medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Today (9. June) is the feast day of:
1) Primus and Felician (d. ca. 303, perhaps). P. and F. are Roman martyrs of the Via Nomentana included in the _Depositio Martyrum_ of the Chronographer of 364. In the seventh century pope Theodore I (642-49) translated their remains to Rome's church of Santo Stefano Rotondo, where they flank the Cross in a seventh-century mosaic (recently restored):
http://tinyurl.com/ysvul3
http://tinyurl.com/3g4tvh
http://www.jemolo.com/alta/imgro451.jpg
Detail (Primus):
http://www.jemolo.com/alta/ro452.jpg
P. and F. have had a church dedicated to them in Pavia since perhaps the ninth century, though the present facade is dated to the later twelfth century and additions to and reworkings of the building from the later Middle Ages through the eighteenth century render a determination of its original date highly conjectural. Herewith a not very good view of the facade:
http://www.miapavia.it/i/turismo/2005/primofiliciano_g.jpg
Certainly by the ninth century these saints' legendary Passio (BHL 6922) had come into existence. This makes them brothers martyred in the Great Persecution, interrogated separately and then tortured and executed jointly. The English-language translation of the third nocturn lesson from their proper reproduces the essential story line:
http://tinyurl.com/2gl7t
Laura Gibbs' Bestiaria Latina Blog gives a text of Jacopo da Varazze's treatment of P. and F. in the _Legenda Aurea_ and also three expandable views of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century illuminations of scenes of their suffering:
http://tinyurl.com/kpdy6
Views of the martyrdom of P. and F. in a late thirteenth-century _Legenda Aurea_ (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, ms. HM 3027, f. 65) are available towards the bottom of this page:
http://tinyurl.com/33p2qn
2) Ephraem the Syrian (d. 373). E. (also Ephraim, Ephrem, Ephram). E. was born into a Syriac-speaking community in the Roman garrison town of Nisibis in upper Mesopotamia, today's Nusaybin in Turkey's Mardin province. His energy and learning led to his early ordination to the diaconate and to appointment as teacher by his bishop (St. Jacob of Nisibis, d. ca. 339). E. was extraordinarily productive both as an hymnographer and as a biblical commentator. The Roman cession of Nisibis to Persia in 363 entailed the removal of its Syriac Christian population to Edessa, the center of Syriac Christianity.
Shortly after E.'s death legendary accounts of him at variance with the evidence of his writings began to circulate. Some of his writing was translated into other "Eastern" languages, including Greek and Coptic, and a large corpus of pseudo-Ephraemic texts arose. Many of the latter were still ascribed to E. when in 1920 pope Benedict XV proclaimed him a Doctor of the Church.
Herewith some views of Nisibis'/Nusaybin's largely eighth-century church of St. Jacob (Mor Yacqub):
http://tinyurl.com/2oz3u5
http://tinyurl.com/34qq3k
The church's baptistery portion dates to 359, when E. was still in Nisibis. The first of these views is from 1911:
http://www.gerty.ncl.ac.uk/photos/fpx/R_092.htm
http://tinyurl.com/2o3hfl
Jacob's tomb (his relics are said to be in Edessa) is in the crypt of the baptistery:
http://tinyurl.com/2o9xxf
A not awfully good reproduction of the thirteenth-century depiction of E. in the Meryem Ana Kilisesi at Diyarbakýr (formerly Amida) in southeastern Turkey:
http://tinyurl.com/69uovw
E. (at lower right, with St. George and St. John Damascene) in a panel from an early fourteenth-century triptych now in Saint Catherine's Monastery, Sinai:
http://tinyurl.com/5ctk4u
The Dormition of E. (mid-fifteenth-century), icon in the Iviron Monastery, Mt. Athos:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/65486023@N00/7905714/
3) Maximian of Syracuse (d. 594). We know about M. from the correspondence of pope St. Gregory the Great. He was a Sicilian who moved to Rome, entered Gregory's monastery of St. Andrew, served under Pelagius II and Gregory as papal apocrisarius in Constantinople, and ended his life as bishop of Syracuse and papal legate for all Sicily. M. was one of G.'s sources for miracle stories in the _Dialogues_. G.'s letter to M. (_Ep._ 4. 11) on the incompatibility of simultaneous monastic and clerical service by the same person was included in revised form in Gratian's _Decretum_.
4) Columba of Iona (d. 597). C. (also Colum Cille) was a member of a northwest-Irish branch of the royal kin-group of the Uí Néill. We know very little about his life prior to his founding, along with several close relatives, of the monastery of Iona in the Irish kingdom of Dál Riata in the southwest of today's Scotland. During his thirty-four years at Iona C. organized a family of monastic settlements, including some back in Ireland (e.g. Durrow, founded by C. on a return trip between 585 and 589). The Irish vernacular poem _Amra Coluim Cille _ ("Eulogy of Colum Cille"), written shortly after C.'s death, speaks in some detail about his learning and his monastic vocation. The major source for C.'s life, a Vita (BHL 1886, 1887) by his later seventh-century successor at Iona, Adomnán, also documents his early cult, which was already popular as well as monastic. In the central Middle Ages various anonymous poems in Latin and in Irish were ascribed to him.
5) Richard of Andria (d. ca. 1199). It's not every saint of the Regno whose hagiographic dossier includes a memorandum of ocular testimony by a member of the kingdom's leading nobility. This is the _Historia inventionis et translationis gloriosi corporis s. Richardi Anglici confessoris et episcopi Andriensis_ (BHL 7205, 7206) ostensibly by (but in all likelihood written for) Francesco II Del Balzo, Duke of Andria, Count of Montescaglioso, member of the Sacro Regio Consilio of the mostly mainland kingdom of Sicily. Dated 15. September 1451, this outlines in a first-person narration how the duke had in 1438 been informed by a certain Tassus that the remains of Andria's sainted bishop Richard, lost from sight close to a century earlier during Louis of Hungary's invasion of the kingdom (Louis' mercenaries sacked Andria in 1350), could be found buried in Andria's cathedral.
The duke goes on to say how he and the then bishop oversaw the recovery of these relics and their translation to the main altar and how cathedral documents had later been discovered giving a brief biography of the saint (for whom there was then no Office), establishing his _dies natalis_ as 9. June, listing post-mortem miracles resumed in the duke's account, and indicating that R. had been canonized at some obscurely expressed time in the now distant past (generally interpreted by those giving some credence to this account as indicating the pontificate of Boniface VIII). According to the duke, these documents (the Miracles excepted) having later been lost, confirmation of R.'s cult was obtained from Eugenius IV (d. 1447).
That R. was a twelfth-century bishop of Andria is certain from other mentions. That he was English is not otherwise attested. No independent record exists of either the alleged original canonization or the alleged confirmation by Eugenius IV.
In 1438 duke Francesco began a major reconstruction of Andria's twelfth-century cathedral, built over an earlier (9th- or 10th-century) church; an early addition (1440) was a special chapel housing R.'s remains. Dedicated to Our Lady of the Assumption, this building was redecorated in baroque mode in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; in the nineteenth century a neo-classical porch was added. A restoration in 1965 returned much of the interior (but not R.'s chapel) to a "gothic" appearance. Two expandable exterior views of the cathedral and its belltower:
http://tinyurl.com/45o2p8
The crypt, a remnant of an early medieval predecessor church, houses tombs believed by some to be the resting places of Frederick II's wives Isabella (Yolande) of Brienne and Isabella (Elizabeth) of England (F.'s residence of Castel del Monte is only some 18 km. distant from Andria). Some views:
http://tinyurl.com/5xqjvj
http://tinyurl.com/52ttq9
and the top one here:
http://www.bed-and-breakfast.it/pagina.cfm?ID=1935&IDregione=13
And, for those who read Italian, an account of what was discovered when the tombs were opened in 1994:
http://www.stupormundi.it/intrigo.html
This page on artistic treasures of the diocese includes expandable views of two late fifteenth-century enamels that until 1965 had, with others, adorned R.'s reliquary cabinet in the chapel dedicated to him (the Cappellone di San Riccardo):
http://www.diocesiandria.it/opere.htm
Another chapel houses Andria's "Sacra Spina", a single thorn supposedly taken from the Crown of Thorns. Its tip is said briefly to turn red in years when the feast of the Annunciation and Good Friday coincide. 2005 was such a year:
http://digilander.libero.it/davide.arpe/AndriaSpina2005.htm
The thorn's Official Site is here:
http://www.diocesiandria.it/sacraspina/#
This thorn is said to have come to Andria as a gift of Charles II late in his reign (1285-1309), very possibly in 1308 when his daughter Beatrice of Anjou married Bertrand des Baux / Bertrando del Balzo, lord of Andria (yes, these del Balzo are a branch of the medieval Provençal family who were once the lords of Les Baux). Its miraculous reddening is not recorded prior to the early modern period.
Best,
John Dillon
(older posts revised)
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