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MEDIEVAL-RELIGION  September 2009

MEDIEVAL-RELIGION September 2009

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Subject:

saints of the day 20. September

From:

John Dillon <[log in to unmask]>

Reply-To:

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

Date:

Sun, 20 Sep 2009 03:13:40 -0500

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text/plain

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medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture

Today (20. September) is the feast day of:

1)  Eustachius, Theopista, Theopistus, and Agapius (d. ca. 118, supposedly).  Unknown to early martyrologies and with no known really ancient cult, these saints are the the subject of an extraordinarily popular romance-like Passio whose original version was thought by Delehaye to have been that of BHG 641 and that exists in many languages other than Greek.  According to this tale, in the reign of Trajan the Roman general Placidus, one of nature's noblemen, was out hunting one day when he saw a stag of surpassing beauty earing between its horns a luminous cross with the figure of Jesus Christ.  This marvelous beast announced its identity to P. as Jesus Christ, asked why it/He was being pursued, and invited P. and P.'s family to accept baptism.  Which they did, P. taking the name Eustachius (or Eustathius), his wife Theopista, and his sons Theopistus and Agapius (all significant names but Eustachius does NOT signify 'Good Stag').

Still according to the legend, E. was treated as a new Job, undergoing all sorts of privations, as did also his immediate family.  One of these that was important for their construction in the later Middle Ages was that they lost all their slaves and their horses and cattle to a plague; as they themselves survived, they became plague-saints.  At the end of all these adventures, during which E. had been separated at different times from T., T., and A., they were reunited to take part in celebrating a military victory that E. had won for Trajan.  This of course required ritual sacrifice, E. refused, he and his family were condemned, and all four, after exposure to wild beasts had proved ineffectual, found quick death in a bronze bull made red-hot by a fire beneath it.  Their miraculously unburnt bodies were buried by fellow Christians; when Constantine had ended the persecutions an oratory was built over their grave.

The earliest known dedication to E. is that of a diaconal church in Rome attested from the time of pope St. Gregory II (715-731), a predecessor of today's Sant'Eustachio in Campo Marzio.  That's been rebuilt since the Middle Ages.  But its belltower has not:
http://www.dkimages.com/discover/previews/758/274722.JPG
The feast of E., T., T., and A. was removed from the general Roman Calendar in the latter's revision of 1969.  T., T., and A. were dropped from the RM in its revision of 2001 (in Orthodox churches they are still celebrated today along with E.); E. was retained as the saint of the aforementioned diaconal church.  E. is a patron saint of (among others) Madrid, Matera (MT) in Basilicata, Acquaviva delle Fonti (TA) in Apulia, and Campo di Giove (AQ) in Abruzzo.

Herewith a few images of E., T., T., and A.:

a)  E. (at right) on the Harbaville Triptych (tenth-century), now in the Musée du Louvre, Paris:
http://tinyurl.com/3m3sj6

b)  E. and the Stag in a wall painting (twelfth-century?) in the rupestrian cripta di Sant' Eustachio at Matera (MT) in Basilicata:
http://www.ilvicinato.com/data/s%20eustachio.jpg
http://www.lacittadelluomo.it/sez03_05_saneustachio.htm
Another view of this former church:
http://www.ilvicinato.com/data/s%20eustachio%202.jpg

c)  Head reliquary of E. (late twelfth-century), formerly in the cathedral treasury at Basel and now in the British Museum, London:
http://www.metmuseum.org/special/basel_cathedral/1.L.htm
http://www.internetindia.com/enduring/me205.jpg

d)  The St. Eustace window (ca. 1210), Notre-Dame de Chartres:
http://tinyurl.com/54e4yl

e)  Illumination of E. and the Stag in a thirteenth-century psalter of English origin (Venice, Biblioteca Marciana, ms. lat. I, 77 [2397], fol. 6v):
http://tinyurl.com/4hhstz

f)  Illumination of E. and the Stag in an earlier fourteenth-century collection of French-language saint's Lives (Paris, BnF, ms. Français 183, fol. 231v):
http://tinyurl.com/mc667a

g)  E., T., T., and A. in the bronze bull as depicted in the earlier (second quarter) fourteenth-century frescoes in the church of the Holy Ascension at the Visoki Deèani monastery near Peæ in, depending on one's view of the matter, either the Republic of Kosovo or Serbia's province of Kosovo and Metohija:
http://tinyurl.com/n7atqw

h)  Panels from the now dismembered late fourteenth-century (ca. 1380) altarpiece of E. reported stolen in 1902 from his church in Campo di Giove (AQ) in Abruzzo and returned from the United States late in 2008 (destined for the Museo Nazionale d'Abruzzo, they went first to a Carabinieri office in Rome while the museum, located in L'Aquila, made preparations to mount them -- does anyone know whether they reached L'Aquila before last April's earthquake, in which the museum suffered serious damage?):
Illustrated,English-language accounts (the second is a video, with detail views starting at about 2:11):
http://tinyurl.com/5a8u92
http://tinyurl.com/4gupqc
Illustrated (just not awfully well), Italian-language account:
http://tinyurl.com/3uxbu7

i)  Pisanello, E. and the Stag ("Vision of St. E."; ca. 1440), now in the National Gallery, London:
http://tinyurl.com/4prm5u

j)  Master of the Benedict Passion, E. and the Stag (ca. 1465), variously said to be either in the National Museum in Kraków or else in the Holy Cross chapel of that city's cathedral (does anyone on the list know for certain where this painting now resides?):
http://artyzm.com/obraz.php?id=2182

k)  Wall painting (ca. 1480) of scenes from E.'s legend, Canterbury cathedral:
http://flickr.com/photos/chrisjohnbeckett/368385671/
Detail (E. and the Stag):
http://flickr.com/photos/chrisjohnbeckett/369230784/

l)  Illumination of E. and the Stag and E., T., T., and A. receiving baptism (ca. 1480-1490; Paris, BnF, ms. Français 245 [Jean de Vignay's tr. of the _Legenda aurea_], fol. 152r):
http://tinyurl.com/mlb3pd

m)  Albrecht Dürer, E. on a panel of the Paumgärtner Altarpiece (ca. 1498-1504), now in the Alte Pinakothek, München:
http://tinyurl.com/3kzppm

n)  Albrecht Dürer, print from an engraving (ca. 1501) of E. and the Stag:
http://www.zeno.org/Kunstwerke.images/I/323D034a.jpg

o)  E. (center) on the tomb of the Kurfürstin Anna (1512), church of the former monastery of Heilsbronn (Kr. Ansbach) in Bayern:
http://tinyurl.com/4zl3w3


Some dedications:

a)  Remains of the eleventh-century church dedicated to E. at Matera (MT) in Basilicata, over which its present, originally thirteenth-century cathedral of the BVM was built:
Longitudinal section:
http://tinyurl.com/4tweao
Transverse section:
http://tinyurl.com/4td9ec
Plan:
http://tinyurl.com/4yftgg
Views:
http://tinyurl.com/3my3vl
http://tinyurl.com/3zbcv6
http://tinyurl.com/43bezv
http://tinyurl.com/47h45c 
For comparison, the originally eleventh-century Ognissanti of Valenzano (BA) in Apulia:
http://tinyurl.com/53w432
http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiesa_di_Ognissanti_(Valenzano)
That church's vaulting:
http://tinyurl.com/43ujfa
Also for comparison (for the shape of domes) the originally eleventh-century former church of Sant'Eustachio ('San Staso') in the rural territory of Giovinazzo (BA) in Apulia:
http://www.mondimedievali.net/pre-testi/images/archit11.jpg

b)  The ruins (recently restored) of the originally later twelfth-century basilica di Sant'Eustachio at Pontone di Scala (SA) on the Amalfi Coast in Campania:
http://tinyurl.com/52f4pu
http://tinyurl.com/44hcyb
http://tinyurl.com/4rctgp
http://tinyurl.com/3euycl
A distance view:
http://tinyurl.com/4gdeoa

c)  The ruins of the originally early twelfth-century abbazia di Sant'Eustachio at Nervesa della Battaglia (TV) in the Veneto:
http://tinyurl.com/4np76g
http://tinyurl.com/3oectv
http://tinyurl.com/4r2kws
http://tinyurl.com/497jse
http://tinyurl.com/4nryce
http://tinyurl.com/3q2675
http://tinyurl.com/4mw7ks

d)  The originally thirteenth- and fourteenth-century église Saint-Eustache at Mosles (Calvados) in Normandy:
http://tinyurl.com/nw5e8d
A French-language page on this church (including a plan):
http://paroisse.st.exupere.free.fr/DocMosles/MoslesEglise.htm

e)  the église Saint-Eustache in Paris (built, 1532-1637):
http://tinyurl.com/3mg84s
http://tinyurl.com/4w5332


2)  Adelpretus (Albert) of Trent (Bl.; d. 1172).  A. was bishop of Trent, now the capital of Italy's Trentino-Alto Adige region and from early in the eleventh century until its Napoleonic conquest in 1801 the administrative center of a sizeable imperial territory governed by bishops who in time came to be styled formally as prince-bishops.  A., who was zealous in the maintenance of episcopal rights -- and thus income -- within this territory, is said to have used that income generously on behalf of children and of the poor.  He was assassinated by a local noble with whom he had been at odds and with whose family the prince-bishops of Trent remained in conflict until 1273.

A.'s veneration as a martyr seems to have begun almost immediately.  Though one could not tell this from the website of the Archdiocese of Trent, where a discreet silence masks the never papally canonized A.'s very existence, the main altar of Trent's originally thirteenth-/fourteenth-century cathedral was dedicated jointly to the early bishop St. Vigilius (26. June) and to A.

From at least the sixteenth century until the early twentieth, when the archdiocese of Trent dropped him from its calendar, A. was celebrated liturgically on 27. March.  That is also where he was in the RM until its revision of 2001, when his commemoration was moved to today to accord with the information provided by our one detailed source for this event, the thirteenth-century hagiographer Bartholomew of Trent.

Bartholomew's Passio and Miracula of A. are available in Emore Paoli's modern critical edition: Bartolomeo da Trento, _Liber epilogorum in gesta sanctorum_ (Florence: SISMEL; Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2001).  The text is at pp. 379-85; there's important contextual matter in the Introduzione at pp. xxvi-vii.

Work on Trent's present cathedral of St. Vigilius began in 1212 and went on for over a century.  Here are a plan  (East at top) and a few exterior views:
http://www.tamtamtravel.com/opera.php?opera=586
http://www.itea.tn.it/notiziario/n30/copertina.html
http://tinyurl.com/krhqen
http://tinyurl.com/kpguhj
http://tinyurl.com/mjza2o
http://tinyurl.com/mo5bje
http://tinyurl.com/3rmjrf
http://tinyurl.com/pwgo3
http://tinyurl.com/mbreun
http://tinyurl.com/lmbu83
and two of the interior:
http://tinyurl.com/2m6enr
http://tinyurl.com/lreaj4

A.'s sarcophagus in the cathedral was once covered with this plaque showing him being run through by a lance (wielded by a figure identified in a nimbus-like defined space as one Aldrigitus, i.e. Aldrighetto da Castelbarco, the nobleman said to have committed the murder):
http://www.ora-et-labora.net/image015.jpg

Best,
John Dillon
(last year's post lightly revised)

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