medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Today (23. June) is also the feast day of:
Agrippina (d. ca. 256, supposedly). A virgin martyr of Rome said to have been put to death in the reign of Valerian (253-60), A. is unknown to the early martyrologies. Whereas her cult has traveled widely, she is essentially an Italo-Greek saint of Sicily principally venerated at today's Mineo (CT) on the northeastern edge of the Monti Iblei.
A.'s legend is attested to by a Latin-language Translation from Rome to Mineo (BHL 173; thought to be of the later eleventh or twelfth century and derived from a Greek-language predecessor) as well as by a Greek-language Office, Canon, and brief _menaion_ entry, all transmitted in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century printed sources drawing upon older Sicilian manuscripts. These together form a reasonably coherent dossier suggesting that her legend, as we now have it, goes back as least as far the eighth century (possibly earlier if a post-mortem miracle said to have occurred during a Muslim raid is a later accretion). For a popularly written English-language synopsis, see:
http://www.northendboston.com/aggripina/agrippina.html
A. is said to have been brought to Mineo shortly after her death and to have been buried at a spot where a church was later erected in her honor. This will have been the Byzantine-period ancestor of Mineo's chiesa di Santa Agrippina, a fourteenth-century structure severely damaged in the great earthquake of 1693 and extensively rebuilt in the following century. An illustrated, Italian-language page on this building is here:
http://tinyurl.com/7j6nt
Other views:
http://tinyurl.com/3mh8j7
http://tinyurl.com/49lw64
http://www.gentracer.com/mineo04.jpg
http://www.gentracer.com/mineo05.jpg
At some point in the central Middle Ages A.'s cult reached Constantinople; from there it spread as far as Russia. In the Latin West, an offshoot developed in Köln (Cologne; the Roman _Colonia Agrippina_), where the sequence _Gaude felix Agrippina_, reportedly addressed to the saint and not to the city, occurs in a combination gradual-antiphoner (Erzbischöfliche Diözesan- und Dombibliothek, Ms. 226) prepared in 1353-58 and presented in the latter year to that city's Stift Sancta Maria ad Gradus.
A. is a patron of both Köln and Mineo. Sicilian emigrants to the U.S. brought her cult to Boston (MA), where she is now the focus of a major festival every August (late August is also when her _patronale_ occurs at Mineo). She was dropped from the RM in its revision of 2001.
Best,
John Dillon
(an older post revised)
**********************************************************************
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
|