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MEDIEVAL-RELIGION  May 2009

MEDIEVAL-RELIGION May 2009

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Subject:

saints of the day 7. May

From:

John Dillon <[log in to unmask]>

Reply-To:

medieval-religion - Scholarly discussions of medieval religious culture <[log in to unmask]>

Date:

Wed, 6 May 2009 18:11:22 -0500

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text/plain

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medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture

Today (7. May) is the feast day of:

1)  Domitilla (d. ca. 96).  According to Eusebius (_Historia ecclesiastica_, 3. 18. 4), Flavia Domitilla, a niece of the Roman consul Flavius Clemens on his sister's side, was exiled to Ponza along with many other Christians during the fifteenth year of the principate of Domitian (81-96).  We know from Suetonius (_Vita Domitiani_, 15), who was much closer in time and physical space to events in Rome in these years, that the consul in question, who was a member of the emperor's extended family, was executed in 95 for failing to recognize the gods of the state and that he had a wife named Domitilla.  The often well-informed early third-century Cassius Dio (_Historia romana_, 67. 14) agrees that the executed consul's wife was named Domitilla, says that she was Domitian's niece, and has her exiled to the prison island of Pandateria (today's Ventotene; like Ponza, one of today's Isole Pontine off the coast of mainland southern Lazio).

It is not clear whether there were two exiled Domitillas or whether Eusebius got some of his details wrong.  Thanks to her Pontine suffering D. is today's saint of the Regno.  The Roman cemetery of Domitilla, often associated with her, may very well take its name from another D.  The late antique legendary Greek Passio of Sts. Nereus and Achilleus (BHG 1327; Latin-language offshoots at BHL 6058, etc.), who were buried there, makes D. one of its characters and has her martyred at Terracina.  Her commemoration today is not attested before Florus of Lyon in the ninth century.    


2)  Maurelius of Ferrara (d. ca. 644, supposedly).  M. (also M. of Voghenza) is a very poorly attested, perhaps altogether legendary bishop of Ferrara.  He has a quite legendary fifteenth-century Vita in Italian translated from a now lost Latin original of uncertain date.  This makes him a Syrian of noble ancestry from Edessa who is mentored by a bishop of Smyrna who elevates him to the priesthood and sends him off to Rome to inform the pope of the activities of a nefarious heretic.  While M. is en route he informed by an angel that the heretic has been incinerated by a bolt of lightning.  Contrary winds prevent him from returning.  He lands at Ostia and makes his way to Rome, where in short order his colleague St. George [Ferrara's principal patron] persuades pope John IV to name him to the vacant see of Ferrara and to consecrate him bishop.

At Ferrara M. establishes his cathedral and performs miracles.  Family difficulties, including the apostasy of his brother Hippolytus, cause M. to return to Edessa, where he shortly dies on this day in an unspecified year.  In 1106 the emperor Henry IV [who in a development unknown to serious historians seems to have been in Syria] is motivated by a vision of the saint to bring his body back to Ferrara, where M. is honorably re-interred in the church of St. George [i.e., Ferrara's later medieval cathedral] across the Po from what had been his own church.  Thus far this Vita.

M.'s cult is attested in Ferrara from 1177 onward.  He appeared on the city's coinage from the late fourteenth century to the early eighteenth.  Here's an example from 1450-1452:
http://tinyurl.com/dm97cw
The duchy of Ferrara spread M.'s cult more widely, e.g. to Rovigo (RO) in the southern Veneto, where he has been venerated in a sequence of churches going back to the fifteenth century.  One of Ferrara's patron saints, M. has yet to grace the pages of the RM.

Here's M. (at right, obviously) in a panel painting of ca. 1475 by Cosmč Tura, now in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC:
http://tinyurl.com/chgu2z


3)  John of Beverley (d. 721).  According to Bede, John was educated at St Hilda's monastery of Streanaeshalch (later, Whitby).  In St. Theodore of Canterbury's division of Northumbria into four dioceses (687), J. received Hexham, a see he held until 706 (during which time he ordained Bede first as deacon and later as priest).  In 706 he became bishop of York.  He resigned because of ill health either in 718 (traditional) or ca. 714 (modern scholars) and spent his remaining years at his monastery of Inderawuda (later, Beverley).  Bede related various miracle stories of J.; Alcuin promoted his cult.  Today, his _dies natalis_, has been his principal feast day since at least the ninth century.  In 1037 J. was canonized by the then archbishop of York, who translated his remains to a new shrine at the rebuilt Beverley Minster.

J. was known as a healing saint.  Post-Conquest miracle collections indicate widespread renown.  J. also gained a military reputation.  At the Battle of the Standard near Northallerton in 1138, where the English forces were led by the archbishop of York, his banner was flown along with those of St. Peter, St. Wilfrid, and St. Cuthbert.  It seems to have been thought particularly efficacious, for in the thirteenth through the fifteenth centuries it was J.'s banner that accompanied Yorkshire levies taking the field for England.  Agincourt occurred on the feast of John's translation (25. October), whereupon J. was made a patron of the royal house and both his feasts were made obligatory for all England.  J.'s shrine was destroyed ca. 1541.

Later tradition made J. a native of Harpham in today's Yorkshire.  Here are some views of its medieval church dedicated to him:
http://tinyurl.com/39c5q5
http://tinyurl.com/2ussbp
http://tinyurl.com/6fr9rs
J. has a nearby holy well (view expandable):
http://www.megalithic.co.uk/article.php?sid=8243

And here are some views of his originally twelfth-century church at Salton, North Yorkshire:
http://tinyurl.com/22avd2
http://tinyurl.com/yo97d6

The present Beverley Minster (at Beverley, East Riding of Yorkshire) was begun in 1220 and completed in 1425.  It is now dedicated to St. John the Evangelist and to St. Martin of Tours.
Two pages of expandable views:
http://tinyurl.com/23vsp
http://www.eriding.net/media/Churches.shtml
Some single views:
http://tinyurl.com/2fsog7
http://tinyurl.com/3c58t3
http://tinyurl.com/2882lj
http://www.northeastengland.talktalk.net/BevMinster.jpg
http://tinyurl.com/2d76s4
http://tinyurl.com/d4c7cf
http://tinyurl.com/cl5tl7
http://tinyurl.com/d7r6km
http://tinyurl.com/27u4zv
http://tinyurl.com/6gkoew


4)  Heilika of Niedernburg (Bl.; d. 1020).  H. (also Eilika, Eilica, Helga) was a member of the upper nobility of Bavaria.  In 1010, when she was about fifty-five years old, she became abbess of a women's monastery near Passau at a place that quickly became known as Niedernburg ('Lower Town') and that now is a section of Passau proper.  Although she is often said to have entered the community then as a recent widow, what she was doing before 1010 is unknown.  It is quite possible that she was already in religion, for in addition to enriching her house with important gifts from Henry II (who removed the monastery from episcopal jurisdiction) and to rebuilding structures said to have been badly damaged by the Hungarians she is said to have introduced into it the Benedictine Rule.

H. has yet to grace the pages of the RM.  Her tomb is in a niche in the Gisela chapel of the ex-abbey church of the Holy Cross in Passau (begun under her rule in 1013).  A plan showing its location vis-a-vis that of Bl. Gisela of Hungary (no. 5, below) is here:
http://tinyurl.com/cqy3nu
Some partial views of H.'s tomb are in the background in this view of that of Bl. Gisela:
http://www.shbapa.bayern.de/images/Giselakapelle.JPG
http://tinyurl.com/2lmgq5


5)  Gisela of Hungary (Bl.; d. ca. 1060).  G., the widow of king St. Stephen and Hungary's first queen, reposes in the ex-abbey church at Passau - Niedernburg (see no. 3, above).  She is somewhat dubiously said to have been Bl. Heilika's niece.  While in Hungary she actively promoted the spread of Christianity.  After her  husband's death in 1038 she was held captive by enemies until 1042, when she was freed by Henry II.  G. then entered the monastery of Niedernburg, becoming its abbess in 1057.  Today is her _dies natalis_.  G.'s grave with its eleventh-century tombstone was further monumentalized in the early fifteenth century in response to an increase in pilgrims from Hungary.  Herewith some views:
http://www.shbapa.bayern.de/images/Giselakapelle.JPG
http://hvanilla.sakura.ne.jp/passau/image/passau33.jpg
http://tinyurl.com/2lmgq5
http://tinyurl.com/2l7ubl

An illustrated, German-language account of the excavation of G.'s tomb in 1995 and the subsequent examination of her remains is here:
http://www.stadtarchaeologie.de/projekte/grabungen/gisela/

The thirteenth-century Gisela chapel (Gizellakapolna) at Veszprém in Hungary, whose early modern entrance is shown here:
http://tinyurl.com/2m3wfz
has a fresco of the royal pair, both nimbed:
http://tinyurl.com/cpcczg
http://www.heiligenlexikon.de/Fotos/Gisela_von_Ungarn.jpg
There's a brief, English-language description of the chapel near the bottom of this page:
http://tinyurl.com/2459w8


6)  Anthony of Kiev (d. 1073).  We know about the Ukrainian monastic founder A. (also A. of Pechersk, A. of the Caves) chiefly from the late eleventh-century, Slavic-language Life of St. Theodosius of Kiev by St. Nestor of Pechersk (Nestor the Chronicler) and from mentions in the _Russian Primary Chronicle_ (begun by Nestor).  A native of Lubec in the Chernigov region north of Kiev, he made an early pilgrimage to Mt. Athos and returned there in mid-life, entering the Esphigmenou monastery in about 1028.  Later A. became a solitary in a cave at Pechersk, then outside of Kiev but now part of that city.  After he had attracted a small number of followers, he withdrew to a cave farther away, continuing to act as spiritual father to his little eremitic community but leaving day-to-day leadership first to St. Barlaam of Kiev and then, after Barlaam had been called to lead a new monastery, to St. Theodosius of Kiev.

A., whose relics have never been found, is said to have been buried in his cave, the nucleus of what would be called the monastery's Far Caves.  His cult was immediate.  A., who entered the RM in 2001, is depicted at left (St. Theodosius at right) in this late thirteenth-century icon now in the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow:
http://www.icon-art.info/masterpiece.php?lng=en&mst_id=182

Herewith a few English-language accounts of the Kiev (Kyiv)-Pechersk Lavra (a.k.a. the Monastery of the Caves):
http://orthodoxwiki.org/Monastery_of_the_Kiev_Caves
http://symeon-anthony.info/pilgrimage/lavra.html
http://tinyurl.com/d8gfgj

Best,
John Dillon
(Maurelius of Ferrara, John of Beverley, Heilika of Niedernburg , and Gisela of Hungary lightly revised from last year's post)

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