medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Today (9. September) is the feast day of:
Gorgonius of Rome (?). G. is listed, under this date, in the _Depositio
martyrum_ of 354 and in the (pseudo-)Hieronymian Martyrology as a martyr
of the Via Labicana. The latter adds that he was buried at the cemetery
_ad duas lauros_ and, uniquely in our surviving testimony, that this was
called the _cimiterium sancti Gorgoni_. We know nothing about him.
Neither, apparently, did pope St. Damasus (d. 384), whose epitaph for
him (Ferrua no. 32) is altogether uninformative. G.'s grave near the
church of St. Helen is routinely cited in the early medieval pilgrim
itineraries for Rome. His feast entered for today in the Gelasian
Sacramentary and in the historical martyrologies from Bede onward.
In about 763 the enterprising St. Chrodegang of Metz had G.'s relics
translated to the abbey he had founded at today's Gorze (Moselle) in the
Lorraine. In an able review for H-France
http://www.h-france.net/vol6reviews/firey.html
of M. A. Claussen's _The Reform of the Frankish Church: Chrodegang of
Metz and the Regula canonicorum in the Eighth Century_ (Cambridge
University Press, 2004), Abigail Firey refers to C.'s translations of
"the obscure saints Gorgonius, Nabor, and Nazarius". But she must be
speaking of present-day obscurity, which latter we should be hesitant to
impute to the eighth century. Nabor and Nazarius are in the Gelasian
Sacramentary's canon of the Mass and G.'s resting place, as we have
seen, was a fixture in the itineraries for pilgrims at Rome. The
_Itinerarium Salisburgense_ goes so far as to single it out for special
mention among the many graves in today's Catacombe dei Santi Marcellino
e Pietro.
In the ninth century G. received a personality when Ado, under today's
date, identified him with the Gorgonius of 12. March, a martyr of
Nicomedia under Diocletian, and averred that it was the latter's remains
that had been placed in the cemetery on the Via Labicana. Ado's fairly
circumstantial account (repeated in summary form by Usuard) follows
Eusebius in making this Gorgonius a member of Diocletian's imperial
household. Later he came to be viewed in the West as a soldier-saint.
G. is so depicted, for example, on medieval seals of the cathedral at
Minden on the Weser (in today's Nordrhein-Westfalen), whither his relics
are said to have been translated from Gorze in the tenth century. A
panegyric from Minden for G.'s feast there was edited by Francois
Dolbeau in _Analecta Bollandiana_ 103 (1985), 35-59. G. is still the
patron of what is now the Catholic parish church there (still called a
'Dom') of Sts. Peter and Gorgonius.
Whereas the abbey at Gorze was called that of G., its surviving
twelfth-/thirteenth-century church (with later additions) is dedicated
to St. Stephen. Herewith some views of this St.-Etienne, restored in
the nineteenth century:
(twelfth-/thirteenth-century). Views:
http://tinyurl.com/zcuhe
http://tinyurl.com/f652v
http://vaux57.free.fr/galerie/gorze.htm
http://www.tholey-historisch.de/Kirche_gorze.jpg
http://www.tholey-historisch.de/Kirche_gorze001.jpg
Some views of the Dompfarrkirche St. Peter und St. Gorgonius at Minden:
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bild:Minden_Dom2.jpg
http://www.dom-minden.de/img/dom_pics01.jpg
http://www.dom-minden.de/img/dom_pics04.jpg
http://www.dom-minden.de/img/dom_pics03.jpg
The latter's Treasury has this early fifteenth-century arm reliquary of G.:
http://www.dom-minden.de/domschatz/reliquiare/gorgonius.html
and this mid-fifteenth-century statuette of him (sword lacking),
seemingly from a shine:
http://www.dom-minden.de/domschatz/figuren/gorgoniusstatuette.html
And here are St. Peter and G. on the seal of the cathedral prior
Wedekind vom Berge (1350-1369):
http://tinyurl.com/mqabm
The figures are reversed (naturally) on this stamp from 1230 for the
town seal of Minden:
http://tinyurl.com/n2e8c
Best,
John Dillon
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