medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Today (23. January) is the feast day of:
1) Emerentiana (?). E. (whose name seems really to have been Emerentianes) is a martyr of the great cemetery on the Via Nomentana, where she is cited in the seventh-century pilgrim itineraries for Rome and where in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries fragments of her epitaph were found. A fifth-century addition to the pseudo-Ambrosian Passio of St. Agnes makes her A.'s foster sister, stoned to death by pagans at A.'s funeral and buried alongside her. When E. appears in the later sixth-century (ca. 560) procession of virgin martyrs in Ravenna's Sant'Apollinare Nuovo she is at some remove from A. According to a report in the Annals of Xanten, E.'s body was translated in 851 to Saxony. In 1123 an altar was dedicated to her at A.'s reputed place of execution in what now is Rome's Piazza Navona.
In 1615 remains said to be E.'s were intended to be enclosed along with those of the by then headless Agnes in a silver reliquary commissioned by Paul V and located in Rome's Sant'Agnese fuori le Mura. In 1621 this reliquary was placed under the same pope's newly commissioned altar for that church. When it was rediscovered early in the twentieth century it contained only the skeleton of one headless girl, generally assumed to be A.
In the (pseudo-)Hieronymian Martyrology E. appears under 16. September. Her feast today, two days after that of her supposed sister, is in the historical martyrologies from Bede onward, in the Gelasian Sacramentary, and in other early medieval liturgical sources. In the Mozarabic liturgy Agnes and E. are celebrated jointly on 20. January. E. is the patron saint of the city of Teruel in Aragón, where she is honored today with a Solemnity.
The British Museum's Royal Gold Cup (ca. 1370-1380) depicts E.'s stoning:
http://tinyurl.com/ywqzgm
The church of Santa Emerenziana in Tuenno (TN) in Trentino - Alto Adige's Val di Non is an early sixteenth-century expansion of an originally eleventh- or twelfth-century building. Herewith some views of its "gothic" exterior:
http://tinyurl.com/2e9qbl
http://www.flickr.com/photos/angelike/2171664394/
and two views of details, one interior and one exterior:
http://tinyurl.com/ytnt3u
Can anyone point to a reproduction of its fourteenth-century fresco of E. on her deathbed?
Herewith two views of the originally later fifteenth-century (1472) chapelle Sainte-Émerance at La Pouëze (Maine-et-Loire):
http://tinyurl.com/bj3zx5
http://tinyurl.com/achr4z
2) Severianus and Aquila (?). S. and A., husband and wife, are entered under today in the (pseudo-)Hieronymian Martyrology as martyrs of Neocaesarea in Mauretania. This information is repeated in the historical martyrologies of the Carolingian period with the detail that they were burned to death. As there is no other record of a Neocaesarea in Mauretania, other venues have been suggested, e.g. Neocaesarea in Pontus and Caesarea in Mauretania. Aquila is a name ordinarily borne by men; possibly A. was originally called something else (e.g. Acilia).
3) Amasius of Teano (d. ca. 356, supposedly). Today's less well known saint of the Regno is said in his two untrustworthy Vitae (BHL 354, 355) to have been a priest who fled Arian persecution in the East under Constans I and who arrived in Rome in the papacy of Julius I (337-52). Sent to preach at Sora, he was forced out by the Arian party there and proceeded to Teanum Sidicinum, today's Teano (CE) in Campania. There he was elected bishop and died peacefully. A. is the second of Teano's three largely legendary early bishops, following St. Paris and preceding St. Urban. He is also the patron saint of Piedimonte San Germano (FR) in southern Lazio.
In Teano's rebuilt cathedral of San Clemente the present parapet (a replacement for the original, badly damaged in the fire of 1608) of the ambo is composed of panels taken from a fourteenth-century funerary monument decorated with images of, among others, Paris, Amasius, and Urban. Two views of it are here:
http://www.prolocoteano.it/Monumenti/Ambone.htm
4) Maimbodus of Domnipetra (d. 9th cent.?). M. (in French, Maimboeuf) is a poorly documented saint of Besançon and vicinity. According to his brief, undated Passio (BHL 5176) he was a young and very pious Irishman of wealth, social standing, and physical beauty who, coming to the view that these attributes were an impediment to his soul's salvation, left his parents, dressed meanly, and crossed over to the European mainland, where he traveled from one pilgrimage site to another, mortifying his flesh, vivifying his spirit, and resisting diabolic temptation. After visiting the shrines of several named saints in different parts of Lotharingia, M. stayed as the guest of a nobleman in Burgundy who offered him numerous gifts including a pair of very fine gloves. M. accepted only the gloves. At a place called Domnipetra he was set upon and murdered by robbers who had inferred from the gloves that he had money.
Still according to the Passio, as he was dying M. pardoned his killers. B. was buried in Domnipetra's church of St. Peter. Miracles occurred at his grave and a martyr cult arose. After some passage of time, and at the request of a count Adso in whose territory Domnipetra lay, Berengar, archbishop of Besançon (from which Domnipetra is said to have been eight miles distant, thus seemingly ruling out various localities now called Dampierre as the site of M.'s murder) translated the saint to Montbéliard, where his relics continued to effect miracles. Thus far the Passio. M.'s date of death is inferred from those of Berengar's episcopacy (895-918).
M. is said in the Passio to have dressed as an Irishman. Since the Passio elsewhere underscores differences between appearance and reality, it might be worth considering that his name as transmitted is Frankish (cf. the seventh-century St. Maimbodus or Magnobodus of Angers and the eighth-century St. Meginbodus of the Buraburg). Accounts of Irish missionaries in Francia sometimes include M. among their number. But the Passio, which is our sole source for who he was, presents him merely as an ascetic pilgrim.
Best,
John Dillon
(Emerentiana and Amasius of Teano revised from last year's post)
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