medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Today (6. July) is the feast day of:
1) Dominica (d. ca. 303, supposedly). Dominica (in Italian, Domenica) is the local martyr of Tropea (VV) on the northern shore of Calabria's Capo Vaticano. She has both a Latin Passio (no BHL number) and a Greek one (BHG 462). The former (a brief set of breviary readings from Tropea of uncertain date; first attested to in the work of the sixteenth-century Messinese hagiographer Francesco Maurolico) makes D. a Campanian by birth and is silent about the place of her martyrdom. According to this account angels conducted her soul to heaven and brought her body miraculously to Tropea. The undated but seemingly rather late Greek Passio is silent about D.'s place of birth or residence (though it does give her parents Greek names, Dorotheus and Cyriaca, the latter being the Greek equivalent of Dominica) and says nothing about her place of martyrdom but notes, curiously, that the official who had her put to death was of Campanian origin.
Both Passiones present D. as a young woman who is denounced as a Christian, while her parents either remain free and encourage her to make the required cult sacrifice (Greek Passio) or else are sent into exile (Latin Passio). D. declines to do this, is brought before Diocletian, infuriates him by persisting in her refusal of idolatry, is sentenced to death, survives various execution attempts, and is finally decapitated. The story's similarity to that of the Cyriaca martyred at Nicomedia under Diocletian, together with the similarity of these saints' names, has led many to suspect that this was originally a south Italian cult of a Greek saint named Cyriaca that used a localizing adaptation of one of the Passiones of C. of Nicomedia. D. was dropped from the RM in its revision of 2001.
Tropea, whose paleochristian necropolis was discovered near its twelfth-century cathedral early in the twentieth century, was a Roman coastal fortress (Belisarius was there in 535, towards the start of the Justinianic reconquest of Italy) until the ninth century, when it fell for a while into Muslim hands (Nicephorus Phocas the general [grandfather of the homonymous emperor] regained it for the empire in 890), and again until the eleventh century, when it became part of Roger I's domains during the Norman-led conquest of Byzantine Calabria. As a Byzantine garrison town it will have had an at least partly Greek-speaking population during the early Middle Ages. The cathedral, much rebuilt after after various earthquakes, was restored to a "Norman" appearance in the 1920s. The "Mondes Normands" site has four enlargeable views of the cathedral's exterior here (on a page curiously labled "Abruzzes"):
http://tinyurl.com/8kph6
Other exterior views:
http://www.zerodelta.net/immagini/calabria087.jpg
http://www.zerodelta.net/immagini/calabria086.jpg
http://www.zerodelta.net/immagini/calabria085.jpg
2) Romulus of Fiesole (?). R. (in Italian, Romolo) is first attested from a surviving late antique inscription (fourth-, fifth-, or sixth-century) at Fiesole, now badly worn, that says that he served the church from his earliest years, that he had been a lector for fifteen years, and that he had been ordained deacon. What follows is unfortunately very largely illegible. When we next hear of him, in a donation of 966, his church in Fiesole is described as that of _S. Romuli confessoris, ubi sanctissimum eius corpus quiescit humatum_. By 1028, when his remains were translated to Fiesole's then new cathedral, R., now considered a bishop, was no longer a confessor but instead a martyr. That remained the standard view of him throughout the central and later Middle Ages and beyond. R. has a highly legendary, late eleventh- or twelfth-century Passio that makes him a disciple of St. Peter himself (BHL 7330).
An Italian-language history of Fiesole's originally early eleventh-century cathedral of San Romolo:
http://www.cattedralefiesole.it/cattedrale.php
Four pages of views of it are here (keep clicking on "Avanti"; the views themselves are expandable by left-clicking):
http://www.cattedralefiesole.it/galleria_foto.php
More exterior views:
http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immagine:Duomofiesole.jpg
http://tinyurl.com/nmjnzo
http://www.comune.fiesole.fi.it/contenuti/foto/neve/04.jpg
More interior views:
http://flickr.com/photos/idlelight/12631940/
http://www.travelblog.org/Photos/3556.html?popped=1
Here's R. at right between the Madonna and St. Donatus of Fiesole in an early fifteenth-century polyptych by Bicci di Lorenzo in the cathedral of Fiesole:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/75881025@N00/12631964
http://tinyurl.com/lfusdm
And here he is in a portrait by Beato Angelico now in the National Gallery in London:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/it/a/a1/San_Romolo.jpg
3) Sisoes (d. ca. 430). Byzantine synaxaries record for today a feast of St. Sisoes the Great; although their notices of him are too brief to be helpful, they must refer to the early desert father S. to whom are ascribed numerous sayings in the _Apophthegmata Patrum_ that are not attributed in these collections either to S. the Theban or to S. of Petra. From the sayings attributed to him scholars have deduced that S. was in his youth a companion of St. Macarius the Elder at Scetis, that when that community grew he left it in about 356 and withdrew to St. Anthony's Mountain in the Thebaid where he lived, mostly alone, for at least seventy-two years, and that in his great age he and his disciple Abraham moved to Clysma on the Red Sea where he fell ill and is presumed to have died.
Here's S. in a fresco from 1527 by Theophanes Strelitzas (T. of Crete) in the monastery church of Agios Nikolaos Anapafsas in the Meteora district of Greece's Trikala prefecture:
http://tinyurl.com/l4k9mz
4) Palladius of Ireland (d. after 431). The little that we know for certain about P. comes entirely entirely from two references by his younger contemporary St. Prosper of Aquitaine. The latter tells us in his _Chronicle_, under the year 429, that P. was responsible for persuading pope St. Clement I to send St. Germanus of Auxerre to Britain in order to combat Pelagianism there, and, under the year 431, that the same pope sent P. to Ireland to be its Christians' first bishop.
Prosper's slightly later _Contra collatorem_ attributes to Celestine successful outcomes in both islands. Muirchú's late seventh-century Vita of St. Patrick has P. die not long after his arrival in Ireland. As far as P. is concerned, both statements could easily be inferences from silence.
In at least the later Middle Ages it was believed that P. had been a missionary to the Scots in Scotland, that he had died at today's Auchenblae in Fordoun parish (Aberdeenshire), where his relics sanctified a chapel dedicated to him. Here's a view of the remains of that originally thirteenth-century structure:
http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/299281
Herewith an English-language description of, and a few views of, the Fordoun Stone, an inscribed cross slab that had once lain beneath the chapel's altar:
http://tinyurl.com/n9uq8y
http://tinyurl.com/mh95mm
http://www.archaeoptics.co.uk/wp-content/images/fordoun.jpg
http://tinyurl.com/mw8cf8
5) Monenna (d. 517). M. (also Moninne and Darerca; sometimes identified with the St. Modwena of Burton upon Trent) was the founding abbess of the monastery of Killevy in southern Armagh. According to what is thought to be her earliest Vita (BHL 2095; preserved in a manuscript of the fourteenth century), she was the daughter of a nobleman of today's County Louth who took the veil from St. Patrick himself and, together with a small group of fellow religious, later spent some time with St. Brigid at Kildare. The date of her death is furnished by the annals of Ulster. A later Vita by one Conchubran (BHL 2096; before 1100) improves her genealogy, gives her three trips to Rome, and includes Scotland and Mercia within the scope of her activities
6) Goar (d. 7th cent.?). We first hear of G. from 765, when Pepin III gave to the monastery of Prüm in the Eifel a _cella sancti Goaris_ in the diocese of Trier near today's Oberwesel (Lkr. Rhein-Hunsrück) in Rheinland-Pfalz. He has an eighth-century Vita by a monk of Prüm (BHL 3565) that makes him a native of Aquitaine who was ordained priest by a bishop of Trier and who with that worthy's permission settled down as a hermit in the vicinity of Obwerwesel, where he built a cell and a church, celebrated Mass every day but Friday, recited the psalter in its entirety, was kind to pilgrims, declined appointment to the see of Trier, and died on this day in an unspecified year. An earlier ninth-century Vita et Miracula by Wandalbert of Prüm rewrites the original and adds numerous miracles attesting to G.'s efficacy (BHL 3566).
G. is the eponym of two towns in Rheinland-Pfalz: Sankt Goar, the town that grew up next to his cult site, and Sankt Goarshausen on the opposite bank of the Rhine. Herewith an illustrated, English-language page on the originally late eleventh-century, much rebuilt former Stiftskirche St. Goar in Sankt Goar (now a Lutheran parish church):
http://tinyurl.com/l3k9by
A German-language account of this church:
http://tinyurl.com/nrp3kv
Exterior view (right foreground):
http://tinyurl.com/lyrfhg
Further views (interior):
http://tinyurl.com/n79e84
Best,
John Dillon
(Dominica revised from an older post)
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