medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
On Friday, February 4, 2005, at 10:22 pm, Phyllis wrote:
> Today (5. February) is the feast day of:
>
> Agatha (?) Legend tells that Agatha was a Sicilian of wealthy family
> who dedicated herself to God. During some imperial persecution, a
> consul fell in lust with her and used the persecution as a pretext to
> work his evil will upon her. She refused his importunities, though,
> so he humiliated and tortured her. She's often shown holding a pair
> of pincers or caring her breasts on a plate (legend says her wanna-be
> lover had them torn off). Bread is blessed on St. Agatha's day
> because of a misunderstanding---that it was bread on the plate,
> rather than severed mammalian tissue. A. is the patron saint of
> nurses, I assume at least originally of the nursery (wet nurse)
> variety.>
The standard legend in its various forms makes Agatha a martyr of the
Decian persecution (so d. 250 or 251, supposedly). She is particularly
associated with Catania, both as the site of her imprisonment, torture,
and death and as the place she has protected from eruptions of nearby
Mt. Etna since -- according to the legend -- the year following her
martyrdom. During his evanescent reconquest of eastern Sicily in the
late 1030s and very early 1040s the East Roman general George Maniakes
had her remains removed to Constantinople. In 1126 (thus after the
successful Norman-led conquest of the island) a pair of enterprising
French knights brought these, or what they had been assured were these,
back to Catania (less some bits that during the return trip got left at
Taranto), thereby engendering two minor monuments of medieval Sicily's
Latin literature: abbot-bishop Maurice's engaging prosimetric account of
this event and the somewhat later and very lovely sequence for the feast
of A.'s translation from Constantinople.
Photographs of A.'s reliquary bust (1373-76; later adornments), of her
fifteenth century "gothic" reliquary shrine, and of various reliquaries
for individual body parts -- all belonging to the archdiocese of Catania
-- are shown on these two pages:
http://www.cataniaperte.com/santagata/reliquie/reliquie.htm#busto
http://www.comune.catania.it/conoscerect/sagata/le_foto.htm
The body-part reliquaries as posed for a group portrait:
http://www.cataniaperte.com/santagata/reliquie/c_reliquie.jpg
http://www.comune.catania.it/conoscerect/sagata/immagini/sagata20.jpg
An arm-and-hand reliquary:
http://www.comune.catania.it/conoscerect/sagata/immagini/sagata14.jpg
And a breast reliquary (Catania seems to have but one of these):
http://www.comune.catania.it/conoscerect/sagata/immagini/sagata15.jpg
Best,
John Dillon
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