medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Today (23. May) is the feast day of:
1) Ephebus (d. early 4th cent.?). According to the late eighth- or early ninth-century first part of the _Chronicon episcoporum sanctae Neapolitanae ecclesiae_, today's less well known saint of the Regno (also Ephebius, Euphebius) was the eighth bishop of Naples, 'beautiful in body, more beautiful in mind' (_pulcher corpore, pulchrior mente_). _Ephebus_, sometimes given in its pronunciation spelling _Ephevus_, is the form of E.'s name regularly transmitted in our earliest sources. Underlying the chronicler's _mot_ about E.'s exterior and interior beauty is the common association in Latin of the Greek loan-word _ephebus_ ('young man') with male prettiness. _Euphebius_ is E.'s standard late medieval and early modern name form.
The earlier ninth-century Marble Calendar of Naples gives today as the feast of E.'s deposition. E. was buried in a catacomb outside the city. His remains are said later to have been translated to the Stefania (the episcopal basilica preceding today's cathedral). The late ninth- to eleventh-century _Libellus de miraculis S. Ephebi_ (BHL 2705) relates three stories about E.'s post-mortem tutelary presence at a church in his honor outside the walls, presumably located above E.'s catacomb. The first of these, which is prosimetric (in prose with embedded verse), relates how E. blinded members of a Muslim raiding party in order to protect both his church and a priest who was saying mass within it. Upon the leaving the church the priest passed safely through the raiders, smiting a number of them dead with a mere touch of E.'s pastoral staff (which he had taken with him from the church) and causing the others to flee in terror at the sight of their falling comrades.
By the sixteenth century E. had become one of Naples' seven major patrons. In that century (but not earlier, as far as one can tell) relics said to be those of E. and of his two immediate successors, saints Fortunatus and Maximus, were said to repose beneath the extramural church of Sant'Eufebio (now S. Eframo Vecchio), located between today's Botanical Garden and the Tangenziale di Napoli (the A56). In 1589 a formal Inventio of these remains was followed by their translation to the church's high altar, where they remain today. An adjacent catacomb was (re-)discovered in 1931 and was promptly designated as the Catacomba di Sant'Eufebio.
2) Desiderius of Langres (d. prob. ca. 356). D. (in French, Didier and Désiré), bishop of what is now Langres (Haute-Marne), is named by St. Athanasius of Alexandria as one of the subscribers to the Acts of the Council of Serdica/Sardica (343). He is said to have been his city's third bishop. According to his early seventh-century Passio (BHL 2145) by Warnaharius of Langres, when his city was attacked by Germanic marauders (W. calls them Vandals), D. left the safety of the walls to admonish the enemy to desist lest divine punishment be visited upon them. Captured and brought before the barbarian chief, he offered his life in return for sparing the city. In W.'s account, the enemy leader had D. decapitated and then took Langres, sacked it, and slew all its Christians.
In the earliest witness of the probably early seventh-century (pseudo-)Hieronymian Martyrology D. is entered under 11. February. Ninth-century and later versions enter him under today, as does also Usuard. Legend made D. both a cephalophore and a native of a small town near Genoa, in whose former republic he has been widely celebrated from at least the eleventh century onwards.
Two views of the chapelle Saint-Didier at Langres' now deconsecrated, originally twelfth-century ex-église Saint-Didier:
http://tinyurl.com/2qvhvn
http://tinyurl.com/33tqbq
The building houses the extensive antiquities collection of the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire de Langres.
The originally twelfth-/thirteenth-century church of Autrey lès Gray (Haute-Saône)
http://la-haute-saone.com/images/eglise_autrey-1427.jpg
preserves this fifteenth-century polychrome statue of D. (the village's patron saint):
http://la-haute-saone.com/images/st_didier_autrey-ebde.jpg
Scenes illustrating D.'s Passio as depicted in a later fifteenth-century copy (1463) of Vincent of Beauvais' _Speculum historiale_ in its French-language version by Jean de Vignay (Paris, BnF, ms. Français 51, fol. 328v):
http://tinyurl.com/3xhzoqg
D. enthroned as depicted in a later fifteenth-century (after 1475) Book of Hours for the Use of Langres (Langres, Bibliothèque municipale, ms. 4, fol. 150r):
http://tinyurl.com/2568nk8
3a) Spes, abbot near Nursia (d. earlier 6th cent.).
3b) Eutychius and Florentius, abbot and monk near Nursia (d. earlier 6th cent.). S., E., and F. are saints of Pope St. Gregory the Great's _Dialogues_: S. at 4. 10 and E. and F. at 3. 15. Both S. and E. were heads of small monasteries in the vicinity of Nursia (today's Norcia in Umbria). S. endured blindness cheerfully for forty years; on his death, his soul was seen to depart in the form of a dove. E. and his friend F. were a pair of monks who shared an oratory. E. was an extrovert who by his exhortations converted many souls to God and who was called to direct a nearby monastery. The introverted F. remained behind. Some of E.'s monks killed a tame bear who was F.'s servant and faithful companion. E. could not console his friend, who called down divine vengeance upon the evil-doers and for the remainder of his life regretted having done so.
By the early tenth century there was a monastery some eighteen kilometers distant from Nursia/Norcia that was named for E. Today's abbazia di Sant'Eutizio (situated in the Val Castoriana near Preci [PG] in Umbria), it flourished from the tenth century into the thirteenth and considered itself -- as it does today -- to be both the institution founded by St. Spes and the one directed by E. in the story summarized above. It has what are said to be the remains of both S. and E., housed in a splendid Renaissance tomb (1514); these relics were officially recognized in 1594.
Some views of the abbazia di Sant'Eutizio:
http://www.bellaumbria.net/Preci/abbazia_preci.jpg
http://tinyurl.com/22kv4cy
http://tinyurl.com/23j3lss
http://tinyurl.com/2dtkmd5
http://tinyurl.com/24z26pf
http://tinyurl.com/26lkuxp
http://tinyurl.com/2ex9gal
http://www.lamiaumbria.it/photovisor/visore-foto.asp?pag=284
This illustrated, English-language blog entry on the abbey has two views of the tomb with the putative remains of S. and E.:
http://tinyurl.com/234vsme
Many of the products of the abbey's scriptorium were given to St. Philip Neri and are now in Rome's Biblioteca Vallicelliana, though the one containing the miniature shown here is at Montecassino (cod. 117):
http://tinyurl.com/2bhef85
Not far away, at Campi Vecchio in Norcia's _frazione_ of Campi, the originally fourteenth-century chiesa di San Salvatore (said to be a rebuilding of a church attested from 1115) was a dependency of Sant'Eutizio until 1493. For reasons that are not clear, Spes is sometimes referred to as "of Campi". Herewith some views of this church, whose right-hand side and present peak represent a fifteenth-century expansion:
http://tinyurl.com/2wbrmse
http://www.lebontadelparco.com/640/sansalvatore_campi.JPG
http://tinyurl.com/2u2trqk
4) Honoratus of Subiaco (d. late 6th cent.). Pope St. Gregory the Great (_Dialogues_, 2, prol. and ch. 15) names H. as one of his oral sources for the life of St. Benedict of Nursia and Montecassino and says in the first of those passages that O. is now (i.e. early 590s) the head of the monastic cell where Benedict previously had lived. It's assumed that Subiaco is meant; of the several monasteries there the one in question is usually thought to have been the one that Benedict dedicated to St. Clement and that later was re-dedicated to Sts. Cosmas and Damian (the site is now occupied by the monastery of Santa Scholastica). Tradition at Subiaco at least as old as the eleventh century made H. the recipient of rich gifts from pope St. Gregory and the builder of the church of St. Cosmas and Damian. H. has been one of Subiaco's local saints since at least the early twelfth century.
5) Syagrius of Nice (d. 787). According to his brief, perhaps tenth-century legendary Vita BHL 7696, S. (also Siacrius, Siagrius; in French, Siagre and Syagre) was a young nephew of Charlemagne who accompanied that monarch on his successful campaign to extend both his control and Christianity to Cimiez and Nice, who at Charlemagne's direction then founded Cimiez' monastery dedicated to St. Pontius (in French, St. Pons), who was abbot of that house when at the age of thirty-three he was made bishop of Nice in 777 in the fifth year of the pontificate of Hadrian I, who ruled as bishop for ten years, who died on this day, and who was buried at the aforesaid monastery.
Apart from the date of S.'s election, the length of his episcopate, and a connection of some sort -- perhaps only posthumous -- between S. and the monastery, none of this is even plausible. The Vita, which was published in 1613 from a now lost manuscript said to have belonged to the monastery, also ascribes to S. in his lifetime various healing miracles. Though this has been taken as evidence of an immediate cult, it could just as easily be a later projection on the part of the monastery that had S.'s body.
Cimiez (now only a _quartier_ of Nice) was the ancient Cemenelum, an important town on the Via Aurelia's extension to Arles at a time when Nice (Nikaia, Nicaea) was a smaller dependency of Marseille. Its late antique diocese was merged with that of Nice in the 460s and its former cathedral is said to have become property of the monastery of St. Pontius in the eleventh century. The date of the monastery's founding is unknown (its earliest charter dates from 999) but archeological investigation at the much rebuilt former monastery church, now the église Notre-Dame de l'Assomption, has revealed fragments of a Carolingian-period chancel. Charlemagne's variously reported exploits at Cimiez and Nice are the stuff of legend.
The excavated portions of Roman Cemenelum include, built into the West (or Women's) Baths, the remains of a fifth-century basilican church and of an adjacent baptistery. In the aerial view shown here, the West Baths complex is at lower left (the red building behind it is the Musée Matisse) and the choir of the basilica is toward the complex's right end:
http://tinyurl.com/6o96fe
A view of the remains of the baptistery:
http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/ZRPuk4YJ1aNmVjKqi3fT_g
A reconstruction of the baptistery:
http://tinyurl.com/62pjh5
6) Guibertus of Gembloux (d. 962). We know about the monastic founder G. from the traditions of the former abbey of Gembloux in today's Brabant wallon and especially from G.'s Vita (BHL 8882) by Sigebert of Gembloux (d. 1112) in his _Gesta abbatum Gemblacensium_. According to Sigebert (who provides credible names for G.'s parents and for one set of grandparents), G. was a Lotharingian noble who after blameless military service founded with the aid of his grandmother Gisla the monastery of Gemblacum on land held from the emperor, put his friend Herluin (Erluin) in charge, and then went off to serve as a monk at Gorze.
Relatives of G. (and Sigebert is at pains at the beginning of the Vita to explain that G.'s mother had second, third, and fourth marriages after the one that produced G. and that from these she had numerous offspring) forced him and Herluin to defend the foundation before the emperor, who in turn confirmed his act and granted the monastery various privileges (this will have been Otto I, who in fact was not yet emperor). G. returned to Gorze, whence he later served as a missionary among Hungarians who had remained in Lotharingia after their invasion of 954 and where he died on this day. His body was brought back to Gembloux over the objections of Gorze. Thus far the Vita. G. was accorded an Elevatio at Gembloux in 1099 and was canonized papally in 1211.
Best,
John Dillon
(last year's post revised and with the addition of Syagrius of Nice)
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