medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Today (3. June) is also the feast day of:
Conus of Diano (d. early 13th cent.). Today's less well known saint from
the Regno is the Benedictine monk Conus, patron of Teggiano (SA) in the
Vallo di Diano. According to an undated but seemingly late medieval brief
Life of C. (BHL 1943; published in the _Acta Sanctorum_ "ex vetusta
membrana Dianensi"), C. was born to a noble family in the _terra Diani_,
that is, in the small city of Diano (Teggiano's medieval name and its
modern one until 1862) and its outlying possessions. A prenatal omen
presaged his sanctity. When C. was barely eight years old, he began by
divine influence to engage in forms of self-denial and
self-mortification. Unbeknownst to his parents, he soon entered the
Benedictine abbey of Santa Maria at nearby Cadossa.
Here C. eagerly accepted instruction in grammar and in logic and at the
same time overcame his abbot's doubts about his fitness for monastic
life. One day he was observed by his parents, who were on the premises
in order to get wood. C. evaded them by hiding in a burning oven. When
found by the abbot, who had gone searching for him, he emerged
completely unscathed. One other day, while the monks were dining, a
voice from above called to C., announcing that he would be called by God
that night. During that night he did indeed pass away; on the following
day the monks buried him. Later, the "Italicum regnum" having been
convulsed by war, the monks abandoned the abbey and fled in fear to
safer places. Then people of Padula (another town in the Vallo di
Diano) arrived to sneak away with C.'s body. But people of Diano also
went to Cadossa, drove off their rivals, and upon entering the abbey
were greeted by a great fragrance emanating from C.'s tomb. When the
tomb was opened, C.'s body was discovered to be incorrupt. C. was
brought back to Diano and buried in the town's principal church. This
happened in the year 1261.
Thus far the Life. Guesswork has given us a traditional birthdate for
C. in the late twelfth century; the absence of adult miracles has caused
him to be represented as youthful. The story seems to have two parts: an
_exemplum virtutis_ for youth, especially young postulants, and an
aitiology of C.'s burial in Diano's Santa Maria Maggiore (the town's
principal church since the later thirteenth century) and not in a
possession of the great Carthusian abbey of San Lorenzo near Padula
(founded in 1306). The Life itself is probably from the late fourteenth
or early fifteenth century. It was polished up humanistically for a
printed version in 1595 and has served as the base for various early
modern and modern Lives.
The latter have added such entertaining miracles as C.'s preventing
Santa Maria Maggiore's belltower from collapsing in 1300 and his heroic
defense of Diano's castle when in 1497 king Federigo was cannonading it
in order to compel the capitulation of its rebel lord, Antonello
Sanseverino, prince of Salerno and, in modern times, a local hero for
the Dianesi. C. has been credited with saving Diano/Teggiano several
times since. His cult was confirmed in 1871. Emigrants have brought it
to other parts of the world, perhaps most notably to Uruguay, where C.
is the patron of the city of Florida.
Whereas the most populous town in the Vallo di Diano today is Sala
Consilina, in the later Middle Ages that honor went to Diano, which was in
effect the southern capital of the extensive feudal state controlled by
the Sanseverino counts of Marsico. A guided tour (in Italian) of
medieval Diano/Teggiano is here:
http://www.prolocoteggiano.it/proloco/storia/
and that tour's page on Santa Maria Maggiore is here:
http://www.prolocoteggiano.it/proloco/storia/14.htm
(note that this church is now a cathedral: the diocese, today united
with that of Policastro to the southwest, was created in 1850).
A slightly larger version of the last page's photograph of the pulpit
(dated 1271) by Melchiorre da Montalbano is here:
http://www.teggianoantiquaria.it/luogo/internochiesa.jpg
Some fragments of Diano's late medieval provincial splendor can be seen in
the Diocesan Museum (views expandable):
http://tinyurl.com/qnf86
Best,
John Dillon
(last year's post, revised)
PS: "Conus" (Italian: "Cono") is an unusual name; C.'s hagiographers have
expended some perverse ingenuity in explaining it symbolically. But it's
not all that mysterious. As a latinization of "Cono", it could represent
either a diminutive of "Conrado" or a form of Greek "Conon" (demotic:
"Cono"). In the tenth and eleventh centuries the Vallo di Diano was
peopled in part by Greek-speakers (the neighboring Cilento sheltered a
Greek linguistic island that died out only in the early twentieth
century) and as late as the early thirteenth century there was still a
Greek-rite monastery, San Andrea Arpio, near Cadossa. So the latter
origin is not out of the question. We have only a handful of notarial
documents from Teggiano prior to the fourteenth century. "Cono" appears
in none of these, though it does from 1349 onward, probably reflecting
the influence of the saint's cult.
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