exiled St. Eugenius of Carthage (d. 505), who had a devotion to A., had been laid to rest in his crypt.
Since at least the twelfth century a church of St. Alban at today's Vieux (Tarn) claimed that it had been founded by E. and that it held both his relics and those of A. In 1494 the bishop of Albi translated these saints' putative remains (and those of three others) from the church there to his cathedral. Two illustrated pages on that church's earlier sixteenth-century replacement, the église Saint-Eugène of Vieux:
http://tinyurl.com/6qny47
http://catholique-tarn.cef.fr/spip.php?article1102
2) Prosdocimus of Padua (?). P. is an early bishop of Padua venerated there and elsewhere in the Veneto since at least the fifth or sixth century, when his image (later detached) bearing the legend SCS PROSDOCIMVS EPS ET CONFESS ('Holy Prosdocimus, bishop and confessor') was carved on a sarcophagus, this part of which was discovered in 1957 in his tomb in Padua's church of Santa Giustina. An early eleventh-century Vita (BHL 6961a) makes him the evangelist of Padua, sent by St. Peter to the upper Adriatic region along with Sts. Mark the Evangelist (Aquileia) and Apollinaris (Ravenna). According to the same legendary account, P. was still alive when St. Justina (whose Passio he is in this Vita said to have written and whose church at Padua he is said to have consecrated) was martyred under Maximian (so ca. 304, supposedly). In this context, it is interesting to read on a page from Padua's Basilica del Santo (i.e. of St. Anthony of Padua)
http://www.basilicadelsanto.org/ing/visita/storia.asp
that "[P.'s] old age has been confirmed by the recent recognition of his bones that rest in the Basilica of St. Giustina."
Whereas P. is represented on the sarcophagus fragment as a youngish, beardless man:
http://www.abbaziasantagiustina.org/images/sp5.jpg
(there's a much larger reproduction of the entire relief in the _Bibliotheca Sanctorum_, vol. 10, cols. 1185-86), in later practice he is customarily shown as old. See, for example, his representation on this Paduan coin from the years 1345-1350:
http://www.numismaticainternazionale.com/photo/ze085.jpg
or this detail of his statue (later 1440s; by someone working with Donatello) at the high altar of Padua's Basilica del Santo:
http://www.basilicadelsanto.org/gfx/visita/sprosdocimo_bronzi.jpg
or this panel of Andrea Mantegna's St. Luke Polyptych (1453-54), formerly in Padua's Santa Giustina and now in the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan::
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Andrea_Mantegna_018.jpg
The sarcophagus fragment is now mounted on the wall above P.'s sixteenth-century tomb in the originally late antique Shrine (_sacello_) of St. Mary (sometimes called "of St. Prosdocimus") in Santa Giustina. There is an extensive account of this part of the church (resystematized in the 1560s) in Ireneo Daniele, _San Prosdocimo vescovo di Padova nella legenda, nel culto, nella storia_ (Padova: Istituto per la storia ecclesiastica padovana, 1987), pp. 81-153 (plus two plates between pp. 80 and 81). Its late antique aspects are also discussed in Gillian Mackie, _Early Christian Chapels in the West: Decoration, Function, and Patronage_ (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003). For some expandable views, see:
http://tinyurl.com/aslw8
BHL 6961 (a preface) and 6961a are edited by Daniele, _San Prosdocimo vescovo..._, pp. 235-48.
3) Herculanus of Perugia (d. ca. 547). According to St. Gregory the Great (_Dialogi_, 3. 13), H. (in Italian, Erolano) was a monk who had become bishop of Perugia, who led resistance to a Gothic siege, and whom the Gothic king Totila had flayed and then decapitated. The saint's dismembered body was cast away outside the city but pious hands reassembled it and buried it. When some days later it became possible to bring H.'s body into Perugia and his temporary grave was opened, it was found that his head had become re-attached to the trunk and that there were no signs of abuse on any part of his body. Thus far Gregory's miracle account.
Perugia's originally late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century chiesa di Sant'Ercolano (1297-1326; upper portion removed in the sixteenth century) occupies a site traditionally believed to have been that of H.'s execution. Some views:
http://tinyurl.com/6bwdcp
http://tinyurl.com/56cvtg
http://tinyurl.com/5os2x8
Benedetto Bonfigli's Totila's Assault on the City and the Finding of Herculanus' Incorrupt Body, a mural painting in Perugia's cappella dei Priori (now part of Galleria Nazionale dell'Umbria, which latter is housed in the Palazzo dei Priori), shows this church as it appeared in the later fifteenth century. An expandable view is here:
http://tinyurl.com/5r4lll
An illustrated, English-language account of the church:
http://www.ktucitywalks.co.uk/217.html
H. in a fourteenth-century panel painting in the Galleria Nazionale dell'Umbria:
http://tinyurl.com/6xbn4n
H. on a fifteenth-century coin of Perugia:
http://tinyurl.com/6aw43c
H. at far left in a painting by Perugino, now in the Musei Vaticani, of the Madonna and Child with Perugia's patron saints (1495-1496; H., Lawrence, Louis of Toulouse, Constantius of Perugia):
http://tinyurl.com/5r4wvx
H. at left in a later painting (1517) by Perugino of much the same subject (but the Virgin is not enthroned and Sts. Lawrence and Louis of Toulouse are absent), now in the Galleria Nazionale dell'Umbria:
http://tinyurl.com/6hxweu
4) Cyngar (d. early 8th cent.?). C. (also Cungar, Congar; in Latin, Cungarus) is the saint of Congresbury (Somerset), recorded from the early eleventh century onward. He has a legendary eleventh or twelfth-century Vita (BHL 2013) that makes him the son of an emperor of Constantinople who establishes an oratory at Congresbury, moves on to Wales, and ultimately is buried at Congresbury. In late medieval Somerset he was celebrated on 27. November. In late medieval Wales, where his cult (or, perhaps, that of a homonym conflated with him both in the Vita and in the RM) was widespread, he was celebrated today.
Two illustrated pages on the later medieval church of (St Cynfarch and) St Cyngar in Hope (Flints):
http://tinyurl.com/554ymu
http://tinyurl.com/6329fw
5) Willibrord (d. 739). Most of what we know of W. comes from his Vita by Alcuin (different forms: BHL 8935-8939), from a brief account in St. Bede's _Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum_ (5. 10-11), and from an even briefer biographical note in the so-called Calendar of St. Willibrord (Paris lat. 10837). A scion of Northumbrian aristocracy, he entered religion as a monk of Ripon and later spent a dozen years in Ireland at Rath Melsigi before becoming a missionary bishop (ordained by pope St. Sergius I in 695) on the European continent. W.'s first mission was among the Frisians, with his see at Utrecht; later he settled at the monastery he founded at Echternach in Luxembourg.
W. died at Echternach. When in 1797 the abbey was secularized his relics were taken from its church to the town's parish church of St. Peter and Paul. In 1906 they were brought back to the by then rebuilt abbey church. In 1939, during the festivities for the twelfth centenary of W.'s death, they were placed in a newly built confessio in the church (which latter has been rebuilt again after having been badly damaged in World War II). He is Luxembourg's patron saint and a patron saint of The Netherlands.
Here's a view of W.'s present resting place at Echternach:
http://tinyurl.com/555ehl
6) Lazarus the Galesiote (d. 1053). Our principal source for this holy man of Greek-speaking Asia Minor is a closely posthumous Bios by his disciple, Gregory the Cellarer (BHG 981). According to this account, L. was born in the vicinity of Magnesia on the Maeander, was given the baptismal name Leo, had a clerical and monastic education, and went on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, stopping off _en route_ for a period of some years at a monastery at Attalia (tonday's Antalya in southwestern Turkey), where he made his profession and took the name Lazarus.
Still according to Gregory's Bios of him, L. arrived in Jerusalem in what will have been the early 990s and stayed until a climate of anti-Christian oppression (symbolized by the destruction of the church of the Holy Sepulchre in 1009) forced him to leave. After a journey to holy sites in Byzantine Syria and Pontus, L. returned to Asia Minor, where he settled at an hermitage in the vicinity of Ephesus, soon became a stylite, and attracted disciples. Too much attention caused the deeply humble L. to remove to a cave on nearby Mount Galesion, to defy an order from the bishop of Ephesus to leave the mountain, and to begin what would be a series of attraction of monastic disciples and moves to more remote places on the mountain, where his followers in turn built a succession of towers for him. L. was eighty-six when he died and a widely admired ascete. Thus far this Bios.
Best,
John Dillon
(last year's post lightly revised and with the addition of Lazarus the Galesiote)
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