medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Today (24. July) is also the feast day of:
1) The Three Magi (d. 1st cent.?). This feast commemorates the translation, effectuated by the emperor Friedrich Barbarossa in 1164, to Köln from Milan of the putative relics of the Magi of Matthew 2:1-12. These are not known to have been in Milan prior to 1158 and it seems likely that the Vita of Milan's fourth-century St. Eustorgius (BHL 2776, 2777; many versions), in whose church they had been kept, was either originally written or else effectively altered at that time in order to give them a back story ascribing to that saint their previously undocumented (and perhaps previously unimagined) late antique translation to Milan from Constantinople.
Once those relics had been in Germany for a while, north Italians found different means of discounting them. In the early fourteenth century some Milanese claimed that the Three Magi were still in their city's church of Sant'Eustorgio. Epiphany celebrations took place in and in front of the church (for the festival of 1336, see the account in Richard Trexler, _The Journey of the Magi_ [Princeton University Press, 1997], pp. 88-89). In 1347 a confraternity of the Three Magi/Kings erected in Sant'Eustorgio the altar shown here:
http://tinyurl.com/a8xnd
and, in much greater detail, about a third of the way down this page from Italia nell'Arte Medievale:
http://tinyurl.com/myt9au
The Venetian Marco Polo took a different tack, reporting (_Il Milione_, 31) that in the thirteenth century the bodies of the Three Magi were being venerated at the Persian city of Savah. The fourteenth-century Franciscan missionary, Bl. Odoric of Pordenone, a Friulan, reported the same thing. But in Köln, of course, the Magi are still held to lie in their golden shrine (ca. 1192-ca. 1220) in the cathedral of Sts. Peter and Mary:
http://tinyurl.com/5pdcf4
http://tinyurl.com/35b6es
http://tinyurl.com/28nrkj
Detail (Adoration of the Magi):
http://www.koelner-dom.de/uploads/pics/v050008.jpg
Matthew doesn't tell us how many Magi there were. Nor, since the Nativity is now considered to have occurred several years earlier than the Year One, can we be certain that these magi all survived into the first century of the Common Era, though in legend they have roles as missionaries in the East after having been baptized by St. Thomas the Apostle. In the East, where their legends seem to have begun, their number varies. In the West they are ordinarily three in number and since the fourth century they have been considered kings.
2) Fantinus the elder (d. 4th or 5th cent.). This less well known saint of the Regno (also F. the Wonder Worker; in Greek his given name is spelled as Phantinos) has been venerated at today's Taureana di Palmi (RC) in Calabria since late antiquity, when the crypt in which he was buried was constructed in an ancient nymphaeum. He is the subject of canon (long hymn) by St. Joseph the Hymnographer, of a ninth- or perhaps early tenth-century Bios (BHG 1508) by Peter, bishop of the West (i.e. of Syracuse), whose first part is a stylish encomium and whose second part is a plainly written miracle collection, and of a Latin Vita from Syracuse (BHL 2824) that confounds him in places with his tenth-century homonym St. Fantinus the Younger, makes his parents martyrs of the Great Persecution, and has him die at the age of thirty-three.
According to bishop Peter, F. was a servant of a man of high rank named Balsamius who had placed him in charge of a herd of mares in a horse pasture along the Metaurus (today's Petraci, Taureana's river); in order to assist the poor, the well intentioned F. used the mares at night to thresh their grain. This was reported to B., who came at night in order to catch F. in the act of tiring out his herd when the animals should have been bulking up. As B. approached, F. cast down a sheaf of grain he was holding in his hand and lo! it became a meadow in which the mares were seen to be lying down asleep. On a second occasion, when the angry B. actually caught F. in the act the river parted and allowed both the mounted F. and all the other mares to cross to temporary safety on the other bank. B., recognizing the saint's power, professed F. to be the master and himself the servant.
In the eighth century a basilica dedicated to F. stood above his crypt; this is said to have been wrecked by Muslim raiders in the tenth century but was soon rebuilt. It was replaced in the 1590s by the predecessor of the present, originally nineteenth-century chiesetta di San Fantino. Behind the latter, portions of the early medieval church, including two small apses, have now been excavated. Two views:
http://tinyurl.com/6d8e5s
http://tinyurl.com/5byphf
And here's a view of the cripta di San Fantino:
http://tinyurl.com/6zv8nk
An English-language translation of bishop Peter's Bios of F. begins here (links to the remainder are at the bottom of the page):
http://www.sanfantino.org/biosenglish.htm
3) Sigolena (d. later 6th cent. ?). We know about S. (also Segolena; in French, usually Sigolène; at Metz -- and probably more broadly among adherents of the Parti Socialiste --, Ségolène) from a later seventh-century Vita (BHL 7570) that is almost entirely a tissue of borrowings from other Vitae. This makes her the abbess of a monastery at Troclar at Lagrave (Tarn), some twenty kilometers west of Albi. She is presumed to have been the first abbess and, in view of the Vita's apparent lack of reliable information about her, to have lived rather well before the latter was composed. S.'s cult is attested medievally both at Albi, whose cathedral had relics of her in 1218, some of which were still there in 1720; in 1490 some of her relics were in Albi's church of St-Salvi, whence in 1819 two bits were transferred to S.'s church at Lagrave.
A French-language site on the excavations at Troclar is here:
http://pagesperso-orange.fr/pmc.cabot/Troclar/
At Metz, the originally thirteenth-/fifteenth-century église Sainte-Ségolène (replacing earlier structures), now mostly neo-gothic, has preserved its late medieval choir, absidioles, and three adjacent bays:
http://tinyurl.com/6xpvxc
http://tinyurl.com/mpzto
http://www.flickr.com/photos/7503984@N05/2705590691/sizes/o/
http://www.assumpta.fr/IMG/jpg/20040803_metz_03.jpg
4) Boris and Gleb (d. 1015). B. and G., the protomartyrs of Russia, were sons of the Kievan grand duke St. Vladimir, Russia's first Christian prince. Their deaths shortly after his were ascribed to the machinations of another brother, Sviatopolk, who ruled in Kiev until 1019, when he was defeated by Vladimir's oldest son, Jaroslav. The latter installed the bodies of B. and G. in the church of St. Basil at Visgorod, proclaimed them martyrs, and inaugurated their cult. This is their joint day of commemoration in the RM; in Orthodox churches, B. is celebrated today and G. is celebrated on 5. September.
Expandable views of a number of icons of B. and G. from the fourteenth to the early sixteenth century, now in the Tretyakov and other Russian galleries, are here:
http://tinyurl.com/mrcrgt
Portraits of B. and G. frescoed in 1502 by the painter Dionisy in the Virgin Nativity cathedral of the St. Ferapont Belozero (Ferapontov Belozersky) Monastery at Ferapontovo in Russia's Vologda Region:
http://www.dionisy.com/eng/museum/123/141/index.shtml
5) Baldwin of Rieti (d. 1140?). This less well known saint of the Regno is the addressee of a letter from St. Bernard of Clairvaux from which we learn that he had become a monk of Clairvaux under Bernard's tutelage and that he had been sent in 1130 to take charge of the abbey of St. Matthew (attested from 1045/46) near Rieti in today's Lazio. B. was buried at that abbey; how quickly his cult developed is unknown. In the 1493 or 1494 his relics were translated to the cathedral in Rieti. At Rieti he is celebrated liturgically on 21. August. Today is his day of commemoration in the RM and his feast day in the Cistercian Order.
Rieti's cathedral was largely rebuilt in 1639. But its crypt is of the twelfth century, as are much of the exterior of the nave, including the three portals under the Renaissance porch, and the belltower. Some views of the crypt:
http://tracks.vagabondo.net/lazio/rieti/rieti-14.jpg.html
http://tracks.vagabondo.net/lazio/rieti/rieti-15.jpg.html
http://tracks.vagabondo.net/lazio/rieti/rieti-16.jpg.html
Belltower and front:
http://tinyurl.com/n24b9k
http://tinyurl.com/6b2mfz
http://tinyurl.com/mown8o
Ornamental central portal (detail):
http://tinyurl.com/mjqocu
More views are at this page from Italia nell'Arte Medievale:
http://tinyurl.com/nzknxh
The bottom of that page has some views of the adjacent bishop's palace with its massive ground-floor vaults (begun in 1283) fronted by an only slightly later loggia (1288). Some other views of this structure (restored in the 1930s):
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Palazzo_Vescovile_di_Rieti
http://tracks.vagabondo.net/lazio/rieti/rieti-05.jpg.html
http://tracks.vagabondo.net/lazio/rieti/rieti-06.jpg.html
6) Christina the Astonishing (Bl.; d. 1224?). According to her Vita by Thomas of Cantimpré (BHL 1746), whose historical accuracy is open to question, C. (in Latin, Christina Mirabilis) was a twenty-one-year-old Flemish orphan of peasant stock when she suffered a seizure that caused her to be taken for dead. A funeral was held and during the service she awoke and levitated. When called down by a priest she landed on the altar and announced that she had seen Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory. Continuing (we are told) to levitate and to engage in other extraordinary feats, C. then lived as solitary at Looz and finally at the monastery of St. Catherine at Sint-Truiden/Saint-Trond.
7) Kinga (d. 1292). K. (in Latin, Cunegunda; when called by that name form she is C. -- in German, Kunigunde -- of Poland, thus differentiating her from St. Cunegunda/Kunigunde of Luxemburg) was the daughter of Béla IV of Hungary and of his queen Maria Laskarina, a niece of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, and a great-niece of Saint Hedwig of Andechs. Two of her sisters were St. Margaret of Hungary and Bl. Jolenta (Yolande) of Poland. K. had a chaste marriage with Bolesław V, prince of Kraków. As princess she engaged regularly in acts of charity. After her husband died in 1279 K. retired to the convent of Poor Clares at Sandeck, where she is said to have lived very humbly. A patroness of Poland and Lithuania, she was canonized in 1999.
Best,
John Dillon
(last year's post lightly revised)
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