medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Today (28. May) is the feast day of:
1) Emilius, Felix, Priam, and Lucian (?). The (pseudo-)Hieronymian Martyrology lists for today a group consisting of Emilius, Felix, Priamus, and Felicianus (sometimes given as Licianus or Lucianus), said in most witnesses to have been martyred in Sardinia. Usuard follows suit, using Lucianus as the name of the last saint. Twentieth-century hagiographical scholarship usually views the entry in the (ps.-)HM as a garbled doublet of that for for the Roman martyrs Primus and Felicianus of 9. June and interprets the "In Sardinia" part as a mistake. Sardinians have been more accommodating but even so only Emilius, Priam, and Lucian seem to have been venerated on the island, and Lucian seemingly only after the Invention in 1620 of his putative remains along with those of E. and P.
E. and P. are the patrons of the city of Bosa (OR) and of the homonymous diocese (E. is Bosa's traditional protobishop). The city's modern cathedral (replacing one originally of the twelfth century) is dedicated to the BVM and to E. and M., whose statues decorating the high altar are garlanded with flowers today. At Villanova Truschedu (OR) and at Tortolě (OG) E., here called Gemiliano, has a civic patronal festival and present or former church dedications. At Lanusei (OG) there is a small sanctuary dedicated to P.
Whereas much of this recognition appears not to antedate the later sixteenth century, in the diocese of Cagliari the churches dedicated to E. (as Gemiliano/Mamiliano/Milia[n]u) at Sestu (CA) and at Samassi (VS) are originally from the latter half of the thirteenth century. Each replaced an earlier church at its site and at least at Samassi the predecessor, attested in a charter of 1119, was also dedicated to E. The same diocese has a parish of San Priamo at the locality of that name in San Vito (CA), where to a twelfth-century chapel dedicated to P. has been added an early modern church dedicated to St. Andrew. At all of these places E. and/or P. are/is still the focus of a civic patronal festival.
An Italian-language site, with exterior photographs and a floor plan, on the rural church of San Gemiliano at Sestu is here:
http://web.tiscali.it/itgnervi/gemiliano.htm
Most of the photographs are at the bottom of the page.
The link below that ("Torna Chiese Romaniche") brings one to a page with links to similar treatments of other (mostly also small) "romanesque" churches in the area.
Another Italian-language page on this church, with three photographs (incl. an interior view of the late sixteenth-century Catalan Gothic front portico), is here:
http://www.ilportalesardo.it/monumenti/casestu.htm
Another, with a better view of the apses and with bibliography:
http://tinyurl.com/5v4p6h
Single views:
http://www.infosestu.it/immagini%20sestu/san%20gemiliano.jpg
http://img138.imageshack.us/img138/2884/2810071157xs3.jpg
http://img89.imageshack.us/img89/2338/2810071158aw4.jpg
http://img124.imageshack.us/img124/4026/2810071159is0.jpg
http://img510.imageshack.us/img510/4426/2810071150ja3.jpg
An Italian-language account, together with a photograph, of the church of San Gemiliano at Samassi occupies the lower portion of this page:
http://www.hellosardinia.it/dicembre99.htm
Another, with a view of the apse and with bibliography:
http://tinyurl.com/57uk2o
2) Germanus of Paris (d. 576). According to Venantius Fortunatus, the author of our earliest account of him (BHL 3468), G. was born in the territory of Autun, was educated there, and served as deacon and then priest in its diocesan clergy before being named abbot of its monastery of St. Symphorian in the year 540. In the mid-550s king Childebert I made him his arch-chaplain and then bishop of Paris. Personally ascetic, G. was known for his learning, for his kindness to the less fortunate, and for his miracles. When he died he was buried in the monastery he had founded, since known as Saint-Germain-des-Prés. His cult was immediate.
In 755 G.'s remains were translated to the high altar of the abbey church in the presence of Pepin the Younger and his sons Charles (not yet the Great) and Carloman. There they remained until their destruction during the French Revolution. Herewith a few views of the abbey church, starting from the front with its massive late tenth-/early eleventh-century belltower and working back to the twelfth-century chancel and ambulatory:
http://members.virtualtourist.com/m/p/m/1507e/
http://p.vtourist.com/2589455-St_Germain_des_Pres-Paris.jpg
http://tinyurl.com/2fjjet
http://tinyurl.com/ytbvqw
http://tinyurl.com/yuqcgd
http://tinyurl.com/yok4b6
http://tinyurl.com/2ccrxd
http://tinyurl.com/2xxamw
3) Lanfranc of Bec and of Canterbury (Bl.; d. 1089). A native of Pavia whose father was a magistrate there, P. obtained an education in the trivial arts and then voyaged abroad in search of his fortune. He wound up in Normandy, where he ran a school at Avranches and later entered the recently established monastery at Bec, at that time still headed by its founder St. Herluin. There L. became prior and again ran a school. According to one of the telling anecdotes that stud his twelfth-century Vita from Bec traditionally ascribed to Milo Crispin (BHL 4719), L. became known to the Bec's wealthy patrons as someone rather more practical than its abbot.
In 1063 duke William of Normandy chose L. to be abbot of the newly founded abbot of St.-Etienne at Caen, where he also continued to teach. Some of L.'s students from his time at at Bec and at Caen are well known to medievalists: Ivo of Chartres, Anselm of Bec and Canterbury, Guitmund of Aversa. Others were sent by pope Nicholas II to prepare for service in papal and imperial chanceries. It was during this period that L. wrote his grammatically and rhetorically informed commentary on Paul's epistles (incl. Hebrews, regarded by L. as Pauline) and undertook what became a lengthy opposition to the eucharistic teachings of Berengar of Tours.
L. served William an ecclesiastical counselor and envoy both before and after the latter's conquest of England. In 1070 William chose him to replace the deposed Stigand as archbishop of Canterbury. There he successfully asserted Canterbury's primacy over York, worked to regain ecclesiastical properties alienated in the recent troubles, revitalized and expanded Canterbury's monastic chapter, started the construction of the present cathedral, and promoted the well-being of other monasteries in the realm. After his death he seems to have had a bit of a cult in Normandy but none in England, where even at Canterbury he was remembered annually with a Mass _in memoriam_.
Two pages of views of the mostly eleventh-century église abbatiale St-Étienne at Caen, begun by L.:
http://www.pitt.edu/~medart/menufrance/caeetie.html
http://tinyurl.com/3c7epx
L.'s subscription to the royal constitution of 1072 affirming his primatial status is shown here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Acrdwnch.jpg
Here's a twelfth-century manuscript drawing of L. at the incipit of his most widely circulated work, the anti-Berengarian _De corpore et sanguine Domini_ (Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodl. 569; originally from St Albans abbey):
http://tinyurl.com/6mz5v6
4) Ubaldesca (d. 1205). The most authentic form of U.'s Vita is a sixteenth-century Italian translation of a lost Latin original seemingly written written shortly after 1261; the latter also served as the base for two expanded early modern Vite, also in Italian, that underlie most of accounts of U. circulating today. According to this translation, probably written before 1586 and first published in 1996, U. was born of humble parentage in the Pisan suburb of Calcinaia. At the age of fourteen she entered the convent of San Giovanni in Pisa's Chinzica quarter. She spent the remainder of her life there, seemingly as a lay sister, living a life of virtue and of extreme self-denial and interacting with the Pisan public when begging for alms on the city's streets. Late in life, U. was regarded as a living saint; post-mortem miracles expanded her cult among her fellow Pisans.
By 1207 San Giovanni had come under the control of the Hospitallers of the nearby church and convent of San Sepolcro. Later in the thirteenth century it was functioning as a women's hospital and, though the Vita gives no indication of this, it may already have done so in U.'s lifetime. When U. was in extremis, her monastery's chaplain, a priest of San Sepolcro, made arrangements for her exequies and for the burial of her remains at the latter church. U. was henceforth both a city saint and an Hospitaller one, celebrated liturgically on 28. May. Sixtus V recognized her as Blessed when in 1586 he authorized the translation of some of her relics to Malta. Pisan calendars, etc. consistently call her Saint, as does also the "new" RM of 2001.
U. is also Calcinaia's patron saint. In 1924 her relics at San Sepolcro were translated to Calcinaia's church of San Giovanni Battista, where they are kept in the effigy shown here:
http://santiebeati.it/immagini/Original/90595/90595A.JPG
Stile Pisano's illustrated page on Pisa's San Sepolcro, with many expandable images at bottom and with links to other collections of views higher up, is here:
http://tinyurl.com/2z5dhb
Best,
John Dillon
(Emilius, Felix, Priam, and Lucian, Germanus of Paris, and Ubaldesca revised from last year's post)
**********************************************************************
To join the list, send the message: join medieval-religion YOUR NAME
to: [log in to unmask]
To send a message to the list, address it to:
[log in to unmask]
To leave the list, send the message: leave medieval-religion
to: [log in to unmask]
In order to report problems or to contact the list's owners, write to:
[log in to unmask]
For further information, visit our web site:
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/medieval-religion.html
|
