medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture

Today (8. February) is the feast day of:

1) Quinta of Alexandria (d. 249). Q., whose name in Greek is spelled as Kointa (whence through a process of transliteration she was known in the medieval Latin West as Cointa or, with an added 'h', Cointha) was one of the martyrs of Alexandria in Egypt during its anti-Christian riots in the year preceding the Decian persecution. According to Eusebius (_H. E._ 6. 41), she was brought into a pagan temple and and ordered to perform an act of adoration. When she refused, her feet were bound together and she was dragged through the streets of the city, whose paving stones pulped her. Still alive, she was taken to a suburb and stoned to death.

Florus of Lyon composed a lengthy elogium for these martyrs of Alexandria, locating it in his martyrology at 20. February. St. Ado of Vienne chopped this into pieces, assigning individual martyrs to different days. In Ado's scheme (followed in this particular by Usuard), Q. (or C.) was assigned today's date.

For USAmericans, here's a view of La Quinta of Alexandria:
http://tinyurl.com/2mkb2f
 

2) Eventius of Pavia (d. 397). E. was bishop of Pavia in the late fourth century. He took part in the synod of Aquileia in 381 and in that of Milan in 390, whose letter to pope St. Siricius condemning Jovinian he was the first to sign. He is generally considered to have been the 'sanctus episcopus' of Pavia who according to St. Ambrose of Milan (_De officiis_ 2. 29) courageously opposed church teaching to the force of an imperial rescript and secured for a widow the return of her property.

In the tradition of Pavia E. is called Iuventius or Inventius and is reckoned the city's third bishop. The eighth- or ninth-century Vita of St. Syrus of Pavia (BHL 7976) says that he had been baptized by St. Syrus and that he had been informed by St. Syrus in a vision of the date of his own death. The same Vita gives today as the day of E.'s laying to rest in the church of St. Nazarius, which he had founded (this church later became known as that of San Iuvenzio). That is the day of his medieval feast in Pavia. The RM, following the practice of his city, gives his name as Iuventius. In today's Gaggiano (MI) the church dedicated to him is that of Sant'Invenzio.


3) Honoratus of Milan (d. ca. 570). Paul the Deacon tells us that H., bishop of Milan fled his city during the Lombard advance (568-569) and took refuge in Genoa, where he died (perhaps of the plague). Although Genoa remained the seat of the Catholic (as opposed to the Arian) archdiocese of Milan until some years after the Lombard conquest of coastal Liguria in 640, H.'s remains are said not to have been kept there but instead to have been returned to Milan for burial. At some point they were translated to that city's basilica of Sant'Eustorgio. In the early fifteenth century H. was being celebrated in Milan on 8. _January_.

An illustrated, Italian-language overview of Milan's Sant'Eustorgio is here:
http://www.santeustorgio.it/storia_della_basilica.html
A panoramic tour:
http://tinyurl.com/cyor2z
Remains of the late antique church beneath the apse:
http://tinyurl.com/c7msey


4) Ælfflæd (d. 714). Æ.'s (or E.'s, if you prefer 'Elfleda') father was Oswiu, king of Northumbria. In gratitude for his victory over the not-Christian king Penda of Mercia, O. dedicated her to God, placing her in the care of nuns at today's Hartlepool in County Durham. When abbess St. Hilda founded from Hatlepool the community of Streanæshalch that became Whitby Abbey in today's North Yorkshire, she brought Æ. with her. Æ. in turn became abbess herself, along with her widowed mother Eanflæd. She became known for resolving disputes, including, it is said, reconciling Sts. Wilfrid of York and Theodore of Canterbury after pope St. Agatho had affirmed T.'s division of W.'s see of Northumbria into four dioceses.

Bede's prose Vita of St. Cuthbert (BHL 2021) relates two miracles involving that saint and Æ. In the first of these she was ill and expressed a desire to have some article of his clothing, as that would cure her. Soon she received a girdle from him. She wore it and, lo, she was swiftly cured. In the second, C. was in her presence when he received a vision of a man being carried by angels to heaven.

A brief, English-language account of Whitby Abbey is here:
http://www.sacred-destinations.com/england/whitby-abbey.htm
Another, with a virtual tour of the ruins:
http://tinyurl.com/wy23
English Heritage's virtual tour:
http://tinyurl.com/2wa6pt


5) Stephen of Muret (d. 1124). According to his unreliable mid-twelfth-century Vita by Stephen of Lissac (BHL 7906-7907), S. came from a noble family of Thiers in Auvergne (whence he is sometimes called S. of Thiers). Taken, it is said, with the life of some Calabrian hermits he encountered while staying for some time in the care of an archbishop of Benevento, he settled at Muret in a mountainous part of the Limousin and there founded a community of hermit monks that shortly after his death moved to Grandmont in today's Saint-Sylvestre (Haute-Vienne) and that was the nucleus of what became the Grandmontine order. We have no authentic writings of S.: both the _Liber sententiarum_ that goes under his name and the Grandmontine Rule are later productions.

S. was canonized in 1188. A Limousin reliquary châsse on display in the église Saint-Antoine at Ambazac (Haute-Vienne) is said to contain one of S.'s tibias. Expandable views of it and of the church itself (originally late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century) are here:
http://tinyurl.com/cou98y
A view of the choir:
http://tinyurl.com/da3c77
More on the châsse:
http://www.culture.gouv.fr/emolimo/parement.htm
Here's S. (at right) in a later twelfth-century (1181) plaque from a retable for the main altar of the abbey church of Grandmont, now in the Musée National du Moyen Âge in Paris (the Musée de Cluny):
http://tinyurl.com/d6b877
The church at Ambazac also possesses a later thirteenth-century dalmatic traditionally said to have been that of S. Here's a French-language page on it with expandable views of the vestment before and after restoration:
http://tinyurl.com/bblm2h
Further views:
http://tinyurl.com/cyorz2
The originally thirteenth-century église Saint-Sylvestre at nearby Saint-Sylvestre (Haute-Vienne)
http://tinyurl.com/dhjfkx
http://www.razes-en-limousin.fr/img/mini/sylvestre.jpg
possesses a late fifteenth-century silver gild reliquary bust of S. said to contain his head:
http://tinyurl.com/clcmgy
The Prieuré de Grandmont Villiers at Villeloin-Coulangé (Indre-et-Loire) has a modern adaptation of that bust showing S. in the restored dalmatic:
http://pagesperso-orange.fr/grandmont/images/57.jpeg


6) Girolamo Emiliani (d. 1537). The Venetian patrician G. (also Gerolamo; surname sometimes given as Miani) followed a military career until 1511 when, taken prisoner by forces of the League of Cambrai, he experienced in prison a religious conversion. Freed unexpectedly, he turned to theology and in 1518 was ordained priest. G. devoted himself to succoring the poor, the ill, abandoned youths, and women whom he turned from a life of prostitution. Active in many towns of the Veneto as it then was, he established hospitals, orphanages, and a home for repentant fallen women.

To carry forward his social mission G. established in the early 1530s a body of priests that became the Congregation of Clerics Regular, popularly known as the Somascan Fathers after the town of Somasca (now in today's Bergamo Province of Lombardy). G. was based there in his later years and there he died of an illness contracted while tending the sick. He was canonized in 1767.

Best,
John Dillon
(Quinta of Alexandria, Eventius of Pavia, Honoratus of Milan, Ælfflæd, and Girolamo Emiliani lightly revised)

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