medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
19. June is also the feast day of:
1) Paisius the Great (d. earlier 5th cent.). Paisius is the most commonly used latinization of this Egyptian saint's Greek name Paisios or Paesios (seemingly a variant of the more commonly occurring Paesis). In Coptic he is Pshoi (also Pishoi / Pishoy and Bishoi / Bishoy) and is often differentiated from others of this name by the localization 'of Scetis'. He has a Life wrongly ascribed to St. John Colobus with versions in Greek (BHG 1402-1403d), in Syriac (BHO 181, 182), and in Arabic; the latter has offshoots in Coptic and in Ethiopian. According to these accounts Paisius was one of several children of Christian parents; his father died when they were still very young. An angel announced to Paisius' mother that he had been selected divinely for a religious life: she protested that he was physically weak but the angel insisted that he had been chosen. Paisius would spend his life striving to attain perfection in weakness (2 Cor 12:9). He became a monk of Scetis under the direction of an elder named Amoi / Amoy (in the Greek texts he's called Pambo) and there became friends with another of Amoi's / Pambo's disciples, John Colobus. After their master's death Paisius left Scetis for life as an hermit in a cave two miles distant. He attracted disciples, formed a community, taught orthodox Trinitarian doctrine, healed the physically ill, expelled demons, and experienced visions of, among others, Jesus Christ (for the stranger whose feet Paisius washed was He) and St. Constantine the Great. The Syriac Life has him visited by St. Ephraem the Syrian.
Still according to these Lives, after the first sack of Scetis (407) Paisius fled to the area around Antinoopolis (Antinoe) where he lived in a mountain cave (there are many of these in the area). The date of his death is unknown. According to the Arabic Life, Paisius' body and that of his friend St. Paul of Tamma were later translated from the vicinity of Antinoopolis to the monastery named for him in Wadi Natrun (as Scetis is now called). The presence at the monastery of bodies believed to be theirs is first reported from the end of the eleventh century. Later texts date this translation to the ninth century and treat it as a return after the bodies had been removed earlier for safekeeping.
Medieval Greek synaxaries enter Paisius' feast under 19. June; modern Eastern Orthodox churches follow suit. Egyptian and Ethiopian Coptic churches celebrate him on 15. July. Paisius has yet to grace the pages of the RM.
Paisius the Great as depicted in a late twelfth- or early thirteenth-century fresco in the Palaia Enkleistra ('Old Hermitage') in the St. Neophytus monastery at Tala near Paphos in the Republic of Cyprus (for a better view, click on the image):
http://tinyurl.com/c9kh8by
The resting place of Paisius' / Pshoi's reputedly incorrupt body in the church dedicated to him in his monastery in Wadi Natrun:
http://tinyurl.com/82xem79
http://www.cortinastelle.it/eclissi/fotoegitto/monastero-copto03.jpg
http://tinyurl.com/6ps5rx3
An illustrated, English-language account of the much rebuilt monastery (Deir Anba Bishoy), some of whose buildings go back to the fourteenth century:
http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/bishoy.htm
2) Childemarca (d. later 7th cent.). In the hagiography of the Norman abbey of Fontenelle (St.-Wandrille) and of its sister house at Fécamp, Childemarca (also Hildomarca _vel sim._; in French, Childemarque, Hildemarque, etc.) was an abbess at Bordeaux when, perhaps midway in the reign of Chlotar III (657-673), she was recruited to serve as the first abbess of the newly founded monastery for women at Fécamp. The fullest account of this, deriving from a now lost Vita of Childemarca, occurs in an expanded version (BHL 8805; seemingly earlier ninth-century) of the Vita of St. Wandregisilus (Wandrille). Roughly contemporary with that account is the episode in the early Vitae of St. Leodegarius (Léger) of Autun (BHL 4849b-4850; 4851-4852b; earliest witness is later ninth-century) in which that worthy miraculously regained the use of his tongue (which latter is said to have been removed on the orders of his enemy, the mayor of the palace Ebroin) at Fécamp while under Childemarca's care. Earlier still is the first evidence for Childemarca's cult: in 772 the abbey of Fontenelle entered her under 19. June in its copy of the (pseudo-)Hieronymian Martyrology now at Wolfenbüttel (HAB, cod. Guelf. 81 Weiss., fols. 7r-102r).
A French-language Wikipedia account of the abbey of the Most Holy Trinity at Fécamp:
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbaye_de_la_Trinit%C3%A9_de_F%C3%A9camp
The abbey church is an eleventh- to fourteenth-century building that replaced a predecessor of the late tenth century. A brief account in English is here:
http://tinyurl.com/7h2ca4a
Katrin Brockhaus' illustrated, scholarly account of the church's development: "Guillaume de Volpiano: Fécamp et l'histoire normande", in _Tabularia: Sources écrites de la Normandie médiévale_; dossier, 2002:
http://tinyurl.com/8yc8nvb
Other views:
http://www.flickriver.com/photos/biron-philippe/sets/72157627288471984/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/hagger71/3411863449/
http://tinyurl.com/76exkql
http://tinyurl.com/838zhbt
3) Gerland of Caltagirone (Bl.; d. before 1327). Our knowledge of this holy person of Sicily (not to be confused with his Sicilian homonym Gerland the sainted late eleventh-century bishop of Agrigento) derives from a report from 1331 of the translation on 19. June 1327 of the recently discovered body of Blessed Gerlandus de Germania from a church where it had lain called Santa Maria de Templo to the church of St. James in Caltagirone (CT), then in the diocese of Syracuse, and of subsequent healing miracles associated with his relics (BHL 3450). The church in which Gerland's body is said to have been found was situated in the valley of the river Tempio near today's Mirabella Imbaccari (CT); its name has been taken to indicate that it had once belonged to the Knights Templar (who on this view will have given their name to the river). After the Templars' suppression it and its possessions are supposed to have been given to the Hospitallers of St. John of Jerusalem (as will have been the case had it indeed been a Templar church), whence the supposition has arisen that Gerland had been either a Templar or a Hospitaller. But there is no proof that he had belonged to either order. Nor do we know the basis for the belief reflected in BHL 3450 that his name was Gerland and that he had come from Germany. Six lines of leonine hexameters in praise of Gerland appended to this report add that from his youth he had been devoted to the BVM (probably an inference from the location of his reported gravesite) and that he cured many of their illnesses (probably an inference from the recent miracles).
Gerland's Italian-language Vita in Giacomo Bosio's late sixteenth-century _Dell'istoria della sacra religione et ill.ma militia di San Giovanni Gierosolimitano_ identifies its subject as a Hospitaller, Brother John of Poland whom other writers call Gerland of Germany. It goes on to say that he settled at Caltagirone, that he lived very ascetically, fasting and wearing a hair shirt, that he was an exemplary soldier of Christ, comforting and defending widows, orphans, and the oppressed as well as consoling the afflicted and aiding the needy, and that he died eighty-four years before the discovery of his body. Though one might think this at least largely pious invention, it is the version of Gerland's biography that underlies his elogium in the "new" RM of 2001 as revised in 2004.
Caltagirone's church of St. James, rebuilt after the devastating earthquake of 1693 in eastern Sicily, is now that city's basilica di San Giacomo Maggiore. One of its treasured possessions is this skull reliquary of Bl. Gerland commissioned in ca. 1353:
http://tinyurl.com/ckdejs4
4) Michelina of Pesaro (Bl.; d 1356). According to her very brief Vita BHL 5957, perhaps composed at the end of the fourteenth century but not known to antedate the early sixteenth century, Michelina's parents were wealthy residents of Pesaro (a proparoxytone -- but you knew that!) in the northern Marche. She was married at the age of twelve and widowed at twenty, after which she became a Franciscan tertiary and devoted herself to succoring the poor and the infirm. She established a small hospital, miraculously caused an empty vessel of oil to be refilled, cured with her prayers and her touch a woman afflicted with leprosy, lived ascetically, practiced self-mortification both by binding herself with iron and by wearing a hair shirt, and died on 19. June 1356. Posthumous miracles confirmed her sanctity. Thus far this Vita. A collection of ninety-six notarized miracles of Michelina from 1359 to 1378 existed in Pesaro shortly before 1529. Some of Michelina's miracles -- not necessarily the same ones -- were reported by the Franciscan historian Mariano da Firenze (d. 1523), whose own brief Italian-language Vita of her adds biographical details of uncertain accuracy; others were added by another historian of the same order, Rodolfo / Ridolfo da Tossignano (d. 1601), who drew in part upon information from a person who claimed to be a collateral descendant of Michelina.
Seemingly by the late fourteenth century Michelina was honored with a chapel in that city's then church of St. Francis. Pesaro's statutes of 1531 confirm the existence then of Michelina's annual feast in that city. In 1580 she received a new tomb in that city's santuario della Madonna delle Grazie, which latter had in the late fifteenth century incorporated the aforementioned church of St. Francis. Michelina's relics are still there, kept in a reliquary donated by Clement XI in 1708. In 1737 her cult was confirmed papally at the level of Beata.
The Musei Civici in Pesaro preserve this polyptych of ca. 1410 by Jacobello del Fiore honoring Michelina (at center):
http://tinyurl.com/7k6dc5v
An Italian-language account of this object:
http://tinyurl.com/7wpoque
Some expandable views of the entrance to Pesaro's santuario della Madonna delle Grazie:
http://tinyurl.com/7bxtau7
Best,
John Dillon
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