medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture

Today (22. May) is the feast day of:

1)  Castus of Calvi (d. 66, supposedly).  Today's less well known saint of the Regno is the legendary martyred protobishop of today's Calvi Risorta (CE) in northern Campania, the successor to ancient Cales and medievally called simply Calvi.  He and his homonym of Sinuessa (CE) and of Sessa Aurunca (CE) in the same Campanian province, a fellow martyr celebrated locally on this day (but entered in the RM for 1. July as the C. of Sts. Castus and Secundinus), are probably in origin the same saint whose cults differentiated in the early or central Middle Ages.  A widely held scholarly view is that C. is the third-century African martyr of the this name whose cult spread early to Campania and there generated new identities for C. at different locales.  In addition to the places already mentioned, a C. has been venerated at Benevento, Capua, Gaeta, and Sora at the very least.

Our C. (he of Calvi) has a legendary Passio (BHL 1649) linking him with a fellow martyr Cassius (also thought to be a transplant from Africa but said to have been the protobishop of Sinuessa).  Surviving in the form of lections for their feast at Capua, this is thought to be derived from the now lost Passio of these saints said (by the not entirely reliable Peter the Deacon) to have been written by the young Gregory of Terracina while he was still a monk at Montecassino.  That would put his text on C. and C. towards the end of the eleventh century and make it closely contemporary with the initial building Calvi's originally late eleventh-century cathedral of San Casto.  An Italian-language fact sheet on that structure is here:
http://tinyurl.com/2v64e9

Recent views of Calvi's cathedral:
http://www.cattedrale-calvirisorta.com/cop.jpg
http://www.campaniatour.it/immagini/ml/images/WlTQ_g.jpg
http://www.campaniatour.it/immagini/ml/images/qWiq_g.jpg
http://www.campaniatour.it/immagini/ml/images/BWtI_g.jpg
Early twentieth-century views:
http://www.cattedrale-calvirisorta.com/comera.htm
Capitals in the crypt:
http://www.cattedrale-calvirisorta.com/imgCript.htm

The sixteenth-century historian of the archdiocese of Capua, Michele Monaco, reports having seen an altar to C. and Cassius at Sora (where both were celebrated today) with the two saints depicted as bishops on the arch above it.  Monaco also briefly recounts a legend whereby enemies preparing to attack Sora were dissuaded by a dream vision of the two saints holding up torches atop a mountain and displaying a huge army arrayed in the form of a cross.


2)  Julia of Corsica (d. 5th cent., supposedly).  J. is listed for today by the (pseudo- )Hieronymian Martyrology as a martyr on Corsica.  She has a legendary Passio (two closely related versions, BHL 4516 and 4517) that make her one of the many saints from Italian coastal areas to have fled persecution in distant  Africa.  In her case, the legend appears to originate not in Corsica but at Gorgona, an island in the Tuscan Archipelago approximately 37 km. distant from Livorno: monks of Gorgona, apprised by mournful angels that J.'s crucifixion had just taken place, sailed to the Corsican shore, took J.'s corpse down from her crucifix, brought her to Gorgona with miraculous speed in the face of a strong contrary wind, and there embalmed her and placed her in a tomb.  In one version, the legend itself is ascribed to angelic authorship.

According to medieval tradition, in the early 760s Ansa, wife of the Lombard king Desiderius, had Julia's relics translated to Brescia, where they were interred in the abbey church of San Salvatore at the time of the latter's consecration by pope Paul I.  This translation in turn has recently been pronounced fictional, with the start of J.'s major cult at Brescia being effectively re-dated to the ninth or tenth century (in the Renaissance the abbey was greatly expanded and became known as Santa Giulia).  The hymns from her office there are monuments of medieval liturgical poetry from Italy.

J. is the principal patron of Corsica and is also patron of Livorno.  Like the Corsican martyrs Paragorius, Parthaeus, and Parthenopaeus (7. September; discussed briefly in connection with yesterday's St. Restituta of Corsica), J. seems also to have been venerated medievally at Noli in western Liguria.  For her cult, see Giancarlo Andenna, ed., _Culto e storia in Santa Giulia_ (Brescia: Grafo, 2001), esp. the articles by Gabriel Silagi on the Passio and hymns and by Gian Pietro Brogiolo on the history of J.'s cult at Brescia).

Views of San Salvatore at Brescia:
http://www.brescia.lombardiainrete.it/brescia/santagiulia.asp
http://tinyurl.com/59a6z8
http://tinyurl.com/3cdrr3 

And now for something completely different: a ruined church (or perhaps two churches) on Cape Noli, a structure that _may_ once have been the church dedicated to J. mentioned in 1191 as having been in that vicinity:
http://www.archaeoastronomy.it/santa%20giulia3.JPG


3)  Atto of Pistoia (d. 1153?).  The probably Tuscan A. (there is also a view that he was of Iberian origin) is thought to have entered the abbey of Vallombrosa around 1100.  He wrote a now lost commentary on the Epistles and Vitae of St. Barnabas and of Vallombrosa's founder, St. John Gualbert.  A. became abbot of Vallombrosa around 1120 and bishop of Pistoia in 1134.  As bishop he continued to observe the rules of his Order, served as a papal mediator in ecclesiastical disputes in Tuscany, and founded three hospitals (one of which was enriched with a part of the skull of St. James, donated by the archbishop and chapter of Compostella to the bishop and chapter of Pistoia).

A. was buried in a church near the cathedral and enjoyed a cult both at Pistoia and in his Order.  In 1337 his remains were accorded a formal recognition, were pronounced incorrupt, and were translated to an altar in Pistoia's cathedral.  A.'s cult was confirmed in 1605.  In this detail of Neri di Bicci's late fourteenth- or early fifteenth-century painting of St. John Gualbert and other Vallombrosan saints and blesseds in Florence's Santa Trinita, A. is the mitred figure to the founder's left:
http://tinyurl.com/56u348    


4)  Humility of Faenza (d. 1310).  The monastic founder and mystic H. is perhaps unique in medieval Italy as a known woman author of a substantial body of Latin texts unlikely to have been ghostwritten or significantly redacted by a male secretary or confessor.  These are her fifteen so-called _Sermons_, of which some are sermons in the general medieval and modern sense and the remainder, for which H. accurately uses the term _oratio_ (‘prayer’), are formally addresses of devotion to Christ, the Virgin Mary, and others.

Apart from the testimony of the _Sermons_ themselves, almost all that we know of H. comes from two early fourteenth-century lives, one in Latin and one in Italian.  A talented and determined individual with little if any formal education, she was born into a noble family at Faenza.  There Humility (her name in religion; previously it had been
Rosanese) moved from married life to that of a conventual, then became an ascetic solitary, and subsequently founded a community of Vallombrosan nuns.  In 1282 together with a few companions she traveled to Florence and established in that city the Vallombrosan convent of St. John the Evangelist, where she spent the remaining years of her life.  Recognized as a living saint both in Faenza and in Florence, H. was shortly after her death the subject of a statue by Andrea Orcagna and of a polyptych altarpiece whose paintings have often been attributed to Pietro Lorenzetti.

H.'s cult was papally authorized in 1720 for the Vallombrosans and in 1721 for the dioceses of Florence and Faenza.  She was canonized in 1948.  Julia Bolton Holloway has an excellent website on H., complete with color images from the now disassembled polyptych illustrating H.'s life and miracles often ascribed to Pietro Lorenzetti:
http://www.umilta.net/umilta.html


5)  Rita of Cascia (d. 1447).  The pious daughter of elderly parents in or near Cascia in Umbria, R. had an arranged marriage to a brutish man who beat her badly but whom she is said to have eventually converted from his savage ways.  After the husband had been assassinated and the two sons she had borne him had also died, R. entered the Augustinian convent at Cascia (supposedly on her third try and only through the intervention of Sts. John the Baptist, Augustine of Hippo, and Nicholas of Tolentino), where she lived ascetically as a lay sister, operated miracles, and was miraculously wounded in the forehead by a thorn from Christ's crown.  R., who was canonized in 1627, was venerated as a saint from the moment of her death.  Her body is said to have been incorrupt, though according to this page from today's Basilica di Santa Rita that is not now so:
http://tinyurl.com/6rewnz
And here she is:
http://tinyurl.com/6lqorg

Best,
John Dillon
(Castus of Calvi, Julia of Corsica, and Humility of Faenza lightly revised from older posts)

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