medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture

Today (10. May) is the feast day of:

1)  Quartus and Quintus (?).  Our earliest evidence for Q. and Q. comes from the now lost late fifth- or early sixth-century apse mosaics of the church of St. Priscus at today's San Prisco (CE), an extramural survivor of old Capua, where they were depicted as child saints.  The (pseudo-)Hieronymian Martyrology enters them under today's date as martyrs of Rome buried at a cemetery _ad Centum Aulas_ on the Via Latina.  Seventh-century guidebooks for pilgrims in Rome locate their graves in the basilica of Sts. Gordian and Epimachus (see no. 3, below; note that in the sixth century Gordian too was considered a child saint).  Although some lists of Capua's bishops make Q. and Q. early incumbents of that see, it is more likely that they were really Roman saints also venerated at Capua in late antiquity.


2)  Alphius, Philadelphius, and Cyrinus (d. 255?).  A., P., and C. are patrons of Lentini (SR) in southeastern Sicily.  The earliest record of these three martyrs is usually said to be their brief entry, thought to go back to the eighth century, in the so-called Menologium of Basil II (Vat. gr. 1613; late tenth- or early eleventh-century).  This makes them three youthful brothers arrested along with their tutor and many others by the order of an emperor Licinius and brought to Rome, where most of the companions undergo martyrdom.  A., P., and C., on the other hand, are sent to Sicily and put to death there.  Probably early in the latter half of the tenth century a Greek monk perhaps from southern Italy composed a lengthy, fabulous, multi-charactered Passio of A., C., and P. (BHG 57-62e; Vat. gr. 1591 and later witnesses) that is the source of most details about these saints appearing in later hagiography.

Papebroch inferred from details of the Passio that these saints were victims of the Decian persecution.  For reasons for placing these happenings in the reign of Valerian (254-59), see Giuseppe Morabito, s.v. "Alfio, Filadelfio, Cirino, [etc., etc., etc.]", _Bibliotheca Sanctorum_, vol. 1 (1961), cols. 832-34.    The latest word on the Passio appears to be Aldo Messina, "Il codice Vat. Gr.  1591 ed il romanzo agiografico siciliano", _Byzantion_ 71 (2001), 194-211.

A., P., and C. were certainly honored at the Greek abbey of Grottaferrata near Rome in the eleventh century (they figure in the hymns of Bartholomew of Gottaferrata) and there are hymns to them of Sicilian provenance, also in Greek, dating to the later eleventh century.

Most of today's better-known south Italian and Sicilian cult sites of A., P., and C. are early modern in origin.  Even Lentini seems not to have had relics of these martyrs until 1517, when its present ones were brought there from the Greek abbey of San Filippo di Fragalà near Frazzanò (ME) in northeastern Sicily.  A former possession of that abbey is the originally late tenth- or early eleventh-century church of A., P., and C. at San Fratello (ME), built over an earlier Greek church and containing in its crypt relics of these three saints.  See (with expandable views):
http://tinyurl.com/d9fhz
http://tinyurl.com/b9ryo


3)  Gordian of Rome (d. ca. 303, supposedly).  Prior to its revision of 2001, the RM had on this day a joint commemoration of Gordian and Epimachus.  G. and E. appear to have been two Roman martyrs who had nothing to do with each other until they came to be celebrated together.  Probably they were buried near each other, though the indications of their resting places vary and sometimes G. alone is mentioned.  A mid-sixth century inscription records the priest Vincent's restoration of the child martyr G.'s tomb.  A legendary Passio (BHL 3612) whose basic outlines were already formed by the time of the Carolingian martyrologies, makes G. a highly placed subordinate of Julian the Apostate who after slaying many Christians is himself baptized and suffers martyrdom.  He is buried in a place on the Via Latina where E. had already been laid to rest.  Seventh-century itineraries note G.'s burial in E.'s church on that site (as does G.'s elogium in the "new" RM); in the e
ighth century this was referred to as the church of G. and E.


4)  Cataldus (?).  This less well known saint of the Regno is the legendary protobishop of the port city of Taranto in southern Apulia.  Nothing is known of him prior to the discovery of his relics there in the latter half of the eleventh century.  Of that there are two different accounts.

One of these is an early modern reworking of an account by one Berlengerius (vel sim.; BHL 1652) that had been written soon after events of 1151 described in an Inventio et Translatio (BHL 1653), when C.'s grave under the high altar of the cathedral was opened and C.'s remains were placed in a silver reliquary, whereupon miracles began to occur.  This is the version given in the _Acta Sanctorum_; in it the inventio is ascribed to the time of a bishop or archbishop Drogo and this ascription in turn has led to the dating of the inventio to 1071.  The other (BHL 1653d), edited by Adolf Hofmeister, "Der Sermo de inventione sancti Kataldi: Zur Geschichte Tarents am Ende des 11. Jahrhunderts," _Münchener Museum fuer Philologie des Mittelalters und der Renaissance_ 4 (1924; reprinted: Nendeln, 1972), pp. 101-14, implies that the inventio occurred in 1094.  It seems to have been written shortly thereafter.

The two accounts differ in many important respects, not least in their attitude towards the Normans.  Though neither is entirely confidence-inspiring, that placing the inventio in 1094 (and outside the city rather than inside in a cathedral under reconstruction) seems more credible than its competition, which latter has many of the earmarks of an official version tidying things up after Norman rule had become entrenched.  But see Thomas Head, "Discontinuity and Discovery in the Cult of Saints: Apulia from Late Antiquity to the High Middle Ages", _Hagiographica_ 6 (1999), 171-211, esp. pp. 193-97.  Head finds the Berlengarius version the more plausible.

According to a very brief Inventio (BHL 1654) that formed part of a Tarentine collection of documents bearing upon T., in the 1330s or 1340s C.'s perfectly preserved tongue was found in an arm reliquary of that saint when his relics at Taranto were being given a new home within that city's cathedral.  In 1492, late in the reign of the Aragonese Ferrando (Ferdinando, Ferrante) I of mostly mainland Sicily (_vulgo_ kingdom "of Naples"), a millenarian prophecy favoring the Angevin claim to the throne and defaming Jews (whom the the Crown protected as a matter of policy) was said (BHL 1655) to have been revealed to a Tarentine deacon by C. himself in a vision vouchsafed in the choir of the cathedral.  

C.'s cult spread widely across southern Italy and Sicily (incl. Malta, administratively part of Sicily until 1530, when Charles V gave it to the Knights Hospitaller of the Order of St. John).  The view that he was an Irish bishop who stayed on at Taranto after a pilgrimage to the Holy Land derives from a pectoral cross said to have been found with his remains but not attested before the early modern period.  Though scholarship has debunked this story in many different ways, it lives on happily in Lives of the Saints written for popular consumption.  'Cataldus' seems to be a Lombard name.

Herewith some views of C.'s church at Palermo, founded towards the middle of the twelfth century by the admiral Maio of Bari:
http://tinyurl.com/5jmdmn
http://tinyurl.com/6hklfp
http://sights.seindal.dk/sight/22_San_Cataldo.html
Some better views of its cosmatesque pavement:
http://www.thejoyofshards.co.uk/visits/sicily/cataldo/


5)  Solongia (d. ca. 880, perh.).  S. (in modern French, Solange) is a local saint of Berry.  According to her legendary and seemingly rather late Vita (BHL 7822), she was a piously educated shepherdess in a small town in the vicinity of Bourges who in addition to tending sheep healed the sick and freed the diabolically possessed.  A son of the local lord desired her carnally, she refused his advances, he abducted her by night, she struggled and broke free as they were crossing a stream, he became enraged, seized his sword, and decapitated her.  She picked up her head and walked with angelic guidance to a village chosen by God's providence and her own wish to be her final resting place.  There a church named for her was built over her miracle-working remains.  Thus far the Vita.  The village is today's Sainte-Solange (Cher).

S.'s church at Sainte-Solange is said to be originally of the twelfth century.  The _Acta Sanctorum_ prints a hymn in her honor in ten elegiac distichs whose versification is certainly medieval.  Here's a view of the church:
http://tiny.cc/4Ia8n
And here's an expandable view of a later fifteenth-century statue, now in the Louvre, of S. as a cephalophore:
http://www.insecula.com/contact/A007420.html

Best,
John Dillon
(last year's post revised and with the additions of Quartus and Quintus and Solongia)

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