medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Today (3. November) is the feast day of:
1) Germanus, Theophilus, and Cyrillus (?). This group of martyrs of Caesarea in Cappadocia is part of the common fund of early saints shared by the later fourth-century Syriac Martyrology and the (pseudo-)Hieronymian Martyrology, in both of which they are entered under today. Nothing further is known about them. Their entry in the (ps.-)HM adds the names of others who may have crept in from other commemorations. Florus of Lyon appears to have had a copy that was particularly messy at this point: he omitted Cyrillus but added a Caesarius (presumably in origin C. of Terracina, celebrated on 1. November) and a Vitalis (presumably in origin the V. of tomorrow's pair of Vitalis and Agricola). St. Ado of Vienne and Usuard retained the group as named by Florus and specified that they suffered in the Decian persecution.
2) Libertinus (?). L. (in English also Libertine) is the very shadowy protobishop of Agrigento. He shares with St. Peregrinus venerated at Agrigento -- but in a very secondary fashion -- a legendary Passio from that city (BHL 4909; thought to be sixth- or seventh-century in origin) that places their martyrdom in the persecution of Valerian. Even less credibly, the late seventh- or early eighth-century Encomium of St. Peter's supposed disciple St. Marcian of Syracuse (BHG 1030) makes Peregrinus the latter worthy's own disciple and thus has both Peregrinus and L. (whom this Encomium names as P.'s companion in martyrdom) put to death in the first century. Modern guesses as to the persecution in which L. may actually have perished range from that of Decius to that of Diocletian.
3) Papulus (?). P. (in French, Papoul) is a poorly documented saint of the vicinity of Toulouse, where his cult is first attested from 817. He has two legendary Vitae, one of the thirteenth century (BHL 6453) and one of the early fourteenth (BHL 6454, 6455; by the famous Dominican Bernard Gui): these make him an Antiochene who follows St. Peter to Rome, is sent with St. Saturninus of Toulouse to evangelize in an area recognizable as the early medieval Visigothic kingdom, who during S.'s apostolate in Spain is martyred by decapitation at a place not very distant from Toulouse, who then partakes of the grand French tradition of cephalophory by picking up his head and putting it down at a nearby fountain. Buried there, he became the saint of an abbey named for him. Thus far P.'s Vitae.
Illustrated French-language and Spanish-language pages on the abbaye de Saint-Papoul at Lauragais near Castelnaudary (Aude), which from 1317 until 1801 was also the seat of a diocese:
http://www.larcenciel-forum.com/spip.php?article789
http://tinyurl.com/ygsvmlt
Other views:
http://tinyurl.com/yzhql9o
http://tinyurl.com/24cj8k4
http://tinyurl.com/yfa7hmc
http://www.flickr.com/photos/evidences/3725782741/sizes/o/
http://static.panoramio.com/photos/original/14858489.jpg
http://i1.trekearth.com/photos/27430/img_0311.jpg
4) Sylvia of Rome (d. ca. 591?). S. was the mother of pope St. Gregory the Great; the very little we know about her comes from his writings. Widowed by 573, when G. turned his parents' house on the Caelian into his monastery of St. Andrew, she spent her final years in semi-monastic retreat in a little house on the Aventine (tradition places it in the vicinity of San Saba).
5) Pirminius (d. 753). According to his early ninth-century Vita prima (BHL 6855), P. (also Pirminus; in German very often Pirmin) was the founder of the abbey of Mittelzell on the Reichenau in the Bodensee / Lake Constance, of the abbey of Murbach in Alsace, and lastly of the abbey of Hornbach in Rheinland-Pfalz, where he died and where the Vita was written, as well as of numerous other monasteries in Francia, Alemannia, and Bavaria; he is also the eponym of today's Pirmasens in Rheinland-Pfalz.
Still according to this Vita, P. was previously bishop of/at a _castellum Meltis_ where he delivered his Sunday sermon _utraque lingua, Romana scilicet et Francorumque_ ("in both tongues, the Roman one and that of the Franks"), a datum that implies a location somewhere in the Romance/Frankish border zone. Thus, though it ordinarily signifies Meaux, Meltis here may refer instead to today's Medelsheim (Lkr. Saarpfalz) in Rheinland-Pfalz, not far from Hornbach. The customary view of P.'s episcopacy today is that he was at that time a _chorepiscopus_ (regional bishop).
P. is considered the apostle of parts of Alsace and today's southwestern Germany. A brief manual for the use of new converts, the _Dicta abbatis Pirminii de singulis libris canonicis scarapsus_, still widely attributed to P., is the earliest witness of the Apostles' Creed as it is known today.
To judge from said Vita P.'s cult at Hornbach began shortly after his death. His feast on this day at Reichenau is first attested from the early ninth century. Here's P. (lower left) depicted as Reichenau's founder in a late tenth-century manuscript from that abbey (Karlsruhe, Badische Landesbibliothek, Cod. Aug. perg. 205, fol. 72r):
http://tinyurl.com/2egke4f
Pilgrimage to P.'s tomb at Hornbach ceased with that abbey's dissolution in 1558. Hornbach's last abbot brought P.'s relics to Speyer. From there they went on to Innsbruck in 1587 (_aliter_, 1576). They now repose there in a modern reliquary in Innsbruck's Jesuitenkirche zur Heiligsten Dreifaltigkeit (Jesuit church of the Most Holy Trinity):
http://tinyurl.com/2act4yr
In 1953 some of those relics were returned to Hornbach (with further distribution to Medelsheim and to Pirmasens) and to Speyer. Here's a view of P.'s very modern reliquary in Speyer's cathedral:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/71256895@N00/3550983353/
6) Joannicius the Great (d. 846). J. is an iconophile saint from the period of Byzantine second iconoclasm. He has two contemporary Bioi (BHG 935 and 936) and a later one attributed to Symeon Metaphrastes (BHG 937). According to these sources he was Bithynian who in his youth had been a swineherd and who later was a soldier who took part in campaigns against the Bulgars. In about 795, at the age of forty, he left the world and entered the first of several monasteries he would inhabit on Mount Olympus in Bithynia. In about 806 he made his profession and received the tonsure. J. would at times interrupt his monastic existence by becoming for a while a wandering hermit; miracles are ascribed to him and he is said to have had the gift of prophecy. Among the dignitaries who are reported to have visit him are St. Theodore the Stoudite and the patriarch St. Methodius.
J. as depicted in the earlier thirteenth-century frescoes (1230s) in the narthex of the church of the Ascension in the Mileševa monastery near Prijepolje (Zlatibor dist.) in southern Serbia:
http://tinyurl.com/yeduyu5
http://tinyurl.com/yewox6h
J. as depicted in a perhaps late thirteenth-century fresco in the ex-chiesa abbaziale di San Mauro at San Mauro sulla Serra in Sannicola (LE) on Apulia's Salentine peninsula:
http://tinyurl.com/265879w
http://tinyurl.com/25mwtkn
J. as depicted in an earlier fourteenth-century fresco (betw. ca. 1338 and 1346) of the church of St. Demetrius in the Patriarchate of Peć at 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/2d5f2q7
http://tinyurl.com/23dxxul
http://tinyurl.com/25rlkk6
J. as depicted in a November calendar portrait in the earlier fourteenth-century (betw. 1335 and 1350) 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/2c9uua8
J. as depicted in the mid-fourteenth-century frescoes of the arch between the intermediate and the western bay in the church of the Holy Apostles in the Patriarchate of Peć at 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/ybutypp
J. as depicted in an early fifteenth-century fresco (ca. 1408) in the monastery church of St. Stephen at Koporin in Velika Plana (Podunavlje dist.) in central Serbia:
http://tinyurl.com/2c9d2lb
7) Berardus, bp. of the Marsi (d. 1130). Today's less well known saint of the Regno was a scion of a leading comital family in Abruzzo that furnished not only several bishops of the Marsi but also at least two abbots of Montecassino as well as Atto, bp. of Chieti and his somewhat famous brother Transmundus, abt. of San Clemente di Casauria and bp. of Valva. B. studied at Montecassino during the abbacy of his kinsman Oderisius I and was called to Rome by Paschal II, under whom he filled various offices. One of these, an ecclesiastical governorship with the rank of count, led to his being briefly held prisoner in a well at Palestrina by a local lord who felt threatened by him. Paschal made him bishop of the Marsi (today's diocese of Avezzano) in about 1110. He has a Vita by his former associate John of Segni (BHL 1176) and several collections of Miracula (BHL 1176b-h). He was canonized in 1802.
B.'s cathedral was the now ruined and seemingly then already isolated Santa Sabina in the former _civitas Marsorum/Marsicana_, today's San Benedetto dei Marsi (AQ) in Abruzzo, shown and discussed (in Italian) here:
http://www.radicchio.it/sanbenedettodeimarsi/page4.html
In 1580 the episcopal seat of the diocese of the Marsi was transferred provisionally to the newly rebuilt church of Santa Maria delle Grazie at Pescina (AQ), an arrangement made permanent, with royal consent, in 1630. B.'s relics were transferred hither in 1631. An illustrated Italian-language page on this church is here:
http://tinyurl.com/2jcyx7
Some exterior views (in the first one, the church is at center):
http://www.cancelmi.com/de.htm
http://tinyurl.com/38mpno
http://tinyurl.com/22rfr7l
http://tinyurl.com/3xkhej
Inside, B.'s relics are in the reliquary bust at the center of the rear wall of this chapel (also the final resting place of other bishops of the Marsi):
http://tinyurl.com/b65mt
This church too was badly damaged by the earthquake of 1915. Restored in the 1930s, it was damaged again by Allied bombing World War II. Much of what one sees is therefore restoration work.
8) Alpais (Bl.; d. 1211). The extreme ascete and visionary A. (also Aupes; in French, occasionally also Alpaide), a peasant woman of today's Cudot (Yonne), survived a horrific illness in late childhood but soon became a paralytic and was bedridden for the rest of her life. A great faster, A. is said to have subsisted on the juice of small morsels of food that she chewed and then spat out and on the Eucharist that she received regularly. A. was already famous in her lifetime: our earliest account of her is a sketch _sub anno 1180_ by the Auxerrois chronicler Robert of Saint-Marien (d. 1212), a Premonstratensian. Cistercians especially promoted her cult: the earliest form of A.'s Vita (BHL 306; several versions) was written by a priest of the nearby priory of Les Escharlis who had conversed with her; the likewise Cistercian Ralph of Coggeshall, writing in the 1220s, devoted to A. several pages of his _Chronicon Anglicanum_.
A.'s cult was confirmed papally in 1874 at the level of Beata. Relics said to be hers are kept in Cudot's originally twelfth-century église Notre-Dame (restored in the later nineteenth century after A.'s formal beatification). Some views of this structure are here, starting at about a third of the way down the page (s.v. Pélerinage de sainte Alpais):
http://tinyurl.com/26g5jb9
A. as depicted in the Nuremberg Chronicle (1493, Beloit College copy, fol. CCVv):
http://tinyurl.com/2ey9533
Best,
John Dillon
(last year's post revised and with the additions of Libertinus, Pirminius, and Bl. Alpais)
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