medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Today (14. December) is the feast day of:
Agnellus of Naples (d. ca. 596). All our sources for the life and
doings of today's less well known saint of the Regno are late. The earliest,
Peter the Subdeacon's tenth-century _Libellus miraculorum sancti Agnelli_,
tells us that St. Gaudiosus (the fifth-century G. of Abitina; 27. October) had
founded on the city's acropolis (late medieval and modern Caponapoli) a
monastery of which A. later became abbot. This monastery did not survive.
At some point between 767 and 780 bishop Stephen II erected on the site
the monastery dedicated to Gaudiosus that long was a feature of the city's
ecclesiastical landscape. Gaudiosus appears in the early ninth-century
Marble Calendar of Naples; Agnellus does not. But when in 1517 A.'s
present church was built at Caponapoli excavations revealed what is said to
have been his burial inscription, executed in a fashion consistent with a late
sixth-century date.
Despite Peter's _Libellus_***, which is really about A.'s cures and is a
nice miracle collection giving us some flavor of early medieval city
life, it was not until several more centuries had passed before A.'s
cult really took off in Naples, though it is probable that the monastery
of saint Agnellus near Sorrento that features prominently in the ninth-
or tenth-century Life of St. Antoninus of Sorrento (14. February) was
at least by then thought to honor the Neapolitan abbot of this name.
In the later Middle Ages and into the early modern period A. was one
of Naples' more important civic saints. His name survives in his church
and its adjoining little piazza of Sant'Aniello a Caponapoli:
http://www.danpiz.net/napoli/monumenti/grecoromana/3.htm
A chapel dedicated to A. in the eastern environs of Naples gave its name
to one of that city's later medieval outlying communities (_casali_):
Sant'Agnello a Cambranum. Today's Sant'Agnello (NA), just east of
Sorrento, is named after the monastery dedicated to A. whose medieval
village it originally was. It has a very pleasing church also dedicated to A.
But that is a baroque structure and as such beyond the remit of this list.
A. is widely venerated in coastal Campania; since the fifteenth century he
has also been the patron saint of Guarcino (FR) in southern Lazio.
Best,
John Dillon
(Last year's post lightly revised)
*** Edited by Antonio Vuolo as _Una testimonianza agiografica
napoletana: il ’Libellus miraculorum s. Agnelli’ (sec. X)_ (Napoli:
Edizioni scientifiche italiane, 1987).
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