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MEDIEVAL-RELIGION  September 2009

MEDIEVAL-RELIGION September 2009

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Subject:

saints of the day 9. September

From:

John Dillon <[log in to unmask]>

Reply-To:

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

Date:

Tue, 8 Sep 2009 18:41:58 -0500

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text/plain

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medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture

Today (9. September) is the feast day of:

1)  Gorgonius of Rome (?).  G. is listed, under this date, in the _Depositio martyrum_ of the Chronographer of 354 as a martyr of the Via Labicana.  We know nothing about him.  Neither, apparently, did pope St. Damasus I (d. 384), whose epitaph for G. (_Epigrammata Damasiana_, ed. Ferrua, no. 32) is altogether uninformative.  G.'s grave near the church of St. Helen is routinely cited in the early medieval pilgrim itineraries for Rome.  The (pseudo-)Hieronymian Martyrology specifies that he was buried at the cemetery _Ad duas lauros_ and, uniquely in our surviving testimony, that this was called the _cimiterium sancti Gorgoni_.  G.'s feast is entered for today in the Gelasian Sacramentary and in the historical martyrologies from Bede onward.

In about 763 the enterprising St. Chrodegang of Metz had G.'s relics translated to the abbey he had founded at today's Gorze (Moselle) in the Lorraine.  In an able review for H-France
http://www.h-france.net/vol6reviews/firey.html
of M. A. Claussen's _The Reform of the Frankish Church: Chrodegang of Metz and the Regula canonicorum in the Eighth Century_ (Cambridge University Press, 2004), Abigail Firey refers to C.'s translations of "the obscure saints Gorgonius, Nabor, and Nazarius".  Presumably she is speaking of their _present-day_ obscurity, which latter we should be hesitant to impute to the eighth century.  Nabor and Nazarius are in the Gelasian Sacramentary's canon of the Mass and G.'s resting place, as we have seen, was a fixture in the itineraries for pilgrims at Rome.  The _Itinerarium Salisburgense_ goes so far as to single it out for special mention among the many graves in today's Catacombe dei Santi Marcellino e Pietro.

In the ninth century G. received a personality when Ado, under today's date, identified him with the Gorgonius of 12. March, a martyr of Nicomedia under Diocletian, and averred that it was the latter's remains that had been placed in the cemetery on the Via Labicana.  Ado's fairly circumstantial account (repeated in summary form by Usuard) follows Eusebius in making this Gorgonius a member of Diocletian's imperial household.  Later G. came to be viewed in the West as a soldier-saint.  He is so depicted, for example, on medieval seals of the cathedral at Minden in today's Nordrhein-Westfalen, whither his relics are said to have been translated from Gorze in the tenth century.  A panegyric from Minden for G.'s feast there was edited by François Dolbeau in _Analecta Bollandiana_ 103 (1985), 35-59.  G. is still the patron of what is now the Catholic parish church there (still called a 'Dom') of Sts. Peter and Gorgonius.

Some views of the Dompfarrkirche St. Peter und St. Gorgonius at Minden:
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bild:Minden_Dom2.jpg
http://www.dom-minden.de/img/dom_pics01.jpg
http://www.dom-minden.de/img/dom_pics04.jpg
http://www.dom-minden.de/img/dom_pics03.jpg

The latter's Treasury has an early fifteenth-century arm reliquary of G.:
http://www.dom-minden.de/domschatz/reliquiare/gorgonius.html
and a mid-fifteenth-century statuette of him (sword lacking), seemingly from a shrine:
http://www.dom-minden.de/domschatz/figuren/gorgoniusstatuette.html
http://tinyurl.com/2sdccb
St. Peter and G. on the seal of the cathedral prior Wedekind vom Berge (1350-1369):
http://tinyurl.com/3d6jar
The figures are reversed (naturally) on this stamp from 1230 for the town seal of Minden:
http://tinyurl.com/2nsrka

Relics held to be those of G. were translated from Gorze to places other than Minden.  One such was Metz, whose newly rebuilt abbey church of St. Arnold received some in 1049.  Pope St. Leo IX, who consecrated the church, composed one of his versified Offices, _Christiana devotio_, for this translation.  Here's an eleventh-century depiction of Leo consecrating the church:
http://concise.britannica.com/ebc/art-30029

Dedications to G. in the Lorraine include the originally twelfth-century église Saint-Gorgon at Woël (Meuse), shown on these French-language pages with expandable images:
http://tinyurl.com/neuu8u
http://tinyurl.com/le7qy2
and in these single views:
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3098/2812063936_66dcd1dfda_b.jpg
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3211/2811246653_47c4353ed0_b.jpg
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3254/2811256235_0eaf57bcaa_b.jpg
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3098/2811236235_934ba6bdbd_b.jpg
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3148/2812054216_dfbd66b7d9_b.jpg
as well as the originally thirteenth-century fortified église Saint-Gorgon at Lessy (Moselle):
http://tinyurl.com/6n5nau
http://tinyurl.com/653cfo
and the originally fifteenth-/sixteenth-century église Saint-Gorgon at Varangéville (Meurthe-et-Moselle):
http://varangeville.free.fr/eglise
http://tinyurl.com/nqttbh
http://tinyurl.com/nv97wy

Whereas the abbey at Gorze was frequently called that of G., its full titulature in the central and later Middle Ages was that of St. Peter, St. Stephen, and St. Gorgonius.  The abbey's surviving twelfth-/thirteenth-century church (with later additions) is now called that of St. Stephen.  Herewith some views of this église Saint-Etienne, restored in the nineteenth century:
http://tinyurl.com/6s5ugc
http://vaux57.free.fr/galerie/gorze.htm
http://tinyurl.com/yp2ba7


2)  Hyacinth of the Sabina (?).  The (pseudo-)Hieronymian Martyrology enters under today the following notice: _in Sabinis miliario XXX Jacinti, Alexandri, Tiburti_; in various forms, this entry is repeated in historical martyrologies of the Carolingian period.  Its inclusion of the not otherwise attested Alexander and Tiburt(i)us has been considered  erroneous.  They were dropped from the RM in its revision of 2001.  H. was retained, presumably thanks to his martyrial basilica recorded by the _Liber Pontificalis_ in its notice of St. Leo III (795-816).  This reported resting place makes him seemingly distinct from the H. of 11. September's Protus and Hyacinth, martyrs of the Via Salaria vetus.  A legendary Passio of yet another H. who is said to have been cast into the sea and to have survived only to be decapitated (BHL 4053; Hyacinthus in Portu Romano) was used by Rabanus Maurus in his notice of today's H.


3)  Ciarán of Clonmacnoise (d. 549?)  The Irish monastic founder C. (also Kiaran, Kieran, etc.; in Latin, Kiaranus, Queranus, etc.), sometimes called C. the Younger to differentiate him from C. of Saighir) is known from several Latin Vitae (BHL 4654-4656) and Irish Lives as well as from references and anecdotes in the Vitae and vernacular Lives of other Irish saints.  He is said to have studied under St. Finnian at Clonard and under St. Enda on Aran.  Whereas some may think this as legendary as just about everything else that's said of him, if we can trust the statement in Finnian's Office that he had three thousand students there seems little reason to suppose C. might not have been one of them.  C. was remembered as a holy man of exemplary qualities and as the man who established the monastery of Clonmacnoise on the river Shannon in today's County Offaly close to the geographic center of Ireland.

C.'s monastery flourished between the Norse raids of the eighth century and the English conquest of Ireland in the later twelfth, after which it went into a period of decline that lasted until the Dissolution in the sixteenth century.  An aerial view:
http://cache.virtualtourist.com/1020079.jpg
The seemingly slightly isolated small structure near the center of the enclosure is called Temple Ciaran and is reputed to have been built over the site of C.'s grave.  The present building, which is thought to have succeeded a wooden one at the same spot, is originally of the tenth century, though much of its present fabric is later.  Here's a closer view:
http://tinyurl.com/5o9o5u

Also from the tenth century is the monastery's Cross of the Scriptures, now kept in the Visitors Centre (with a copy exposed to the elements where the original once stood).  It's carved on all four sides.  Here's a view:
http://tinyurl.com/n3vhch
Two views of the outdoor copy, the first showing the side opposite that seen in the previous view and the second showing the side already seen:
http://tinyurl.com/mmer4e:
http://tinyurl.com/lbwhj3
The two figures in the lowest panel at right in this image are thought to represent C. and the Irish high king Diarmait mac Cerbaill planting the first stake in the erection of the monastery.  Here's a closer view of the panel on the original:
http://tinyurl.com/5n9q5t


4)  Osmanna (d. 8th cent. ?).  O. (also Osmana; in French, Osmane) is a very poorly attested saint of west France and of the region around Paris, where she occurs under this day in a fourteenth-century breviary for the Use of Paris and in a fourteenth-century missal for the Use of Saint-Denis, where she had a chapel (Paris, BnF, mss. Latin 1023 and 1007, respectively).  She may also be the O. celebrated on 16. August in a twelfth-century missal for the Use of Tours (Paris, BnF, ms. Latin 9436).  Legendarily (Vitae: BHL 6354, etc.), she is said to have been an Irish princess who, preferring virginity to an arranged marriage, fled to today's Saint-Brieuc in Brittany, where she lived out her life as an hermit.

A similar story (but with Brie rather than Saint-Brieuc and with O. becoming a nun, not a hermit) is told by Thomas of Cantimpré, in his _Vita sanctae Lutgardis_, of the saint Osanna of the abbey of Notre-Dame at Jouarre (Seine-et-Marne), who is honored in the crypt of its church with a thirteenth- or early fourteenth-century cenotaph topped by a gisant depicting her as a royal:
http://www.superstock.com/stock-photos-images/1606-10922
Whether she (in French, Osanne and Ozanne) is the same saint as the O. venerated in Paris and at Saint-Denis (as her location in the Île de France would suggest) or else an originally different one with much the same legend is not clear.

In the early fifteenth century relics of O. were translated from Saint-Denis to an originally thirteenth-century church at Féricy (Seine-et-Marne) since known as the église Sainte-Osmane.  The latter's proximity to Fontainebleau facilitated O.'s veneration by the queens Anne of Austria and Maria Theresa of Austria.  Here's a view of the church, whose transept, choir, and porch are sixteenth-century and whose belltower is modern:
http://tinyurl.com/njh237
A view of this church's fourteenth- or fifteenth-century statue of O. is here:
http://tinyurl.com/mkxnkz
I've been unable to find on the free Web any images of this church's twelfth(?)-century holy water font or of its earlier sixteenth-century (second quarter) historiated windows with scenes from O.'s legend.

O. is the patron saint of Sainte-Osmane (Sarthe), whose originally eleventh-century church of the Holy Savior was re-dedicated to her after a translation of relics in 1662.  She has also had a modern cult at Saint-Brieuc (Côtes-d'Armor).

Best,
John Dillon
(last year's post lightly revised and with the addition of Osmanna)

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