medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
On Saturday, February 18, 2006, at 8:36 pm, Phyllis wrote:
> Today (19. February) is the feast day of:
>
> Quodvultdeus (d. 439) Q. was bishop of Carthage at the time of
> the
> Vandal invasion of North Africa. He seems to have been certain
> that
> the invasion was God's punishment because his flock enjoyed the
> games
> too much (he sounds like a reincarnation of Tertullian). Q. and
> most
> of his clergy were banished, with a nice twist: they were loaded
> onto
> decrepit ships without oars or sails and sent out into the
> Mediterranean. They reached Naples safely, though.
439, the year in which the Vandals seized Carthage, is the generally
accepted year of Q.'s expulsion from Africa. Having Q. die in the same
year gives no time for the composition of the _Liber promissionum_,
whose conjectural attribution to Q. by Germain Morin early in the last
century is now widely accepted. The author of the _Liber promissionum_
tells us that he was living at Naples in the time of pope Leo (Leo I;
440-61). Q.'s Catholic successor at Carthage, Deogratias, was in
office by 454. If the _Liber promissionum_ is in fact Q.'s, a likely
date of death for him would be ca. 450.
"without oars or sails" is not in Victor of Vita, _Historia
persecutionis Africanae provinciae_, I. 15, which in Halm's MGH edition
merely says that Q. and a great crowd of clerics were placed on _naves
fractae_ (in John Moorhead's translation, "dangerous ships"). The
detail _is_ in the 12th- or 13th-century _Vita sancti Castrensis_ (BHL
1644), para. 7, where, in a passage seemingly inspired by Victor's
account, the Vandal king orders that Castrensis and his episcopal
colleagues be put into a ship from which these had been removed
(_abiectis tropis et antennis_, lit. "its oar-thongs and spars having
been cast away").
Phyllis' source for her 2004 posting on Q.
http://tinyurl.com/lf4l3
was vastly preferable on both points.
For the attribution of the _Liber promissionum_ to Q., see now Daniel
Van Slyke, _Quodvultdeus of Carthage: The Apocalyptic Theology of A
Roman African in Exile_ (Strathfield, NSW: St Pauls Publications, 2003;
Early Christian Studies, no. 5), esp. pp. 21-63. Dorothy Glass has
said of one of the sermons often attributed to Q., the _Contra Iudaeos,
Paganos et Arianos_, that it "was embedded in the culture of Campania"
-- a neat trick if the African Q. died in the first year of his exile.
See Glass' "Pseudo-Augustine, Prophets and Pulpits in Campania",
_Dumbarton Oaks Papers_ 41 (1987), 215-26, p. 225. Three of those
sermons have been recently translated into English: see Quodvultdeus of
Carthage, _The Creedal Homilies_, tr. and comm. Thomas Macy Finn (NY:
The Newman Press, 2004; Ancient Christian Writers, no. 60). For Victor
of Vita, see his _History of the Vandal Persecution_, tr. with notes
and introduction by John Moorhead (Liverpool University Press, 1992;
Translated Texts for Historians, vol. 10). Hubertus Drobner's entry on
Q. in the Bautz _Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon_
includes a very substantial bibliography extending into the early
1990s. See:
http://www.bautz.de/bbkl/q/quodvultdens.shtml
Best,
John Dillon
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