medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture

Today (26. April) is the feast day of:

1)  Anacletus, pope (d. ca. 91).  A. was the second bishop of Rome after St. Peter.  Both this form of his name and the (pseudo-)Hieronymian Martyrology's 'Aninclitus' are latinizations of Greek 'Anenkletos' ('Blameless'), the form given by such Greek writers as Irenaeus and Eusebius.  He is also called Cletus, as in his commemoration in the Roman canon of the Mass, and in the Liberian Catalogue, followed by the _Liber Pontificalis_, he appears as two popes, Cletus and Anacletus.  According to the _Liber Pontificalis_. A. erected a _memoria_ over Peter's tomb (this is widely disbelieved; the similarly named pope St. Anicetus is a more likely choice) and was himself buried nearby.  The tradition that A. died a martyr seems to be without foundation. 

A. seems at one time to have been a saint of the Regno.  At Ruvo di Puglia (BA) in Apulia a subterranean oratory beneath the present Chiesa del Purgatorio has been called the Grotta di San Cleto since at least the seventeenth century, when according to the ecclesiastical historian Ferdinando Ughelli the following inscription, written in crude "gothic" letters, was legible on one of its walls: "Cives Ruborum nolite timere, Ego sum Cletus Rubensis Episcopus, Tertius post Petrum, qui pro vobis oro" ("Do not fear, citizens of Ruvo.  I am Cletus of Ruvo bishop, third after Peter, who prays for you").  An illustrated, Italian-language account of this space, which holds a Roman-period cistern, is here:
http://www.enec.it/Cripte/Ruvo/Luogo.htm

On the theory that A. (as Cletus) was the town's patron saint before the present one (Biagio, i.e. Blaise), some have thought that the unidentified seated figure above the rose window on Ruvo's thirteenth-century cathedral (finished in 1237 and since rebuilt) is really he.  Views of this putative A. are here:
http://tinyurl.com/3dq5gd  

2)  Trudpert (d. ca. 600, supposedly).  T. is the rather legendary saint of the monastery named for him at today's Münstertal im Schwarzwald in Baden-Württemberg, about twenty kilometers south of Freiburg im Breisgau.  According to his earliest Vita (BHL 8329), he was an Irish missionary who settled here as a hermit and was soon murdered by two serfs who were to have been his laborers.  The monastery, which became very wealthy, grew up over what was said to have been his grave.

A twelfth-century cross from St. Trudpert is shown here:
http://tinyurl.com/3aclzc
The late thirteenth-century Freiburg Cross in the Hermitage is also from St. Trudpert:
http://hermitagemuseum.org/html_En/03/hm3_10_5a.html
The Hermitage held an exhibition in 2003/04 focusing on this piece:
http://tinyurl.com/3ajv94
Also from St. Trudpert is this thirteenth-century set of altar vessels:
http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/litu/hod_47.101.26-29.htm 

3)  Riquier (Richarius; d. ca. 645).  R. founded the monastery of Celle (Centula; also known as the abbey of Ponthieu) at today's Saint-Riquier (Somme) in about 625.  He has a late seventh-century Vitae whose reworking by Alcuin in the early ninth century is the subject of an article by Michel Banniard: "Les deux vies de Saint Riquier: du latin médiatique au latin hiératique", _Médiévales_, no. 25 (1993), 45-52.  A view of the abbey's fifteenth-/early sixteenth-century church, today's abbatiale St-Riquier, is here:
http://tinyurl.com/3cwyaz
A deliberately degraded reproduction for the Web of an early nineteenth-century engraving of the church's portal is here:
http://tinyurl.com/2gr2ch
And an old-postcard view of the interior is here:
http://www.acay.com.au/~gsm/StRiquier-Church-nave.JPG

4)  Paschasius Radbertus (d. ca. 860).  The learned theologian R. was a monk of Corbie.  He is probably best known for his _De corpore et sanguine Domini_, an exposition of the doctrine of the Real Presence, his commentary on Matthew in twelve books, and his Marian _De partu Virginis_.

5)  Stephen of Perm (d. 1396).  After making his monastic profession at Rostov Veliky, where he studied Greek and Old Slavonic, the Komi-speaking Russian S. (also Stephen Hrap) became a missionary among the Zyrians, a Finno-Ugric people in the Komi region of the nothern Urals.  He developed for them a script, the Old Permic alphabet, and translated Orthodox texts into Komi.  In 1383 he was appointed the first bishop of Perm, with his seat at his monastic center at Ust-Vym.  S. died while on a trip to Moscow and was buried there in what is now the Kremlin.  He has a Life by Epiphanius the Wise (d. 1420).

Best,
John Dillon

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