medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Today, November 2, is the feast of:
Victorinus of Poetovio/of Ptuj/of Pettau (German) (283-284 or c304?) The little that we know of him comes chiefly from his own surviving writings and from his notice in St. Jerome, De viris illustribus. According to Jerome, Victorinus was bishop of Poetovio (then an important legionary town in late Roman Pannonia Superior and now the city of Ptuj in Slovenia) and the author of commentaries on the Apocalypse and on various books of the Old Testament as well as of dogmatic and other writings. Jerome observes that Victorinus' Latin was not as good as his Greek.
Victorinus' commentary on the Apocalypse has survived, though in the Middle Ages it was usually read in one of several versions of a major re-working by Jerome, who suppressed Victorinus' chiliastic interpretation of this text and inserted other matter in its place. Also surviving are a fragment on chronology and a brief treatise on the creation of the world. All of these writings are in Latin.
Also according to Jerome, Victorinus died a martyr. Ado and Usuard, who enter Victorinus in their martyrologies under today's date (this is thought to have been originally a feast commemorating a late antique translation of Victorinus' relics to Lauriacum in Noricum Ripense, now Lorch in the city of Enns in Oberösterreich), assign Victorinus' suffering to the Diocletianic persecution. As the commentary on the Apocalypse is now generally thought to have been written under Gallienus in 258-260, and as that commentary was not his earliest work, some modern scholars are reluctant to accept a date of death for Victorinus as late as c304. Martine Dulaey, Victorinus' editor in the series Sources Chrétiennes, suggests a persecution under Numerian in 283-284.
Giusto/Justus of Trieste (d. c304, supposedly) According to his very legendary Passio, Justus was a life-long Christian of Aquileia, devoted to acts of penitence and of almsgiving and executed during the Great Persecution of Diocletian by being thrown into the upper Adriatic with lead weights affixed to his hands and feet. His body is said to have been washed up at Trieste, where a priest who had been alerted by a vision discovered it and, together with the faithful of that city, buried it in a safe place.
Justus may be one of the several martyrs of this name listed in the (ps-)HM without geographic specification under various dates in November. But his cult is exclusively or almost exclusively Tergestine and, it is said, not attested documentarily before 1040. At some time between the ninth and the early eleventh century a basilica dedicated to him arose next to Trieste's then cathedral of Our Lady of the Assumption. In the late twelfth century that cathedral, which had been rebuilt, received an apse mosaic in which Justus is prominently figured on one side. At or shortly after the end of the thirteenth century the two churches were combined into the present cathedral dedicated to Justus and a large belltower was added.
Justus' statue on the belltower: http://www.photoroma.com/foto.php?City=ts <http://www.photoroma.com/foto.php?City=ts&ID1=34&ID2=0> &ID1=34&ID2=0
and at left (St. Servulus of Trieste at right) in the mosaic of the right apse: http://tinyurl.com/p8s2cp .
There exist two documents, the first one could be false, for 911 and 948 AD, published by local historian P. Kandler in Codice Diplomatico Istriano (Scrinium Adriae: http://140.105.55.157/cgi-bin/sa/baseweb_main). The martyrium and the cult of S. Giusto are discussed by R. Bratož in: Il cristianesimo aquileiese prima di Costantino, Udine 1999. - Matej Župančič, 3Nov2006, Medieval religion email list
Carterius, Styriacus, Tobias, Eudoxius, Agapius, and companions (d. c315/320, supposedly) are said in relatively late Greek calendar and synaxary accounts to have been soldiers who suffered martyrdom by being burned at the stake at Sebasteia in Armenia Minor (now Sivas in Turkey) during the persecution of Licinius. Earlier narrative sources for them are lacking. Given the possibility (some would say, likelihood) that the Licinian persecution as reported by Eusebius and as imagined in various Passiones is in origin a propagandistic distortion promoted by Constantine against his former imperial colleague, one may be hesitant to accept the historicity of this account.
A reduced image, in brown tones, of the martyrdom of Carterius and companions as depicted in the late tenth- or very early eleventh-century so-called Menologion of Basil II (Città del Vaticano, BAV, Vat. gr. 1613): http://tinyurl.com/2e7dsne
Acindynus, Pegasius, Aphthonius, Elpidephorus, Anempodistus, and many companions (d. c350) This group of martyrs is the subject of a legendary, seemingly 7th-century Greek-language Passio (two early versions, a 10th-century elaboration by Symeon Metaphrastes, & there's also a Latin one) that makes them courtiers and others in Persia executed in various ways under Shapur II with their relics later translated to Constantinople.
The suffering of Acindynus and companions as depicted in a November calendar scene in (1335-1350) 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/y8sklnv
Pegasius and Anempodistus as depicted in earlier eleventh-century mosaics in the katholikon of the monastery of Hosios Loukas near Distomo in Phokis; Pegasius: http://tinyurl.com/2axgz7g and Anempodistus: http://tinyurl.com/22wbf43
Acindynus, Pegasius, and Anempodistus as depicted in black-and white views of late thirteenth- or very early fourteenth-century frescoes, attributed to Manuel Panselinos, in the Protaton church on Mt. Athos: Acindynus (top) and Pegasius: http://tinyurl.com/2g8ukpw and Anempodistus: http://tinyurl.com/26pfvuo
Aphthonius and Elpidephorus as depicted in the degraded late fourteenth-century frescoes (later 1380s?) in the nave of the church of the Holy Ascension at the Ravanica monastery near Ćuprija in central Serbia: Aphthonius: http://tinyurl.com/24a4f8b and Elpidephorus: http://tinyurl.com/27at43e
Acindynus, Pegasius, Aphthonius, and Elpidephorus as depicted in frescoes (1545-1546) by Theofanis Strelitzas-Bathas (a.k. a. Theophanes the Cretan) in the katholikon of the Stavronikita monastery on Mt. Athos: Acindynus: http://ocafs.oca.org/Icons/august/0822akindynos.jpg and Pegasius: http://tinyurl.com/28fsh2t
Aphthonius: http://tinyurl.com/25c2zak and Elpidephorus: http://tinyurl.com/2eq7hnc
Pegasius and Aphthonius as depicted in the mosaics (betw. 1315-1321) of the Chora church (Kariye Camii) in Istanbul: Pegasius: http://tinyurl.com/2a6y3at and Aphthonius: http://tinyurl.com/2eagzq7
Eustochium of Tarsus (d. 362) was a woman of Tarsus. In the reign of Julian she refused to sacrifice to Aphrodite, and was tortured to death.
Marcian(us) of Cyrus/of Chalcis (d. late 4th century/c387?) We know about the Syrian hermit Marcian from an account by his fifth-century fellow townsman Theodoret of Cyrus (Historia ecclesiastica). He is said to have belonged to one of Cyrus' (Cyrrhus') leading noble families, and to have given up the promise of a brilliant military career in favor of a life of meditation, reading Holy Writ, and fasting conducted in a tiny cell (too small to stand or lie flat in) near Antioch. He, however, was not so remote as to preclude his attracting disciples, one of whom later was bishop of Apamea, as well as a visit from five bishops who sought instruction from him and received it in the form of an expression of abject humility and incapacity. He was embarrassed by his fame and his reputation as a miracle worker. Unable to escape his disciples, he formed a monastery and placed it under the supervision of his disciple St. Eusebius. As he grew old, Marcian was so annoyed at the vultures hovering around waiting for his relics (his nephew even built a chapel to house Marcian's remains as soon as they came available) that he exacted a promise from Eusebius to bury him secretly. Eusebius did so, and Marcian's relics were not discovered for fifty years - after which they became a focal point of pilgrimage. Theodoret gives the impression that Marcian's cult was immediate.
George of Vienne (d. later 7th century) was bishop of Vienne at some point in the later 7th century. Different reconstructions of Vienne's episcopal fasti having him dying either between 664 and 680 or else in 699. In 1239 it was said of George that he had been buried in Vienne's monastery church of St. Peter; he is said to have been accorded an Elevatio in 1251. His feast on this day is recorded in late medieval expanded versions of Usuard's martyrology.
Tigridia (d. c925) was an Old Castilian. Her noble father founded the Benedictine convent of Ona near Burgos for her.
All Souls. This feast was instituted by Abbot Odilo of Cluny (d. 1049) The practice of praying on this day for the souls of all the faithful departed spread to the entire western Church, when monasteries would commemorate their dead as well as the souls of their benefactors. The Armenian Church celebrates a similar feast for all the dead, but on Easter Monday.
Malachy/in Latin, Malachias of Armagh (d. 1148) We know about this Irish Benedictine reformer and prelate chiefly from his Vita by St. Bernard of Clairvaux, from other writings of the same saint, and from various annalistic and documentary sources. His Irish name was Máel Máedoc Ua Morgair and he trained at Armagh at a time when the Irish church was not yet Roman. Thus it does not altogether surprise that he was ordained deacon and then priest by the archbishop of Armagh at uncanonically young ages. Malachy became the latter's vicar and distinguished himself by promoting the liturgy of the hours and the sacraments of confession, confirmation, and holy matrimony, all of which if we are to believe Bernard had fallen into desuetude at Armagh. He next went to Lismore, where he learned Roman practices under a bishop who had been trained at Winchester.
In 1123 the bishop of Lismore died and Malachy went to Bangor as head of its monastery, which he struggled to return from a state of secularization to one of conventual discipline. In 1124 the archbishop of Armagh who had ordained him promoted Malachy to the see of Connor; three years later he retreated to Munster in the face of a raid by an Irish king from the north. In 1132 Malachy was consecrated bishop for Armagh; over the next several years he worked to break the hereditary hold of a secularized clergy on Armagh's insignia and temporalities. In 1136, having succeeded in this effort, he resigned the see and assumed instead that of Down. In 1139 Malachy traveled to Rome to request pallia for Armagh and Cashel, stopping off en route at Clairvaux, where he won the friendship of St. Bernard.
Unsuccessful in obtaining the pallia, Malachy was sent back by Innocent II as native legate for Ireland to convene a synod that would request the pallia more formally. On his return journey he was again at Clairvaux. At some point during this trip he also visited the Augustinian canons at Arrouaise near Arras and made a copy of their rule and of a document outlining some of their practices. Over the next several years Malachy was influential in introducing Cistercian monasticism into Ireland and canons regular into its cathedral chapters. In 1148 he made a return trip to Rome for the pallia, now properly requested by a local synod, but died at Clairvaux before he could get there. In 1149 the Irish monastic author at Regensburg of the Visio Tnugdali placed Malachy in heaven along with St. Patrick. Malachy was entombed at Clairvaux; his canonization, promoted by the Cistercians, came in 1190.
The église Saint-Bernard at Ville-sous-la-Ferté (Aube; near Clairvaux) preserves this relic of M.: http://tinyurl.com/yk8njn6
(See Nov 3)
Wichmann of Arnstein (d. 1270) has not been formally canonized, but was venerated as a saint in the Middle Ages. Wichmann was born in Saxony in c1185 to a noble family. He was educated in the Praemonstratensian canonry of St. Mary's in Magdeburg, and in 1210 became the provost of that institution. In 1221 Wichmann was elected bishop of Brandenburg, but the election was not confirmed by the pope. In 1224 he introduced the Dominican order to Magdeburg, joining their convent in that city himself in 1230. From 1246 on he was prior of the Dominican convent of Neuruppin in Brandenburg.
Thomas Netter of Walden (d. 1430) The subject of an unconfirmed cult, Thomas Netter was a native of Essex who became a Carmelite. He had a doctorate in theology from Oxford and won fame as a theology teacher, known as “Doctor authenticus”, and “Doctor praestantissimus”. He was an active opponent of Wycliff and the Lollards, attended the council of Constance, and served as confessor to King Henry V, who died in his arms in 1422. He became prior provincial of the order. Thomas’ cult has never been officially confirmed.
Margareta of Lorraine (blessed) (d. 1521) was a daughter of Duke Friedrich of Lorraine, born in 1463. In 1488 she married the duke of Alencon. After her husband's early death in 1492, Margareta raised their three children and ruled her land. She turned to the religious life, in 1513 founding a house of Poor Clares in Argentan and in 1520 entering it herself. Her cult was approved in 1921.
Happy reading,
Terri Morgan
--
“The nice thing about studying history is that you can always find people who are a lot weirder than you are.” – Delia Sherman
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