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Angelina of Marsciano (blessed) (d. 1435) was born near Orvieto to the count and countess of Marsciano. She married at age 15; when her husband died two years later she dedicated the rest of her life to God as a Franciscan tertiary. She and some female companions actually traveled around preaching repentance and virginity; she was soon arrested and charged with sorcery and heresy - the king of Naples dismissed the charges, but exiled her as a trouble-maker. Fortunately, a vision told her to found a tertiary convent in Foligno, where she became superior. This is the first of that odd phenomenon, enclosed convents of tertiaries. Angelina founded 11 more before her death.
Arbogast (d. 6th century?) is a poorly documented early medieval bishop of Strasbourg/Straßburg who is credited with building that city's first cathedral and with founding the monastery later named for him there. His Vita attributed to Strasbourg's tenth-century bishop Udo IV makes him a noble from Aquitaine who became a hermit in the forest of Haguenau and whose subsequent ecclesiastical prominence was aided by the respect he had garnered from king Dagobert I. According to it, he was forced by the Frankish king to become bishop of Strassburg, in which office he remained humble to the point of ordering that he be buried in the criminals' graveyard (a church was later built over his grave). One day as the king's son, Sigebert, then a boy, was out boar-hunting, his horse threw the lad, and drew him clinging to
the rein some way, seemingly dead. He was taken up insensible from contusion of the brain. The bishop hurried to the palace, wept and prayed all night, and in the morning the boy opened his eyes, and gradually recovered. The king, attributing this restoration to the prayers of the bishop, gave him the town and lordship of Ruffeih, near Colmar.
The legendary twelfth-century Vita s. Florentii (Floren of Strasbourg, Arbogast's supposed immediate successor) and the thirteenth-century Richer of Sens, falling back on another hagiographic topos, give Arbogast an insular origin. Arbogast is responsible for the building of the first cathedral in Strassburg, and also founded numerous other churches and monasteries. He is the patron saint of Strasbourg and of several towns in Switzerland that once belonged to its diocese. He was already regarded as a saint in his lifetime. In art he is shown walking on a river.
Barhadbesciabas, deacon and martyr (A.D. 354) In the fifteenth year of the great persecution raised in Persia by king Sapor II, Barhadbesciabas, the zealous deacon of the city of Arbela, was apprehended and put on the rack. The executioner struck seven times at the martyrs neck, and not being able to sever his head from his body, ran his sword into his bowels…
Daniel (5th century bce) The prophet Daniel died in Babylon on this day, according to the Roman Martyrology. In the Middle Ages, Alexandria and then Venice claimed his relics.
Julia, virgin and martyr, and Cladius, martyr (c275) This is a Gallican localization of the legend of Ss. Luceja and Aucejas, given in the June volume of "Lives of the Saints", p. 342. The story is the same exactly in both cases, only the names and localities are altered. According to this legend, Julia was a young woman of Troyes (Gaul), beheaded with serveral companions in the reign of Aurelian.
Oddino Barrotti da Fossano (blessed) (d. 1400) was born in 1324, a native of Fossano in the Piedmont. He became a parish priest and Franciscan tertiary there, then resigned and turned his house into a hospital. Oddino was beatified in 1808.
Praxedes / Praxedis / Praxidis (?) is the saint of a Roman church that is first attested from the fifth century as the titulus Praxedis. A systematizing and very legendary late antique or early medieval Passio makes her a virgin daughter of a Roman senator, St. Pudens and the sister of the likewise virginal St. Pudentiana (both May 19). According to this tale, they were converted by St. Peter. Praxedes assisted imprisoned Christians, gave burial to martyrs' remains during a great persecution under an emperor Antoninus, and, worn-out by her labors, obtained the grace of dying very shortly afterward on July 21 of an undetermined year. She was venerated medievally as a martyr.
Though the seventh-century itineraries for pilgrims to Rome place the remains of Praxedes and her sister in the cemetery of Priscilla on the Via Salaria, the absence of earlier indications of their existence has been thought telling. They are first recorded liturgically from the eighth century. In the early ninth century pope St. Paschal I (817-24; a great devotee of the relics of Roman martyrs) erected on the site of an earlier church dedicated to her today's since largely redecorated chiesa di Santa Prassede. Her cult was suppressed in 1969.
Ruricius (d. c507) was the scion of a noble Gaulish family. He became bishop of Limoges in c. 485 and served until his death. He was an important Gaulish religious figure, and many of his letters have survived. He had married before becoming bishop, but he and his wife decided to live chastely.
Simeon Salos (d. 6th century?) Simeon, whose byname means “Fool”, is attested by a brief account in Evagrius Scholasticus’s late sixth-century Historia Ecclesiastica and by a lengthy Bios written in the mid-seventh century by Leontius, bishop of Neapolis on Cyprus (i.e. modern Limassol). Both sources agree that he was a holy man of Emesa in Syria who had bizarre eating habits, appeared to be quite mad, and revealed hidden truth through his erratic and sometimes scandalous behaviors. Both sources have him predict an earthquake, though Evagrius' one seems to have occurred in 551 while in Leontius the prediction itself does not occur until the reign of Maurice (582-602).
Victor of Marseille (d. c 290) is the legendary principal patron of Marseille, whose originally late fifth-century church dedicated to him later served a monastery often - though unpersuasively in light of archaeological evidence - said to have been founded by St. John Cassian (d. c434). Victor has a late antique Passio, the so-called Gesta symbolica that makes him a soldier martyred for Christ and tortured in various ways. Whereas this text is almost certainly to be interpreted metaphorically (even his name could be a posthumous appellation of a saint whose name in life had been lost), it was taken literally by the author of his sixth-century or later Passio panegyrica. By the sixth century, his tomb was already one of the most popular pilgrim centers of what is now France. He may have been
a noble serving as an officer in the Roman army, who encouraged the people of Marseilles to hold out against Maximian's persecution. He was arrested as a Christian, tortured, imprisoned (converting three guards in the process), tortured again, and finally crushed under a millstone and beheaded. Throughout the Middle Ages Victor was viewed as soldier-saint whose martyrdom involved a violent death.
The abbey that grew up next to Victor's church in the early Middle Ages was destroyed by Muslims in the late ninth or tenth century and was rebuilt starting in the eleventh century, with its church dedicated in 1040. Its famous twelfth-century Parisian homonym was initially one of its dependencies. Pope Urban V (1362-70) expanded the abbey and fortified it.
Zoticus, bishop and martyr (date uncertain) In the Roman Martyrology Baronius inserted "at Cumana in Armenia, S. Zoticus, bishop and martyr, who suffered under Severus" but it is impossible to find his authority.