medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Today (9. May) is the feast day of:
1) Hermas of Rome (d. 1st cent.). H. is one of the residents of the Eternal City addressed by name in Romans 16:14. St. Jerome has a brief entry on him (_De viris illustribus_, 10) in which he says that some think H. the author of the early Christian allegorical treatise _The Shepherd_. Modern scholars tend to be less neutral than Jerome on this point, rejecting our H.'s authorship of this text outright. Prior to its revision of 2001 the Roman Martyrology promoted this dubious identification by including in its entry for H. language drawn from _The Shepherd_.
2) Pachomius the Elder (d. 346). The offspring of a Coptic-speaking pagan family from the vicinity of Egyptian Thebes, P. encountered Christianity during what is said to have been brief, enforced service in the Roman army. After his release he had himself baptized and withdrew to a wilderness near his home where an older hermit instructed him in the faith and in ascetic practice. After a few years of this P. gathered together scattered hermits and founded in about 320 at Tabennîsi in the same general area what is now thought of as the world's first fully developed cenobitic monastery. By the time of P.'s death his community had grown to include nine houses, including two for women (both supervised by an older, experienced monk).
P. has early Lives in Coptic and in Greek; a somewhat later brief Bios was translated into Latin (BHL 6410) by Dionysius Exiguus in the sixth century. By the early fifth century, when St. Jerome translated them into Latin, there existed in both Greek and in Coptic a collection of letters ascribed to P. as well as a collection of administrative rules that went under P.'s name. Early monasteries in the West (notably the one at Lérins) followed these ordinances.
P. as depicted at the outset of a copy of his Vita as translated by Dionysius Exiguus in a twelfth-century _Vitae Patrum_ (Reims, Bibliothèque municipale, ms. 1390, fol. 156v):
http://tinyurl.com/3ak55zj
The page as a whole:
http://tinyurl.com/34jh3ke
P. as depicted in the later twelfth-century mosaics of the cathedral of Santa Maria la Nuova at Monreale:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/32441538@N00/2494347803
P. (center) as depicted in a late twelfth- or early thirteenth-century fresco in the bema at the Palaia Enkleistra ('Old Hermitage') of St. Neophytos near Tala (Paphos prefecture) in the Republic of Cyprus:
http://tinyurl.com/2fy92jx
An English-language account of this site:
http://www.doaks.org/research/byzantine/doaks_eid_2424.html
3) Beatus of Vendôme (d. 5th cent.?). B. (in French: Béat, Bienheuré, Bié) is the at least semi-legendary apostle of Vendôme. He has a brief Vita that exists in several versions (BHL 1064-1066a) and that is said to go back to the middle of the ninth century. According to the version printed in the _AA.SS._ (BHL 1064), B. was sent by St. Peter (to judge from other matter in the text, this probably means no more than "by the pope") to preach in Gaul. There he made many converts, operated healing miracles, lived austerely, and supported himself by manual labor (esp. by weaving reeds into baskets).
While he was assisting the fledgling church at Nantes B. formed the intention of living out the remainder of his days as a solitary. Boatmen of the river Loire brought him welcome information about a suitable cave near Vendôme. B. traveled upriver by boat, expelled a dragon from the aforesaid cave, settled there, lived very austerely, and died there in extreme old age. Monks buried him in his cave, where many afterward found healing and which now is noted for innumerable miracles, bringing health to the infirm, solace to the oppressed, and all sorts of salvation to the faithful. Thus far BHL 1064.
To judge from the number and sources of the Vita's known witnesses, B.'s cult spread widely across northern France in the central Middle Ages. He is said to have been translated to Laon in the ninth century and came to be thought of there as a local saint. The originally tenth(?)-century, now mostly vanished extramural church of Saint-Bienheuré at Vendôme was believed to have been built over B.'s cave. The church was destroyed in 1792 but bits remain, including portions dug into the rock and vault fragments with interesting frescoes. Herewith one view each of the former and the latter, illustrating differences between medieval and modern notions of art:
http://tinyurl.com/27pqs5j
http://tinyurl.com/29qf57g
Other expandable views are here:
http://tinyurl.com/2bdq6e8
B. is the eponym of the locality of Saint-Béat in today's Saint-Gaudens (Haute-Garonne) and the titular of the église Saint-Béat in Épône (Yvelines), first mentioned from the later tenth century though the present structure originates chiefly from the twelfth:
http://secteur.route113.free.fr/epone/epone.htm
http://wikimapia.org/14009300/fr/%C3%89glise-Saint-B%C3%A9at
http://tinyurl.com/27lyq5z
http://tinyurl.com/286vfnr
http://tinyurl.com/2fucgbq
4) Gerontius, venerated at Cagli (d. 501, perhaps). G. is the saint of a monastery near today's Cagli (PU) in the Marche that is thought to have been founded in the seventh or eighth century. He has a legendary Passio of perhaps the tenth century (BHL 3489) that identifies him as a bishop of Ficocles, today's Cervia (RV) in Emilia-Romagna. According to this text, P. was decapitated by enemies when returning from Rome in 501; the monastery arose at the site of his martyrdom. Herewith two views of Cagli's rebuilt former monastery church of San Geronzio:
http://tinyurl.com/rt39p
http://tinyurl.com/mbo9r
5) Adalgar of Bremen (d. 909). A. was a monk of Corvey who in 865 became an assistant to archbishop St. Rimbert (Rembert) of Bremen-Hamburg and who in 888 succeeded him in that see. He dealt with repeated attacks on his diocese by Northmen and, far more successfully, with ongoing attempts by the archdiocese of Köln to assert metropolitan authority over his bishopric. Today is his _dies natalis_. Venerated in German dioceses, A. has yet to grace the pages of the RM.
6) Beatus of Thun (?). B. (also B. of Lungern) is a local saint of the area around Lake Thun in Canton Bern. Although his cult is at least as old as the thirteenth century, he has no Vita prior prior to the wholly legendary one by the Franciscan humanist Daniel Agricola, first printed in 1511. This makes him an Englishman named Suetonius (Agricola probably got the name from Tacitus' _Agricola_) who after his conversion to Christianity by St. Barnabas changed his name to Beatus and who not long afterwards went to Rome where he received from St. Peter himself the task of evangelizing Switzerland. Borrowing from the Vita of the also shadowy St. Beatus of Vendôme (no. 3, above), Agricola has B. effect conversions through his preaching and his miracles, slay a dragon in a cave (the corpse is thrown into Lake Thun), and settle down to a life of prayer and penitence along with his companion Achates (derived, no doubt, from Aeneas' friend of that name in Vergil's _Aeneid_).
B.'s Vita is an obvious confection but his veneration by pilgrims at a cave near today's Beatenberg in the Bernese Oberland is documented from 1231 onward. A perhaps fifteenth-century pilgrim badge found there is shown here (image is expandable; click on the link next to the thumbnail):
http://tinyurl.com/267fge
An illustrated, German-language discussion of the cave (the St. Beatus-Höhlen) and of its history as a tourist attraction:
http://tinyurl.com/64872l
In the fourteenth century B. was celebrated liturgically on 18. October. His feast today is first attested from the fifteenth century. B. has yet to grace the pages of the RM.
Best,
John Dillon
(last year's post lightly revised and with the addition of Beatus of Vendôme)
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