medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Today (3. August) is the feast day of:
Aspren (d. late 1st / early 2d cent.). This less well known saint of the Regno was by all accounts Naples' first bishop. Apart from that, we really don't know anything about him. His first mention, in the ninth-century initial portion of the _Chronicon episcoporum sanctae neapolitanae ecclesiae_, puts him at the head of the list and tells us that he loved the poor, that he willingly received people of all stations, and that he daily led the people to the way of salvation. Who could wish to hear anything more specific or revealing?
The Neapolitans, apparently. The ninth-century _Vita sancti Athanasii episcopi_ (BHL 735) is the first witness to an enduring local legend whereby St. Peter himself consecrated A. as Naples' first bishop. The also ninth-century _Vita sancti Aspren_ (BHL 724; a sermon read on A.'s yearly feast) tells us that Peter, passing through Naples on his way from Antioch to Rome, cured A. of an illness, taught him the faith, and baptized him. During Peter's short stay the city was rapidly converted to Christianity; before he left, the apostle consecrated A. as bishop at the request of all the people.
In the eleventh century this Vita was polished up stylistically by Alberic of Montecassino (BHL 725). The _Cronaca di Santa Maria del Principio_, an ecclesiastical chronicle from the late thirteenth or fourteenth century, adds further details (BHL 726). Aspren gets good coverage in the fourteenth-century civic _Cronaca di Partenope_, whose initial chapters deal with various legendary founders of the city.
A. was one of the early bishops whose remains were brought from the city's catacombs to the Stefania, a predecessor of today's cathedral, by the sainted bishop John IV (lo Scriba; 842-49). His chapel in the cathedral (also known as the Cappella Tocco) has remains of frescoes thought to have been executed by Pietro Cavallini in 1308. The Marble
Calendar of Naples (earlier ninth-century) gives today as the feast of A.'s laying to rest. For much of Naples' history A. has been a major patron, second only to Januarius himself. Among those named after him were the nineteenth-century medievalists Gennaro Aspreno Galante (a local archeologist of note) and Gennaro Aspreno Rocco (a literary scholar and Latin poet).
Some views of the Cappella Tocco in Naples' cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta:
http://tinyurl.com/2mwnj4
http://tinyurl.com/2pdvgf
2) Martin of Monte Massico (d. 6th cent.). All we know about this less well known saint of the Regno comes from a chapter in Gregory the Great's _Dialogues_ (3. 16). This tells us that M. was a hermit monk of great holiness and divine favor who lived very ascetically in a cave he had enlarged high up on an elevation called Mons Marsicus whose location is not further specified, that many whom Gregory calls "of us" (_ex nostris_) had witnessed his deeds, that Pelagius I was one of Gregory's informants about M., and that many people, lay as well as religious, sought his advice. Gregory relates several miracles attesting to M.'s exceptional nature, the first being that for three years he resisted diabolic temptation in the form of what to others would have been a terrifying serpent that shared not only his cave but also his bed and that when he finally threw it down the mountain it burned all the trees on that side.
Gregory also tells us, near the end of this chapter, that in order to limit his freedom of movement M. had chained one of his feet to the rock of the cave, that St. Benedict upon hearing of this had sent word to M. that he should bind himself with the chain of Christ rather than with one of iron, that M. then removed the physical chain but remained bound to the same spatial limits as before, and that he began to have disciples (though these did not live in his cave).
Though there are several mountains in Italy that have been called Mons Marsicus, from at least the central Middle Ages onward the usual assumption has been that the one in question is the elevation in northern Campania now called Monte Massico:
http://tinyurl.com/6e6e8a
From at least the tenth century and perhaps as early as the eighth there was monastery on Monte Massico named after M., the _monasterium Sancti Martini in Clivo Montis Marsici_ (or _... in Monte Marsico_), located within what in 1087 became the diocese of Carinola. In the eleventh century, if not earlier, the monastery came into the possession of San Vincenzo al Volturno. And not far away was St. Benedict's own monastery at Montecassino. In the late eleventh and earlier twelfth centuries all three -- Carinola, San Vincenzo al Volturno, Montecassino -- produced accounts of translations under their auspices of M.'s remains and San Vincenzo added for good measure a supposed earlier failed attempt at a translation by a civil power, the principality of Benevento, in the later eighth century.
San Vincenzo, followed by Montecassino (in the person of Peter the Deacon, whose highly tendentious and extremely unreliable Vita of M. [BHL 5604] still finds echoes in "popular" accounts of this saint), also gave voice to a myth whereby M. had protected his monastery on Monte Massico from an attack by Muslim raiders (in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries institutional memories at San Vincenzo and at Montecassino of their late ninth-century sacks by such raiders were very strong).
The best single account of these Campanian appropriations of M. remains Erich Caspar's _Petrus diaconus und die Monte Cassineser Fälschungen: ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des italienischen Geisteslebens im Mittelalter _ (Berlin: J. Springer, 1909), pp. 81-93.
The monastery on Monte Massico has left some visible remains including a cave clearly interpreted medievally as the one in which M. lived. On the latter especially see Alessandra Acconci and Michele Piccirillo, "L’oratorio rupestre di San Martino in clivo montis Marsici, Monte Massico (Caserta)", Arte medievale_, N.S. 4 (2005), no. 2, pp. 9-30. An English-language abstract is here:
http://www.artemedievale.it/articolo.asp?nr=350
Here's a page on Carinola's ex-cathedral into which when new, probably early in twelfth century, St. Bernard of Carinola translated M.'s supposed remains:
http://www.cesn.it/patrimonio_architet/campania/carinola.htm
3) Peter of Anagni (d. 1105). According to his contemporary Vita (BHL 6699), this less well known saint of the Regno was born in Salerno and came from the family of its princes (whence he was sometimes referred to in later writing as P. _de principibus_). Though modern scholarship doubts his noble birth, there seems little reason to reject the Vita's assertion of his Salernitan origin or its statement that he entered religion there as a Benedictine monk. The Roman archdeacon Hildebrand (the future pope St. Gregory VII) brought him to the papal court, where he served in various capacities before becoming bishop of Anagni in southern Lazio in 1062. In 1071 P. was papal apocrisarius in Constantinople; in the years immediately following he initiated construction of the present cathedral at Anagni. One of Gregory VII's model bishops, P. was canonized in 1109.
P. reposes in the crypt of Anagni's cathedral. Here he is, between Sts. Aurelia and Neomisia, in a fresco there from 1324:
http://tinyurl.com/5nyl9v
A few representative views of Anagni's cathedral occur lower down on this page:
http://tinyurl.com/697eou
The cathedral's twelfth-century episcopal chair:
http://www.thais.it/scultura/image/sch00528.jpg
The cosmatesque floor in the nave:
http://tinyurl.com/2bt5ga
4) Augustine Kazotic (Bl.; d. 1323). A., a Croat from Trogir (Traù), entered the Order of Preachers at the age of fifteen. After study in Paris and preaching in Bosnia he became bishop of Zagreb in 1303. There he seems to have incurred the displeasure of Charles I of Hungary (a.k.a. Charles Robert or Carobert) but not to such an extent that he was unwelcome in the lands of the latter's uncle, king Robert of (mostly mainland) Sicily. In 1322 A. was translated to the see of Lucera in northern Puglia, thus becoming a holy person of the Regno. The diocese of Lucera was a trouble spot in the kingdom and a place of particular royal interest, as it had been ever since 1300, when Robert's father, Charles II, violently changed the latter's character from overwhelmingly Muslim to overwhelmingly Christian by selling into slavery its Muslim inhabitants (other than those few who either escaped or were permitted to convert).
An attempt to maintain the area's economic viability by importing settlers from elsewhere in the kingdom and from Provence increased local tensions, especially as the rural districts around the city proper appear to have harbored relapsed crypto-Muslims for some years afterward. Dominicans had been prominent among the friars who engaged in proselytizing and enforced conversion of Jews and Muslims in northern Apulia from the 1290s onward, A.'s immediate predecessor at Lucera (or, to give it its official name from 1300 to the early fifteenth century, Civitas Sanctae Mariae) was a Dominican, and in 1322 a Dominican bishop from outside the kingdom could be seen as appropriate for a largely immigrant Christian community in this seemingly still troubled part of the royal demesne.
During his brief episcopacy at Lucera A. seems to have more than satisfied royal expectations. Prodigies occurring during the time of his funeral and continuing thereafter confirmed his sanctity to the Crown, if not perhaps to any crypto-Muslims still remaining in the vicinity (it's probably no accident that the first of these post-mortem miracles to have been cited was the miraculous escape from accidental death of the the captain of the city, i.e., the senior Crown-appointed local official). In October 1325 Charles, duke of Calabria (king Robert's son and heir apparent), the royal governor of Lucera during A.'s incumbency, petitioned John XXII to commence procedures leading to A.'s
eventual canonization (which has yet to happen). A. was beatified in 1702.
A. was buried in Lucera's church of San Domenico. In 1812 his remains were transferred to the city's cathedral, begun in 1300, consecrated in 1302, and shown here:
Exterior views:
http://www.stupormundi.it/images/luoghi/Cattedrale_Lucera2.jpg
http://www.fotopuglia.it/foto.asp?ID=428
http://fujiso3.hp.infoseek.co.jp/hna6hp/pna559.html
http://fujiso3.hp.infoseek.co.jp/hna6hp/pna304.html
http://www.arturocovitti.it/Ing_DuomoLucera.htm
Interior view:
http://tinyurl.com/cbrpn
Best,
John Dillon
(Aspren and Augustine Kazotic revised from older posts)
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