medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Today (30. October) is also the feast day of:
Saturnus (Saturninus) of Cagliari (d. before ca. 517, perh. 303 or
304). Among the numerous saints Saturninus whose names are recorded in
martyrologies or whose cults are associated with specific locales is S. of
Cagliari, first attested in the mid-6th-century _Vita Fulgentii_ often
ascribed to Ferrandus the disciple and companion of St. Fulgentius of
Ruspe. Here we are told that when in about 517 Fulgentius, Ferrandus, and
others were exiled to Sardinia they built a monastery outside of Cagliari
near the church of the holy martyr Saturninus (whose date and locality of
martyrdom are unspecified). In the current but hardly new text of the
_Vita Fulgentii_, this martyr's name is given as Saturninus. But
ecclesiastical historians of Sardinia suspect that when the text is ever
critically re-edited the name will turn out in fact to be Saturnus, the
only form attested in Sardinian sources prior to the fourteenth century,
when Saturninus begins to be used here instead (probably reflecting the
better known cult of Saturninus of Toulouse).
During the early Middle Ages southern Sardinia was an outpost of the
"Byzantine commonwealth" and its church was Greek-rite. Latinization of
the area began in earnest in the 11th century. One of its chief movers was
the Victorine congregation of Marseille, which took over important cult
sites and other properties in the giudicato of Cagliari including, in 1089,
the church of San Saturno, shown here after early expansion by the
Victorines and after several more recent restorations but still famous for
its paleochristian (4th-5th cents.) core and its 6th-century cupola above
the central _martyrium_:
http://guidasardegna.tiscali.it/visit/church/ca/cagliari/basilica_san_saturn
o.html
Faced with the need to provide narrative accounts for the area's poorly
documented saints, some of whom were or soon became the focus of major
pilgrimages, the Latin church in Sardinia created from the late 11th to
perhaps the mid-13th centuries a series of Passions and Legends calqued on
hagiographies of their homonyms elsewhere but ascribing all or almost all
of the martyrdoms to the Diocletianic persecution and localizing these on
the island. Two of the most impressive are the Legends of Saturnus of
Cagliari and of Antiochus of the Sulcis; these, almost certainly the work
of the Victorines, borrow extensively from other Lives. In the case of
Saturnus, the chief creditors are Saturninus of Toulouse and Sergius of
Caesarea in Cappadocia. The version considered "authentic" by the church
today was, however, not the first to be published and when Saturnus entered
the Roman Martyrology he did so as Saturninus under the influence of a much
later and less specifically Sardinian text that permitted the inference
that this saint was really identical with Saturninus of Toulouse. That
inference also underlies the collocation of S.'s feast at the end of
November along with those of Saturninus of Rome and our old friend
Saturninus of Toulouse. But as the locale of this saint's martyrdom is
really unknown, we may join medieval and early modern Sardinians (who
erected churches to him in various parts of the island) in thinking him
truly one of their own, Saturnus in Latin and Saturru or Sadurru in local
vernaculars.
The _Legenda sancti Saturni_ and the incompletely preserved hexameter
narrative _Christe, patris verbum_" were published by Bacchisio Raimondo
Motzo in his "S. Saturno di Cagliari", _Archivio storico sardo_ 16 (1926),
3-32; repr. in his _Studi sui Bizantini in Sardegna e sull'agiografia
sarda_ (Cagliari, 1987), pp. 157-86. For a recent scholarly survey, see
Raimondo Turtas, _Storia della Chiesa in Sardegna dalle origini al Duemila_
(Roma, 1999), pp. 41-42.
Best,
John Dillon
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