medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Today (3. September) is the feast day of:
1) Mansuetus of Toul (?). M. (in French, Mansuy) is the legendary protobishop of Toul (Meurthe-et-Moselle). His later tenth-century hagiographer Adso of Montier-en-Der says in his Vita et Miracula of M. (BHL 5210) that he was an Irishman who in Rome became a disciple of St. Peter, that he evangelized in Toul, and that St. Martin of Tours had prayed at his tomb. But M.'s cult really seems to begin in the tenth century when it was promoted by Toul's bishop St. Gerard I, who founded a monastery dedicated to M. and who commissioned the aforementioned work of Adso. The latter, not altogether surprisingly, presents M. as a model bishop. A head said to be M.'s is still kept in Toul's cathedral of St. Stephen. In the diocese of Nancy and Toul M. is now celebrated on 4. September, thanks to today's Memorial for pope St. Gregory I (no. 2, below).
Two partial views of M.'s early sixteenth-century funerary monument, formerly in his abbey church and now in the Musée de Toul:
http://www.archeographe.net/IMG/jpg/Imgp4736-arch.jpg
http://www.archeographe.net/IMG/jpg/Imgp4737-arch.jpg
A view of the originally fifteenth-/sixteenth-century église Saint-Mansuy in Fontenoy-le-Château (Vosges):
http://tinyurl.com/lfqg85
2) Gregory I, pope (d. 604). Gregory the Great, known in some churches as Gregory the Dialogist, was born into a Roman senatorial family and as a relatively young man served briefly as city prefect. But he soon resigned, sold his estates in order to establish monasteries, and withdrew to a monastery he had founded on family property on the Caelian. Within a few years he had been drafted into papal service and was ordained deacon. Pelagius II made him his apocrisarius in Constantinople, where the essentially Greekless G. stayed for six years, began his _Moralia in Iob_, and won a doctrinal controversy with that city's patriarch, St. Eutychius. In about 585 he returned to his monastery at Rome, completed and published the _Moralia_, and continued to advise Pelagius and to act on his behalf. In 590 G. was elected bishop of Rome. The first monk to be so chosen, he was ordained priest and consecrated on this day.
An early act of G.'s pontificate was the publication his _Cura pastoralis_ (a.k.a. _Regula pastoralis_), on the role and duties of a bishop. Many of his energies were spent on administrative and diplomatic matters (e.g. managing the estates of the church, keeping the Lombards at bay). He affirmed and exercised his authority in Western dioceses other than Rome and the suburbicarian sees, wrote the _Dialogi_, and sent St. Augustine of Canterbury and others to evangelize the English. He died on 12. March. The latter was G.'s primary feast day in the general Roman Calendar prior to the latter's reform of 1969 and is still the day of his commemoration in the Church of England and in Orthodox churches that have not adopted the Gregorian calendar (in those that have, his feast falls on 25. March).
Here's the September page of of the liturgical calendar in the earlier twelfth-century St Albans Psalter (Hildesheim, Dombibliothek, MS St. Godehard 1), showing today as the feast of G.'s ordination (the deleted word was _pape_):
http://tinyurl.com/5w58cw
G.'s own monastery church of St. Andrew was rebuilt in the twelfth or thirteenth century and again in the early seventeenth century. Formally the chiesa di Santi Andrea e Gregorio Magno al Celio, it is now usually referred to simply as San Gregorio Magno (or as San Gregorio al Celio). Adjoining its cappella di San Gregorio is a little room traditionally held to have been G.'s cell; in it is a late antique Roman chair said to have been his. Two views of the chair are here:
http://www.camaldoli.it/web_it/sg_storia/sg_storia00.htm
A brief, Italian-language account of this complex (which includes three adjacent oratories, two of which are also medieval), with indications of surviving medieval elements, is here:
http://tinyurl.com/3dx28v
Expandable views of pages in a manuscript of ca. 600 of G.'s _Cura pastoralis_, thought to be a product of his own scriptorium in Rome (Troyes, Médiathèques de l'Agglomération troyenne, ms. 504):
http://tinyurl.com/kq7utb
G. at right (pope St. Gelasius I at left) in the later ninth-century (ca. 870) Sacramentary of Charles the Bald (Paris, BnF, ms. Latin 1141, fol. 2v):
http://tinyurl.com/nkd33t
Perhaps the best known of the many medieval depictions of G. composing with the dove of the Holy Spirit at his ear is this scene from a tenth-century ivory book cover now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna:
http://www.umilta.net/gregory1.jpg
An eleventh-/twelfth-century manuscript of G.'s _Dialogi_ (Modena, Archivio capitolare, ms. O.I.9):
http://tinyurl.com/nhz6z9
G.'s _Moralia in Iob_ is addressed to St. Leander of Seville (13. March). An illumination from an early twelfth-century manuscript of this widely copied text (Dijon, Bibliothèque municipale, ms. 168, fol. 5r; dated 1111) depicts both of them at the head of G.'s prefatory letter to L.:
http://tinyurl.com/2u7nk5
And here again are the two of them, at the opening of the same letter in another twelfth-century manuscript (Saint-Omer, Bibliothèque de l’agglomération, ms. 12):
http://www.bml.firenze.sbn.it/gregorio/preview/img_schede_big/24.jpg
Expandable views of two other versions of this double portrait are here:
http://tinyurl.com/2rz8t3
The originally twelfth-century chiesa di San Gregorio Magno at Ascoli Piceno (AP) in the Marche is built into a former Roman temple:
http://tinyurl.com/c66ek
A brief, Italian-language discussion is here:
http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiesa_di_San_Gregorio_Magno
Some views of the originally later twelfth-century église Saint-Grégoire at Tesson (Charente-Maritime) in Saintonge, a church whose predecessor was in 1085 already referred to as _ecclesia de nomine sancti Gregorii pape_ (in case anyone had been wondering, "Which Gregory?"):
French-language account (with plan):
http://tinyurl.com/2vktfd
Aerial views:
http://tinyurl.com/2ob5nd
Facade:
http://tinyurl.com/2jfmso
Rear view:
http://pmarecha.free.fr/roman/charente/tesson30-36.JPG
Some views of the cappella di San Gregorio at the monastero del Sacro Speco at Subiaco (RM) in Lazio, notable for its early thirteenth-century frescoes:
Atrium:
http://web.tiscali.it/benedettinidirectory/benedettini/082.htm
Chapel proper:
http://web.tiscali.it/benedettinidirectory/benedettini/083.htm
G. (with Job at lower left):
http://tinyurl.com/5nll6z
G. (at left) in this expandable view of an illumination in a thirteenth-century manuscript, now in the National Library of Russia, of his _Homilia in Evangelia_ in an early Slavonic translation:
http://www.nlr.ru/eng/exib/Gospel/drus/31.html
G. (at left; St. Jerome at right) in the later thirteenth-century ceiling paintings in the baptistery of Parma:
http://www.cattedrale.parma.it/img/voltabatt/95B-greggiac_Z.jpg
After Ambrose, Augustine, and Jerome, G. is the last of the original four Western Doctors of the Church. All are depicted here (G. at upper left) in Pietro di Puccio's mosaics (1388; restored) on the facade of the cathedral of Orvieto (TR) in Umbria:
http://www.bluffton.edu/~sullivanm/italy/orvieto/cathedral/0093.jpg
Another depiction of these four (in this view, G. is at right), this time in the fifteenth-century ceiling frescoes of the chiesa di Santa Croce at Rocca Canavese (TO) in Piedmont:
http://tinyurl.com/yqojgo
Architectural context:
http://www.comune.roccacanavese.to.it/storia.htm
Views of the originally fifteenth-century église Saint-Grégoire-le-Grand at Ribeauvillé (Haut-Rhin) in Alsace:
http://www.photo-alsace.com/2_photo/68_2/img_1/n30031.jpg
http://tinyurl.com/265a8f
http://tinyurl.com/26rlf7
St. Aredius (Aregius, Arigius, Arey, Érige) of Gap before G. in the mid-fifteenth-century frescoes of the chapelle Saint-Érige at Auron, Saint-Étienne-de-Tinée (Alpes-Maritimes):
http://www.culture.gouv.fr/culture/medieval/en/a050.htm
Some context:
http://www.culture.gouv.fr/culture/medieval/en/carte.htm
G. is the patron saint of Vizzini (CT) in Sicily, whose originally fifteenth-century principal church, rebuilt in the eighteenth century, is dedicated to him. An exterior view showing a Catalan Gothic portal:
http://www.vizzinidascoprire.it/foto/htm/mm1.htm
G. in a later fifteenth-century (ca. 1472-1473) panel painting by Antonello da Messina, now in the Museo nazionale in Palermo:
http://tinyurl.com/lmps6l
G.'s resting place beneath his altar in St. Peter's in Vatican City:
http://tinyurl.com/n4dc9u
3) Remaclus (d. ca. 673). According to his extensive hagiographic tradition (BHL 7113, etc.), R. (in French, Remacle) was an Aquitanian who entered religion at Luxeuil and who later became abbot at Solignac. In about 650 he founded, at the behest of king St. Sigebert III, the double monastery of Stavelot/Stablo and Malmédy in what was then Austrasia and today is in southeastern Belgium. Laid to rest at Stavelot, he was canonized (locally, of course) some ten or fifteen years after his death. By the middle of the ninth century R. had obtained a reputation for miraculous cures that achieved imperial recognition from both Louis the Pious and Lothar II and that led, shortly before the latter's visit to Stavelot in 862, to a compilation of _Miracula_ that continued to grow over the centuries. From this time through to the dissolution of 1794 Stavelot was a major pilgrimage site as well as the capital of an independent ecclesiastical domain within the empire.
R. on a twelfth-century pilgrim's badge now in the Musée communal de Huy:
http://www.musee-huy.be/photos-html/B07.html
A view of R.'s shrine now in the église Saint-Sébastien at Stavelot (1268; photo from its appearance at the Belgian pavilion at Expo 67 [the 1967 World's Fair at Montréal]):
http://tinyurl.com/6p67zw
Some views of R.'s originally eleventh-century church at Ocquier (Clavier) in Belgium's province de Liège:
http://tinyurl.com/59gtdm
http://www.belgiumview.com/belgiumview/tl2/view0000856.php4
In the diocese of Namur R. is now celebrated on 4. September, thanks to today's Memorial for pope St. Gregory I (no. 2, above).
Best,
John Dillon
(last year's post lightly revised)
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