medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture

Today (9. August) is the feast day of:

1)  Secundian, Marcellian, and Verian (d. 250-251, supposedly, or 258, supposedly).  S., M., and V. are martyrs of Tuscia in today's northwestern Lazio and southern Tuscany.  The oldest witness to the (pseudo-)Hieronymian Martyrology, which records them under today, places their death simply in Tuscia.  Some later witnesses specify a place that has been interpreted as the former Castrumnovum near today's Santa Marinella (RM) as does also the third of the three sequential versions of their legendary sixth- or seventh-century Passio (BHL 7550-7552).  The first version locates their martyrdom at Centumcellae, i.e. today's Civitavecchia (RM), while the second gives only a milestone indication on the Via Aurelia that matches neither of the other two specified locales.

In the Passio the three saints are well-educated pagan persecutors of Christians under Decius.  Observing their victims' willingness to die painfully rather than to live easily and considering the (supposed) Christian prophecy in Vergil's Fourth Eclogue (five verse of which are quoted in the Passio), they convert, are baptized by a priest Timotheus, and are confirmed by pope Xistus (i.e., the recently celebrated Sixtus II, whose martyrdom the highly influential late antique _Passio sancti Polychronii_ incorrectly places under Decius rather than under Valerian).  S. is arrested; M. and V. identify themselves as his co-religionists and are arrested as well.  Brought before a magistrate with the unusual praenomen Quartus, they spit on an idol that then topples over and breaks.  Whereupon the martyrs are first tortured and then executed by decapitation.

S., M., and V. were entered in the second edition of Usuard's Martyrology on the basis of their Passio.  From Usuard they entered the RM, where they remained until 2001.  They continue to be celebrated at various locales in Tuscia where their cult was strong medievally, e.g. at Chiusi (SI), where a co-cathedral of the diocese of Montepulciano – Chiusi – Pienza is dedicated to S. and has relics believed to be his, at Tarquinia (VT), where S. is the city's patron, and at Tuscania (VT), whose church of San Pietro is named as their cult site in the third version of their Passio and where all three, said to be buried there, are the local patron saints.  Herewith two illustrated, Italian-language pages on the originally eleventh- and twelfth-century chiesa di San Pietro in Tuscania:
http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiesa_di_San_Pietro_(Tuscania)
http://tinyurl.com/5stcuu


2)  Romanus of Rome (d. 258, supposedly).  R. is a martyr of the Via Tiburtina, where his grave is first recorded with certainty in the seventh-century guidebooks for pilgrims to Rome.  Its location near that of tomorrow's St. Lawrence facilitated the view, reflected in the not entirely reliable _Liber Pontificalis_ and in the synthesizing and highly unreliable _Passio sancti Polychronii_, that he was that saint's companion in martyrdom.  In the _Liber pontificalis_ R. is one of several named ecclesiastics said to have been arrested with L.  That part of the aforementioned Passio that deals with R. (at least three versions: BHL 7309d-f) makes him instead a soldier who is assigned to guard the captive L., converts to Christianity and attempts to aid him, and is himself executed.

The originally thirteenth-century (ex-)chiesa di San Romano in Lucca, consecrated in 1281, secularized in 1866, and now a civic auditorium, succeeded an oratory first attested from 792.  Herewith an illustrated, Italian-language account of this church, which once housed relics believed to be those of today's R.:
http://tinyurl.com/6b5ft4
Other views:
http://tinyurl.com/6phkmc  
Another former home of relics believed to be those of today's R is the tenth- to fifteenth-century (ex-)chiesa di San Romano in Ferrara, now the home of the cathedral museum:
http://www.artecultura.fe.it/index.phtml?id=152
http://tinyurl.com/65j26x
http://tinyurl.com/5s67bd


3)  Firmus and Rusticus (d. ca. 304, supposedly).  F. and R. are martyrs of uncertain origin.  They appear in the perhaps early seventh-century (pseudo-)Hieronymian Martyrology under this date as martyrs in the East (_in Oriente_).  Their legendary Passio (BHL 3020, etc.), which has been thought to go back to the sixth century, makes F. a resident of Bergamo and R. a relative of his and has them both martyred at Verona under Maximian.  Though this Passio apparently derives much of its detail from one or more Passiones of African saints and though there were African martyrs named Firmus and Rusticus (but not known to have had a joint cult), it is not clear that this F. and this R. were originally African.  Though from the early Middle Ages onward their cult is chiefly Veronese, it is also attested from other places in northeastern Italy. 

The very late eighth-century _Versus de Verona_, which in its census of the saints whose churches protect that city pays special attention to F. and R., informs us of the discovery and translation of their previously hidden relics during the time of Desiderius and Adelchis (third quarter of the eighth century) to a church that had already been dedicated to them.  This church, which stood near the Adige in the southern part of the early medieval city, is thought to have been been a predecessor on the same site of today's San Fermo Maggiore, an originally eleventh- and twelfth-century church brought to completion in its upper part by Franciscans in the mid-fourteenth century.  Herewith two illustrated brief accounts of this monument, one in English and the other in Italian:
http://members.virtualtourist.com/m/tt/6267a/
http://www.chieseverona.it/SanFermo.aspx
And here's the same church's page at the Italia nell'Arte Medievale site:
http://tinyurl.com/2wuc4m

Here's an illustrated, Italian-language page on the originally twelfth-century church of Santi Fermo e Rustico in Bedesco in Brembate (BG) in Lombardy.
http://tinyurl.com/5efh8b
Other views:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grignano
Since at least the twelfth century F. and R. have been venerated at Caravaggio (BG) in Lombardy, of which town they have long been the principal patrons.  Herewith two illustrated, Italian-language accounts of the later medieval parish church dedicated to them there:
http://tinyurl.com/yqyyva
http://tinyurl.com/58uuo5
Since at least the fourteenth century, F. and R. have been the patrons of Berzo San Fermo (BG) in Lombardy, whose originally fourteenth-century parish church of San Fermo was expanded in the seventeenth century and now sports a neoclassical facade.
Since at least the later Middle Ages, F. and R. have been the patrons of Carpaneto Piacentino (PC) in Emilia. whose originally fifteenth-century parish church of San Fermo (since greatly rebuilt) houses below its main altar relics said to be those of F.:
http://www.parrocchiacarpaneto.com/storia/pag_foto/17_2.htm
http://www.parrocchiacarpaneto.com/storia/pag_foto/17_3.htm


4)  Falco of Palena (Bl.; d. early 11th cent., supposedly).  Today's less well known holy person of the Regno is said both in the new edition (2001) of the Roman Martyrology and in the latter's revision of 2004 to have been a hermit who died at Palena in Calabria.  But there does not seem to be a Palena in Calabria and the Palena where F. has been venerated since at least the fourteenth century is located in Abruzzo's Chieti province.

F. belongs to a cult of Sette Santi Fratelli ('Seven Holy Little Brothers') whose individual members are venerated in different Abruzzese towns.  Brief Italian-language accounts of them are here:
http://www.casoli.info/casoli/prata/prata02.htm
They are local holy men -- traditionally viewed as hermits -- whose cult (confirmed in 1893) was promoted by Franciscans of Abruzzo who honored them as their predecessors in this region.

According to the _Croniche ed antichità di Calabria_ of Fra Girolamo Marafioti (Padova, 1601), who drew on accounts furnished by correspondents in Benevento, F. and his colleagues in the cult were Greek-rite monks from Calabria who moved to today's Abruzzo as a community under a hegumen called Hilarion (one of the 'Seven', who in some accounts are as many as nine) and who after the latter's death in the pontificate of Eugenius IV (1431-47) became hermits in separate locations along the great chain of central Appennine peaks now known as the Maiella.  But at least some were venerated earlier than this.

Twentieth-century scholars resolved the difficulty by positing that Marafioti had confused Eugenius IV with the earlier Sergius IV (1009-1012) and by then hypothesizing that F. and his colleagues had come from Greek-rite monasteries in Calabria that had been abandoned in later tenth century in consequence of Islamic raids.  Were there any earlier documentation for the belief that F. et al. were Greeks from the south, this view would be more plausible.

The chances are excellent that these are local saints whom subsequent community memory first adapted to the paradigm of hermits of the Maiella (of whom there were a great many) and later to the well-known paradigm of The Saint Who Has Come to Us from Afar.  F.'s original cult locus appears to have been a now vanished settlement near Palena called Sant'Egidio.  A church dedicated to Sant'Egidio and to San Falco is said to have existed there at least as early as 1358.  In 1383 F.'s putative remains were translated to Palena's church of Sant'Antonino, which later came to be known as that of Sant'Antonino e San Falco.  Its successors have been known as as San Falco and, most recently, as San Falco e Sant'Antonino (according to the Diocese of Sulmona-Valva, the parish is that of Sant'Antonino Martire).  Some of F.'s relics are now preserved in the bust shown here:
http://digilander.iol.it/palena/proc02.jpg
More relics, including clothing F. is said to have worn (the apparel of an earlier cult statue?) are here:
http://www.casoli.info/casoli/prata/reliquie_s_falco.jpg
http://www.casoli.info/casoli/prata/tunica_s_falco.jpg
Until relatively recently F. was also celebrated liturgically on 13. January, his traditional _dies natalis_.  Did today's feast originally commemorate his translation in 1383?


5)  Maurilius of Rouen (d. 1067).  Our chief sources for M. are the _Historia ecclesiastica_ of Ordericus Vitalis and the _Gesta archiepiscoporum Rotomagensium_.  He is said to have been a native of the diocese of Reims who after study at Liège was head of the cathedral school at Halberstadt before becoming (by 1030) a monk of Fécamp.  In 1055 M. was made archbishop of Rouen.  In that capacity he held synods condemning simony and nicolaism, worked for civic peace in his region, and presided at the dedications of both the cathedral of Rouen (1063; almost completely destroyed by fire in 1200) and the abbey church at Jumièges (1067).  Two sites on the remains of the latter (at the second, for more views click on "Abbey Church of Notre-Dame"):
http://www.romanes.com/Jumiege/
http://tinyurl.com/6mnvpr

Best,
John Dillon
(Firmus and Rusticus and Falco of Palena revised from last year's post)

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