medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Today (14. May) is the feast day of:
1) Matthias, apostle (d. 1st cent.). According to Acts 1:21-26, after the Ascension M. was chosen by lot to replace Judas. After that he disappears from the New Testament. By the second century he had become popular with Gnostics in Egypt. Though Clement of Alexandria quotes one of their number (Heracleon) as saying that M. died peacefully, by far the more common view was that he had preached among the savages and cannibals of Ethiopia and had there been martyred. A Gnostic Gospel was written in M.'s name, while he and St. Andrew are the joint protagonists of a legendary set of Acta recounting their doings in the land of the cannibals. M. is also said to have evangelized in other places.
Here's a portrait of M. from the originally eleventh-century Cappella San Giorgio in the cathedral of San Gaudenzio at Novara:
http://homes.dico.unimi.it/~monga/etc/SMattia.jpg
context:
http://homes.dico.unimi.it/~monga/smattia.html
Here are two fourteenth-century depictions of M.'s evangelizing and martyrdom (Paris, BN, ms. Français 18 , foll. 58, 67):
http://tinyurl.com/ynq8ke
http://tinyurl.com/2he8c7
In later medieval and Renaissance art M. is often shown with with a halberd or an axe, symbolizing his supposed decapitation, as in this image from the fifteenth-century rood screen at St Agnes, Cawston (Norfolk):
http://www.norfolkchurches.co.uk/cawston/Dscf3692.jpg
context:
http://www.norfolkchurches.co.uk/cawston/cawston.htm
And here's M.'s martyrdom from the Nuremberg Chronicle (1493, Beloit College copy, fol. CVIIv):
http://tinyurl.com/yon426
There is a view in the archdiocese of Trier that M. was buried in Palestine, that St. Helena had found his remains, and that she brought them back to this late antique capital of the empire, where they now repose. Witnesses to this belief do not appear to antedate the ninth century. In 1127, during the demolition there of the old abbey church of St. Eucharius (Trier's first bishop) in preparation for the erection of a successor, these putative remains were miraculously rediscovered. The new church, now much rebuilt, quickly become known as that of M. Some views of M.'s modern tomb and of his former resting place in the crypt are here:
http://tinyurl.com/ynos2e
And here's a view of the tombs of St. Eucharius and Valerius (V. is Trier's second bishop) still down in the crypt:
http://tinyurl.com/yvnewn
2) Constantius of Capri (d. late 8th cent., perhaps). Last year's post on today's less well known saint of the Regno is here:
http://tinyurl.com/39da6j
All but one of the URLs (the second of the three brief, Italian-language accounts) still work.
Best,
John Dillon
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