medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Today (28. February) is the feast day of:
1) Marana and Cyra (d. ca. 455?). We know about M. and C. from the _Historia religiosa_ of Theodoret of Cyrrhus. They were holy women of Berea in Syria (today's Aleppo) who acquired a small house outside of town and immured themselves in it, living a life of extreme asceticism and self-mortification. They received food and wake-up calls from devoted maidservants for whom they erected a smaller, attached house and with whom they conversed through a communicating window. Theodoret's portrait of these hermits presents them as still living at the time of his writing (early 440s).
Baronio entered M. and C. in the RM under 3. August. Byzantine synaxaries usually recorded them on today's date; the RM's latest version (2001, rev. 2005) has followed suit.
2) Romanus of Condat (d. ca. 465). We know about R. chiefly from the early sixth-century _Vita patrum jurensium_. By the time of Gregory of Tours' _Vita patrum_ some seventy years later he was already fading into legend. Around 435 R., who was already perhaps in his mid-thirties, decided to imitate the life of the Eastern desert fathers in the fastnesses of the Jura, where he established a hermitage at a place called Condidasco, now Saint-Claude in the Swiss canton of Jura. He attracted followers, notably his brother St. Lupicinus, and in time they founded other monastic colonies in the region. In 444 R. was ordained priest by St. Hilarius of Arles at a council in Besançon.
One of R.'s foundations was a community of women ruled over by his sister Iola (Yole) and overlooking the gorge of La Balme at today's Pratz (canton Jura). In his extreme old age R. died here on what had been intended as a farewell visit. A thirteenth-century chapel marks the traditional location of his grave:
http://tinyurl.com/2zy6yc
A brief, French-language account of the monastery of Condat and its successors is here:
http://tinyurl.com/2zn26l
3) Oswald of Worcester (d. 992). In leap years O. is celebrated on his _dies natalis_, 29. February. A leading figure of the tenth-century Benedictine reformation in England, O. was a nephew of St. Oda the Severe, archbishop of Canterbury, from whom he received some of his early training, and a more distant relative of Oscytel, archbishop of York, who became his patron after Oda's death. He made his monastic profession at Fleury-sur-Loire and was a monk there until in the very early 960s he was named bishop of Worcester.
At Worcester, O. introduced a monastic community next to the cathedral but seems not to have converted his chapter into a monastic one (as was alleged in the twelfth century). He also founded Ramsey Abbey on an island in the fens in today's Cambridgeshire and re-founded Winchcombe Abbey in his own diocese. In 971 or 972 O. was elevated to the archbishopric of York but kept much wealthier Worcester, which is where he died. A cult sprang up almost immediately. He has an early Vita ascribed to Byrhtferth of Ramsey (BHL 6374; between 997 and 1002) and a fuller Vita et Miracula by Eadmer (BHL 6375-76; ca. 1115), who was asked to write it by the monks of Worcester.
The fifth item here is an expandable view of a page from the so-called Ramsey Psalter, said by Nicholas Brooks in his Oxford DNB entry on O. (v. 42, pp. 79-84) "likely to have been made for Oswald's own use at York or Worcester":
http://tinyurl.com/29txs4
A page of views of Worcester Cathedral is here:
http://tinyurl.com/2m2nbc
This is very largely a twelfth- and thirteenth-century building, restored in the nineteenth century.
And here's a view of the remains of Ramsey Abbey's fifteenth-century gatehouse:
http://www.ramseyabbey.co.uk/images/Abbey%20Gate%20House.jpg
Best,
John Dillon
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