medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
On Saturday, January 15, 2011, at 5:22 pm, I wrote:
In the thirteenth century, the confusion of Vitae/Passiones for the
priest/bishop//confessor/martyr Felix of 14. January had caused the
Dominican hagiographers Bartolomeo da Trento and Jacopo da Varazze to
maintain that there were two Felixes. In Jacopo's view at least (I
won't be able to look at Bartolomeo until Tuesday), the Roman martyr
and Felix of Nola were brothers and they were both called _in Pincis_,
the one because he is said to have been put to death with _pincae_ and
the other because he was buried outside the city at a place called
Pincis...
I've now had a chance to look at Bartolomeo da Trento's _Liber epilogorum in gesta sanctorum_, where the treatment of Felix of 14. January is at cap. 31, _De sancto Felice_. Here, just as in the later Jacopo da Varazze, there are said to be two sainted brothers named Felix, both called _in pincis_, the one because he is said to have been put to death with _pincae_ (Bartolomeo gives the supposed explanation _pinca_ = _subula_, 'awl') and the other (who acc. to B. had been sentenced to hard labor but after a healing miracle had been freed and brought to Nola, where he died) because he reposes at a place called _in pincis_.
Bartolomeo devotes most of his brief chapter to the Felix who died at Nola. At the outset he calls both Felixes priests; in his telling both brothers resided at Rome. The F. killed at Rome had caused an idol to shatter; the who died at Nola had threatened to do the same thing. There is no suggestion in Bartolomeo that the F. killed at Rome was a schoolmaster whose students put him to death with their _pincae_ and their styluses. That version thus seems increasingly likely to have been Jacopo da Varazze's own creation, inspired (as noted previously) by Prudentius' well known account of St. Cassian of Imola.
Herewith an expandable view of the Felix of 14. January being stabbed to death by students as depicted in a late thirteenth-century copy of French origin of Jacopo da Varazze's _Legenda aurea_ (San Marino, CA, Huntington Library, ms. HM 3027, fol. 22v):
http://tinyurl.com/4jywbp4 Best again,
John Dillon
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