medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Today (22. February) is the feast day of:
1) The Chair of St. Peter the Apostle. This feast is first mentioned in the _Depositio martyrum_ of the Chronographer of 354: _natale Petri de Cathedra_. In the late fifth century St. Perpetuus of Tours calls it _Natalis S. Petri episcopatus_. When the Cathedra Petri came to be celebrated on 18. January, the two feasts were differentiated by calling that one the feast of of the Chair of Peter at Rome and today's feast that of the Chair of Peter _at Antioch_ (commemorating the commencement of P.'s episcopate in that city). Both feasts are already present in the early eighth-century Calendar of St. Willibrord. With the suppression in 1960 of the 18. January feast the specification "of Antioch" was dropped from today's celebration.
An expandable view of of P. enthroned from Giotto's Stefaneschi Triptych (ca. 1330):
http://tinyurl.com/27lg2o
Just outside of Antioch (an historically Syrian city now Antakya in southernmost Turkey) one may visit a cave church where P. is reputed to have preached. A set of views of this Cave Church of St. Peter (also the Grotto of St. Peter; Turkish Sen Piyer Kilisesi), whose facade is modern, is here:
http://tinyurl.com/2tn7cz
A little topographic context:
http://www.pbase.com/andrys/image/37687202
2) Papias of Hierapolis (d. prob. earlier 2d cent.). The apostolic father P., bishop of Hierapolis in Phrygia, was the author in five books of a Gospel or Sayings commentary, the _Logion kyriakon exegesis_, preserved fragmentarily in quotations by others. He is said by St. Irenaeus of Lyon to have been an auditor of John and a companion of Polycarp. The latter is clearly the martyr bishop of Smyrna and the former is identified by Eusebius and by Jerome as being, in P.'s case, John the Presbyter. St. Ado of Vienne, who entered P. in his martyrology under today's date, understood this John to be St. John the Evangelist. For the remainder of the Middle Ages P. was in the Latin West considered in a direct recipient of apostolic teaching.
Hierapolis in Phrygia overlooked the hot springs of what is now Pamukkale in southwestern Turkey's Denizli Province. The reputed site of the martyrdom of the apostle Philip, it had had a large Jewish community from the late second century BCE onward. In P.'s day it was still being rebuilt after a major earthquake in the first century CE and most of the ruins one now sees at this UNESCO World Heritage Site are probably or certainly later than our saint. But this late first-century CE municipal gate, dated by an inscription to the principate of Domitian (81-96), will have been familiar to him:
http://tinyurl.com/3cslxr
Here's an English-language history of the place, with links toward the bottom to sub-pages on specific places of interest:
http://www.turizm.net/cities/hierapolis/
3) Paschasius of Vienne (d. earlier 5th cent.). All the bishops of Vienne down to to the middle of the eighth century are saints. In the traditional chronology promoted in the ninth century by St. Ado of Vienne, who credited his archiepiscopal see with an apostolic origin, P. will have been bishop in the very early fourth century, dying in about 312. In the revised chronology by Louis Duchesne (_Fastes épiscopaux de l'ancienne Gaule_, tome 1), the time of P.'s episcopate -- about which nothing is known -- will have been somewhat more than a century later.
Ado entered P. in his martyrology, placing him under today's date and citing (on what factual basis, if any, is no longer apparent) his _admiranda sanctitas_. Usuard elected, as he did often with Ado's episcopal predecessors, not to record P. in either edition of his own martyrology. Late medieval and early modern expanded versions of Usuard included P. in their additions from Ado and from these he entered the RM. Considering our complete ignorance of P.'s particular virtues, the lack of substantive grounds for continuing to accept that he had been bishop during the Great Persecution, and P.'s apparent unimportance in his own diocese (the search engine of whose website produces no results for either Paschasius or Paschase), the only reason I can think of for his retention in the "new" RM of 2001 is the paucity of other saints and blesseds with established commemorations or _dies natales_ on 22. February.
4) Maximianus of Ravenna (d. 556). M. was born at Pola in Istria, today's Pula in Croatia. In 546, at the behest of the emperor Justinian, he was made bishop of Ravenna. According to Agnellus of Ravenna, this appointment was so unpopular within the city (which had wished to name a bishop of its own choosing) that M. was compelled initially to reside outside it as a guest of the Arian bishop of the Goths. M. is sometimes said to have been the first bishop in the west to employ the title of archbishop. He is known for the churches he built or restored or is thought to have built or restored.
One of M.'s churches in Ravenna was San Vitale, where he is portrayed in a mosaic perhaps more familiar for its portrait of his imperial sponsor:
http://tinyurl.com/3x3vhz
M. in close-up:
http://www.initaly.com/regions/byzant/pix/testmass.jpg
Those images come from a four-page site on San Vitale:
http://tinyurl.com/2vbjpg
A discussion of the latter's mosaics occurs on this page:
http://www.initaly.com/regions/byzant/byzant4.htm
Another of M.'s churches (supposedly; the authenticity of his deed is gift is suspect) was St. Mary Formosa at Pula. There's an English-language account of it here with a view of its surviving southern funerary chapel:
http://tinyurl.com/d6hns5
Another English-language account:
http://tinyurl.com/alr4n7
Other views of that chapel:
http://members.virtualtourist.com/m/p/m/1aca1d/
http://www.istra.net/slike/destinacije/000013-001.jpg
One of the treasures of the archdiocese of Ravenna-Cervia is this mid-sixth-century episcopal chair (ivory over wood) known as the Throne of Maximianus:
http://tinyurl.com/286h9u
http://tinyurl.com/yqt5oj
M.'s remains, along with those of the fifth-century bishop St. Exuperantius, are said to repose in this sarcophagus in Ravenna's cathedral:
http://www.heiligenlexikon.de/Fotos/Maximianus_von_Ravenna2.jpg
5) Isabella of France (Bl.; d. 1270). The daughter of Louis VII of France and of Blanche of Castile, I. was the younger sister of St. Louis IX and the aunt of St. Louis of Tolouse. Her pious parents acceded to her wish to remain unmarried. In 1254 Innocent IV authorized her retention of Franciscan spiritual advisors and in the following year she began to acquire land in what is now the Bois de Boulogne for the establishment of a Damianite convent. Not all such houses then followed the Rule of St. Clare (1253) and when the convent was completed in late 1258 or very early 1259 I. secured Alexander IV's approval of the Rule she herself had written for what she called the Order of the Humble Handmaidens of the Blessed Virgin Mary (Ordo humilum ancillarum B.V.M.). The monastery itself was called that of the Humility of the BVM; posterity knows it as the abbey of Longchamp.
I. never became a nun, dwelling instead in a modest house of her own (with an associated chapel) on monastery property where she lived in modified conformity to her Rule. In 1263 the latter was revised by I. in conjunction with St. Bonaventure and with other eminent members of the Order of Friars Minor. In this revision the sisters were officially designated as _Sorores minores_, a form of nomenclature showing that though they were not Poor Clares they were Franciscan.
I. died on this day in the aforementioned house and was buried in the abbey church. Miracles were reported at her tomb and a cult arose. Her Vie (begun in 1283) by the abbess Agnes of Harcourt is considered the first extant vernacular biography of a female contemporary written by a European woman. It has been edited and translated by Sean L. Field in his _The Writings of Agnes of Harcourt_ (University of Notre Dame Press, 2003). An inventory of the abbey's relics drawn up in 1325 includes in seventh place some of I.'s hair in a vessel with a silver gilt foot. In 1521 I.'s cult was confirmed, with an Office, for the sisters of Longchamp; in 1696 a feast of I. on 31. August was authorized for the entire Franciscan family.
The central buildings of the abbey of Longchamp were put up for sale in 1794. When no buyer came forward (the structures are said to have been in very bad condition) they were demolished. Here's an unfortunately reduced view of an engraving showing them in an earlier state:
http://www.insecula.com/contact/A009305.html
Another view, also reduced, is here:
http://tinyurl.com/cfmcvw
The abbey's farm lasted into the 1850s and its originally thirteenth-century mill survives on the grounds of the Hippodrome de Longchamp:
http://flickr.com/photos/feuilllu/132862318/sizes/l/
The last image on this page is of two mid-fourteenth-century statues at the Musée national du Moyen Âge (Musée de Cluny) seemingly from Longchamp (unless there was also an abbey of Longchamps in the vicinity of Paris):
http://cbx41.over-blog.com/article-26261377-6.html
6) Margaret of Cortona (d. 1297) . The Franciscan tertiary and visionary M. founded at today's Cortona (AR) in Tuscany a community of religious women that survived her and that promoted her cause by means of the _Legenda de vita et miraculis beatae Margaritae de Cortona_ (BHL 5314). The latter is a work of multiple authorship including a lengthy record of M.'s visions as recounted to and written down by her confessor G., now generally identified as the Franciscan friar Giunta Bevegnati. The _Legenda_ also incorporates matter from a later confessor and from various locals offering miracle accounts. M.'s cult was confirmed for Cortona in 1515. She was canonized in 1728.
M. at rest in her mostly nineteenth-century church at Cortona:
http://tinyurl.com/atv9wd
An expandable view of a late thirteenth-century panel painting of M. and of scenes from her Legend:
http://tinyurl.com/26t62r
M. in an expandable view of part of a fourteenth-century panel painting showing scenes from her Legend (the painting, housed in the Museo Diocesano di Cortona, is now attributed to a follower of Margarito[ne] of Arezzo):
http://www.beatoalano.it/Genesi/IMAGE027.JPG
M. in a seventeenth-century watercolor based on a now destroyed fresco by Ambrogio Lorenzetti (d. 1348):
http://tinyurl.com/cbmxd2
Best,
John Dillon
(The Chair of St. Peter the Apostle, Papias of Hierapolis, Maximianus of Ravenna, and Margaret of Cortona lightly revised from last year's post)
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