medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Today (4. January) is the feast day of:
1) Pharaildis (??). Also known as Pharahildis, Pharailde, Veerhilde, Veerle, etc., P. is the patron saint of G(h)ent. She has a brief prosimetric Vita (BHL 6791), said to be of the twelfth century, that makes her the daughter of a king Theodoric who ruled in the border area of Lotharingia and Gaul. Through her prayers she obtained the grace of preserving her virginity on her wedding night. Thereafter P. went nightly to a monastery. Her husband, falsely suspecting her of adultery, beat her daily (except in the year during which P. helped him recover from a nearly fatal hunting accident). After many years of this he did die and P. was free to live as a pious widow until she was nearly ninety, engaging in acts of mercy and performing miracles.
This Vita (a.k.a. P.'s Vita prima) details one miracle. P. found some wild geese in a field and herded them into a pen for the night as though they were domestic animals. One was stolen by a servant, cooked, and partially consumed. P. reconstituted it and brought back to life. As G(h)ent's Latin name-forms 'Gandum' (whence French 'Gand') and 'Gandavum' were held to derive from a word for goose (cp. English 'gander' or German 'Gans'; modern scholarship favors a derivation from a Celtic word for confluence), a patronal allegory would seem to be operative here. Medieval Ghenters thought that P.'s remains had been in their city if not always then since at least 752, when, it was later recorded, they had been brought to that city's abbey of St. Bavo (Sint Baaf). P.'s Vita secunda, of the thirteenth century, is even more legendary, adding miracles and through a fabricated genealogy connecting her with other female patron saints of the region.
In 939 the count of Flanders obtained from the monks of St. Bavo some relics of P. for the chapel of his castle at G(h)ent. In the late twelfth-century the castle (het Gravensteen) was rebuilt and in the following century a collegiate church serving the castle and dedicated to P. was built in the immediate vicinity. It became a parish church in 1289, maintained a school for choristers, and was deconsecrated and structurally altered in the 1580s when G(h)ent was officially Calvinist. There's a description, with two views, of this former Sint-Veerlekerk, now the privately owned dwelling at Sint-Veerleplein, nr. 2, here (scroll down to "15 april 2005"):
http://tijlv.studentenweb.org/mt/archives/2005/04/
Here's a view of the rear of that building. The stepped gable is said to be a remnant of the reworked church:
http://tinyurl.com/y333xa
Reliefs from the church, now in G(h)ent's Sint-Niklaaskerk, are shown in the view at lower right here (text in Flemish):
http://www.stniklaas.com/NEDERLANDS/Verbouwing.htm
and in the upper right here (text in English):
http://www.stniklaas.com/ENGELS/Verbouwing.htm
The first two coins whose designs are reproduced here are church pennies from the Sint-Veeerlekerk. The first is from the early fifteenth century and the second from 1585, perhaps the last year of the church's existence as a place of worship:
http://tinyurl.com/yyvpm4
P. was widely venerated in late medieval and early modern Flanders. At Bruay-sur-l'Escaut (Nord-Pas-de-Calais), France, where she was said to have caused a spring to appear miraculously, her church containins an eleventh-century cenotaph of her. In this aerial view of the town the church can be seen a little above and to the right of center:
http://www.valenciennes-metropole.fr/adsl/BRUAY2.jpg
As a supposed saint of the imperial family, P. is represented by a mid-sixteenth-century statue in the Hofkirche in Innsbruck. Here's a view:
http://tinyurl.com/ynbmvs
This lacks the goose (too locally specific?) but has two other recurring elements of P.'s inconography: a house in which people are sheltering and loaves of bread that have been turned to stone. In the miracle account BHL 6794 the loaves are said to have belonged a woman who falsely claimed not to have any bread to share; their metamorphosis was her punishment. This is a hagiographic topos that also occurs in Leontius' Bios of Gregory of Agrigento, a Greek-language text not known to have been read at G(h)ent. Other instances?
For those unacquainted with the Innsbrucker Hofkirche, here's an illustrated, German-language site devoted to this Hapsburg dynastic monument:
http://www.hofkirche.at/hofkirche/
2) Theoctist of Sicily (??). Byzantine synaxaries record T. as the hegumen of a monastery at an otherwise unrecorded Koukoumos (vel sim.) in Sicily. We have no other information about him. In Orthodox churches, where T. is widely celebrated on this day. he and his fellow monks are often said to have been refugees from iconoclastic persecution at Constantinople or, at least, somewhere in the East and are usually dated to ca. 800. But this is early modern and later conjecture, unaccompanied by documentary or archaeological evidence, as is also the view of Ottavio Gaetani (d. 1620) that the monastery was located at today's Caccamo in Palermo province. T. has yet to enter the RM.
Best,
John Dillon
**********************************************************************
To join the list, send the message: join medieval-religion YOUR NAME
to: [log in to unmask]
To send a message to the list, address it to:
[log in to unmask]
To leave the list, send the message: leave medieval-religion
to: [log in to unmask]
In order to report problems or to contact the list's owners, write to:
[log in to unmask]
For further information, visit our web site:
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/medieval-religion.html
|