medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Today (13. December) is also the feast day of:
1) Antiochus of the Sulcis (d. early 2d cent., supposedly). A. was originally the local saint of the late Roman city of Sulci, now the town of Sant'Antioco on the homonymous island in the southwestern Sardinian district of the Sulcis. He has a legendary Passio (BHL 566d), not older than the eleventh century and probably of the twelfth or early thirteenth, that makes him a physician active in Galatia and Cappadocia who converted many to Christianity, was arrested and tortured by Roman authorities, and defended the faith in a lengthy colloquy with the emperor Hadrian. According to that account (which up to this point is adapted from a Passio of St. Antiochus of Sebaste), A. was exiled to the island of Sulci, where he became a hermit and continued to practice Christianity. Denounced to the pagan rulers of Calaris (today's Cagliari), he was granted a peaceful entry into heaven after soldiers sent to seize him arrived at the cave in which he was dwelling.
The cave in the Passio is the latter's interpretation of the early state of the chamber beneath the church at Sant'Antioco in which A. has been venerated since late antiquity. This chamber, formed within a cluster of hypogea going back to Sulci's pre-Roman and Roman Punic past and later expanded and rebuilt with stones from Sulci's Roman city wall, contains a late antique sarcophagus that in 1615 held remains said to be A.'s. At that time the sarcophagus bore a marble slab (now in the cathedral of Iglesias on the Sardinian mainland) with a Latin inscription, seemingly carved in the sixth or very early seventh century and thought from its versification to be a copy of a fifth-century text. This identified the spot as the resting place of A., characterized as a saint but not as a martyr.
In the early Middle Ages Sulci dwindled to a small community with a church in the form of a Greek cross surmounting A.'s burial chamber. From at least the late tenth century this was an Eigenkirche of the house of Lacon-Gunale; in the late eleventh century it belonged to that branch of the family who ruled the judicate of Cagliari. By 1089 judge Constantinus Salusius II had given land next to the church to the Victorines of Marseille for a monastery dedicated to A. When the church was reconsecrated in 1102 it had been rebuilt on a Latin-cross plan and the area beneath may have already become the two-apsed complex known today as the Catacombe di Sant'Antioco. In 1124, when judge Marianus Torchitorius II and others in his immediate family gave the income of the entire island of Sant'Antioco to the monastery, they could still refer to the church as their hereditary property.
Members of the same house were in the eleventh and twelfth centuries judges of Arborea and of Torres; they may have been responsible for the extension of A.'s cult into those judicates. A.'s Passio and the hexameter verse celebrating his martyrdom that accompanies it in his Office were probably written by the Victorines, perhaps at Cagliari rather than at Sant'Antioco itself. The Office is still read on 13. November, A.'s feast day within the ecclesiastical region of Sardinia. A. is a patron saint of all Sardinia.
An Italian-language introduction to A.'s much rebuilt cathedral church at Sant'Antioco (CI) is here:
http://tinyurl.com/wdn6e
To the bibliography add now Pier Giorgio Spanu, _Martyria Sardiniae. I santuari dei martiri sardi_ (Oristano: S'Alvure, 2000), pp. 83-95 and (text of the Office) 177-85.
Another illustrated, Italian-language page on this church:
http://tinyurl.com/ycwqhqw
More views:
http://static.panoramio.com/photos/original/3858706.jpg
http://flickr.com/photos/puntomaupunto/253572096/
http://www.sardegnacultura.it/immagini/7_70_20060308130424.gif
http://static.panoramio.com/photos/original/7237839.jpg
http://www.viaggiscoop.it/foto/2646/4470/37415.jpg
So-called catacombs beneath the church (view of the entrance; illustrated, Italian-language page; other views):
http://tinyurl.com/5bh9v6
http://tinyurl.com/yacnadd
http://tinyurl.com/5qknt8
http://www.ss126.it/gallery/contenuti/grandi/1-108.jpg
A tomb said to be the one that in 1615 was identified, on the basis of a late antique inscription that had been placed upon it, as the one containing A.'s relics:
http://tinyurl.com/57wsrc
http://tinyurl.com/5d83uk
A.'s putative relics, displayed in the church above:
http://digilander.libero.it/PROVERBISARDI/lachiesa/L9(1).gif
Thanks largely to his supposed medical prowess, A. has been popular in various parts of Sardinia from the central Middle Ages onward. Herewith some views, etc. of the originally mostly later twelfth-century chiesa di Sant'Antioco di Bisarcio, an ex-cathedral at Ozieri (SS) in the former judicate of Torres:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sant%27Antioco_di_Bisarcio
http://tinyurl.com/ybnqku3
http://www.mondimedievali.net/Edifici/Sardegna/bisarcio.htm
http://static.panoramio.com/photos/original/25892983.jpg
http://tinyurl.com/5d89zq
http://static.panoramio.com/photos/original/15029218.jpg
http://www.flickr.com/photos/free_soul_magic/3423228961/sizes/l/
2) Judoc (d. 7th cent.). J. (who has many name forms, incl. English Joyce, French Josse, German Jodok and Jo[b]st, and Breton Uzec) is said in his late eighth- or early ninth-century Vita (BHL 4504) to have been the second son of a Breton king who declined an offer of succession, was a pilgrim in various parts of northern France, and in Picardy was ordained priest and founded a hermitage that in the late eighth or early ninth century would become the now vanished abbey named for him near today's Montreuil-sur-Mer (Pas-de-Calais). In about 902 some of its monks, seeking safety from the Northmen, crossed over to England bringing relics of J. which were deposited in the Old Minster at Winchester. By this time J. was already being venerated at St. Maximinus at Trier and at the abbey of Prüm in the Eifel, whence his cult spread widely in German-speaking lands.
In the early eleventh century J. received expanded Vitae by Isembard of Fleury-sur-Loire (BHL 4505-4510, including a reported Inventio in 977 of relics that had not been transported to England) and by Florentius of Saint-Josse. In the central and later Middle Ages his cult spread widely in an arc from Brittany across northern France and the Low Countries and across Germany into Switzerland, Austria, and Slovenia.
An illustrated, English-language page on an early medieval Islamic textile (now in the Louvre) in which J.'s putative relics at the abbey were wrapped:
http://tinyurl.com/5lh5fg
Latin texts and German-language translations of J.'s Vitae may be reached via hotlinks on this page :
http://www.st-jodok.de/index.php?id=39
J. as depicted in the mid-fifteenth-century frescoes of the former Stiftskirche St. Goar in Sankt Goar (Lkr. Rhein-Hunsrück-Kreis) in Rheinland-Pfalz:
http://tinyurl.com/y926g2e
Some views, etc. of the originally late fourteenth-century (1385) Sankt-Jodoks-Kirche at Ravensburg in Baden-Württemberg:
http://www.gkg-rv.de/index.php?id=35
http://tinyurl.com/5cgxyd
http://tinyurl.com/5so4vj
Some views, etc. of the originally fourteenth-/sixteenth-century Pfarrkirche St. Jodok in Landshut in Niederbayern, begun in 1369:
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Jodok_(Landshut)
http://www.st-jodok.de/typo3temp/pics/31e1d55e26.jpg
http://tinyurl.com/yapjsxv
http://static.panoramio.com/photos/original/10389542.jpg
http://www.st-jodok.de/index.php?id=102
Some views, etc. of the originally fourteenth-/sixteenth-century chapelle de Saint-Uzec in the vicinity of Pleumeur-Bodou (Côtes-d'Armor) in Brittany:
http://les.amis.de.st.uzec.free.fr/crbst_3.html
http://paroissepb.org/spip.php?article63
http://tinyurl.com/ybnzhsg
http://www.jodok.de/typo3temp/pics/27a0212198.jpg
http://www.jodok.de/typo3temp/pics/8e72825f60.jpg
Views of the menhir on the chapel grounds:
http://www.lieux-insolites.fr/cotedarmor/uzec/uzec.htm
3) Odilia of Hohenburg (d. ca. 720?). O. (also Ottilia) is the saint of two monasteries, one now defunct at what now is Mont Saint-Odile / the Odilienberg near Saint-Nabor (Bas-Rhin) in Alsace: the abbey of Hohenburg on the heights of this elevation and the former monastery of Niedermunster (in German, Niedermünster) at the upper end of a valley below. We first hear of her in the eleventh century, when in a poem presented to the Alsatian-born pope St. Leo IX she is named as a saint of the abbey and when the first witnesses of her legendary, perhaps originally tenth-century Vita (BHL 6271) were written.
That Vita makes her a daughter of Adalricus / Eticho, the later seventh- and early eighth-century founder of the Etichonid line of dukes of Alsace, has him found the abbey for her, and has her as abbess found the lower monastery as an hospice. Symbolic aspects of the Vita include its presentation of Eticho as a pagan and of O. as having been born blind and as having miraculously recovered her sight after her baptism at a monastery to which she had been sent once E. had been persuaded not to have her put to death. Like today's Lucy, O. is also a patroness of the blind and of those with other afflictions of the eye. She is sometimes represented as holding a book (variously closed or open) on which two eyeballs rest, as in the fifteenth-century examples shown at upper left here:
http://tinyurl.com/y984xo4
A closer view of that first example is here (image is expandable):
http://tinyurl.com/ya9uu3v
Herrad of Landsberg's twelfth-century _Hortus deliciarum_ was written at Hohenburg Abbey. Herewith two reproductions of early nineteenth-century copies of illuminations in this work's since destroyed sole manuscript showing _Eticho dux_ and O.:
http://tinyurl.com/y8pa7o7
http://tinyurl.com/ybc2h25
Hohenburg Abbey was rebuilt in the seventeenth century and restored in the nineteenth. Herewith two views of on its few survivales from its late eleventh- and twelfth-century state:
http://tinyurl.com/yas5vy6
http://tinyurl.com/y8f8qxo
And here's O.'s modern tomb in the abbey church:
http://tinyurl.com/ybsbqjz
Several views of what's left of the abbey (as it became) of Niedermunster are here:
http://tinyurl.com/ybmlhxa
Another view:
http://tinyurl.com/y8quqh6
A sixteenth-century representation of O. in wood:
http://www.brynmawr.edu/library/exhibits/hours/odilia.html
Best,
John Dillon
(matter from last year's posts somewhat revised and with the addition of Odilia of Hohenburg)
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