medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture

Today (13. May) is the feast day of:

1)  Mocius (d. early 4th cent.?).  According to his at least very largely legendary Passio (several versions: BHG 1298-1298e plus a shortish Latin version, BHL 6023) and to his Laudatio by the early ninth-century iconophile saint Michael the Syncellus (BHG 1298h), M. (in Latin also Mucius) was a Christian priest of Amphipolis  -- today's Amfipoli in northeastern Greece -- who during what seems to have been the Great Persecution was denounced by pagans and arrested, who then refused to sacrifice to the god Dionysius and broke the latter's idol in his temple, who was sent for judgment to Perinthus where he was subjected to various tortures that miraculously failed to kill him (he is said to have been broken on a wheel, exposed to beasts, and thrown into a fire), after which his tormentors died horrible deaths, and who finally was sent to Byzantium where he was executed by decapitation.

M.'s martyrial church in Constantinople just to the west of the Constantinian walls is first attested from the early fifth century, when a burial recorded by Sozomen (_Historia ecclesiastica_, 8. 17) took place there.  The tradition that it was founded by Constantine himself is at least as old as the central Middle Ages.  M. is entered under 10. May in the (pseudo-)Hieronymian Martyrology, under 11. May in the Synaxary of Constantinople, and under today in the ninth-century martyrology of Usuard (whence he entered the RM under the same date).

M. (in the roundel at right) as depicted in the earlier fourteenth-century (1330s) frescoes of the church of the Hodegetria in the Patriarchate of Peć at Peć 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/2fbh5bj


2)  Servatius (d. 384, supposedly).  S. (Servaas, Servais) was an anti-Arian bishop of today's Tongeren/Tongres in Belgium.  He took part in the Council of Serdica/Sardica (343) and in the Synod of Rimini (359).  In between, he supported the exiled St. Athanasius the Great and worked with him in 346 for the removal of a bishop of Köln whose Christology was Arian.  S. built a fairly large church at Tongeren, remains of which have now been found, and is said also to have evangelized in today's Netherlands and to have founded a church at Maastricht.  It is unknown whether S. died there or at Tongeren.

In about 560 bishop St. Domitian, who moved the seat of the diocese from Tongeren to Maastricht, erected in that city a church dedicated to S.  This was the predecessor of today's Basiliek Sint Servaas, begun in 1039 and housing S.'s putative remains in its crypt.  Later in the eleventh century came Jocundus' _Vita et Miracula_ of S. (several versions; BHL 7616-37), the first of several eleventh- and twelfth-century Lives of a saint whose cult had now attracted imperial interest.  S. has a very impressive twelfth-century reliquary shrine.  Legendarily, he was a relative of the Holy Family.

Illustrated, Dutch-language accounts of Maastricht's Basiliek Sint Servaas are here (it may help to begin with the first page's part about the church's late nineteenth-century restoration):
http://tinyurl.com/2syamt
http://www.vroomen.org/paulvroomen/servaas.html
The basilica's English-language tour starts here:
http://www.sintservaas.nl/english/index24.html
Several single views are here:
http://tinyurl.com/392hdg
Views of S.'s reliquary shrine:
http://tinyurl.com/2dkb3fg
http://tinyurl.com/27cp5uv
http://www.nieuwsbronnen.com/veronakapel/servaas.jpg
http://www.heiligenlexikon.de/Fotos/Servatius-Schrein.jpg

Some views of the early twelfth-century Stiftskirche St. Servatius, otherwise known as the Quedlinburger Dom, in Quedlinburg in Sachsen-Anhalt.  A couple of distance views are here:
http://tinyurl.com/yoxuej
http://www.quedlinburg-tourismus.de/images/schloss_1.jpg
Some illustrated pages on this UNESCO World Heritage site:
http://tinyurl.com/36er8u
http://tinyurl.com/2mmbla
http://www.raymond-faure.com/Quedlinburg/quedlinburg.htm
Single views:
http://tinyurl.com/3953go
http://tinyurl.com/3am8f2
The crypt:
http://tinyurl.com/2bardzv
A column capital in the crypt:
http://www.braasch-megalith.de/docu0313.jpg
A virtual tour of the crypt starts here (to proceed from page to page, click on "weiter"):
http://www.othersideorg.de/qlb/navipanos/kunst.htm

A few exterior views of the Servatiikirche in Münster in Westfalen (1230; destroyed, 1943-45; rebuilt, early 1950s):
http://tinyurl.com/ypbmhg
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dan_demento/3575602014/
http://tinyurl.com/2ay843

S. (at right; at left, St. Sylvester I) in the late thirteenth-century Livre d'images de Madame Marie (ca. 1285-1290; Paris, BnF, ms. Nouvelle acquisition française 16251, fol. 87r): 
http://tinyurl.com/yfmvotg

Not to miss this page on a very unusual mid-fifteenth-century Danish statue (view is expandable) of a holy person with S. as her attribute:
http://tinyurl.com/32gbry
A larger image (one of these, prob. the one linked to from the English-language page, is reversed) of the same statue of Memelia and S.:
http://www.vhm.dk/page.asp?sideid=200&zcs=2

A later fifteenth-century (ca. 1470) painting of the Holy Kinship in the treasury of the Basiliek Sint Servaas in Maastricht with the child S. and his legendary mother Memelia at lower left:
http://tinyurl.com/qfarnb
Detail views:
http://tinyurl.com/p8fhtz
http://tinyurl.com/p8dnnk
http://tinyurl.com/ovuypy
More views of this piece:
http://tinyurl.com/qo48c6

An early sixteenth-century (1511) depiction of the child S. (mitred, as in the statue) with Memelia in a similar composition on the rear of the Sippenaltar in the Elisabethkirche in Marburg an der Lahn (Lkr. Marburg-Biedenkopf) in Hessen:
http://tinyurl.com/occolj
More (illustrated; German-language text) on this piece:
http://www.elisabethkirche.de/rundgang/ix-nss02.htm


3)  Agnes of Poitiers (d. 586).  A. was abbess of the double monastery of the Holy Cross at Poitiers, founded by St. Radegund in 557.  The poet Venantius Fortunatus was her friend and praised her sanctity in his writings.

Some views of the Baptistère Saint-Jean in Poitiers, rebuilt in the tenth century:
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/32/45874552_1897b2017a_b.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baptist%C3%A8re_Saint-Jean
The sixth-century font in that interior view is said to be the oldest visible part of the church.


4)  Julian of Norwich ("Blessed"; d. ca. 1416).  The English mystic J. (also Juliana) is said to have taken her name from the church of St. Julian in Norwich, where by 1394 she had taken up life as a recluse in an adjoining cell.  Her _Book of Shewings_, better known under its modern English title _Revelations of Divine Love_, meditates on a series of visions experienced on either 8. May (J.'s day of commemoration in the Church of England) or 13. May (her unofficial day of commemoration among Roman Catholics).

Julia Bolton Holloway's learned and well illustrated site on J. is here:
http://www.umilta.net/julian.html

Here's an illustrated page on the church of St. Julian in Norwich, largely reduced to rubble by bombing in 1942 and since rebuilt:
http://tinyurl.com/ywrhuh
More views on this page (toward bottom; expandable; some of the thumbnails are lacking but clicking in their blank spaces will bring up the image):
http://tinyurl.com/3z4nuq


5)  Gemma of Goriano Sicoli (Bl.; d. 1426 or 1429).  Today's holy person of the Regno (also called Gemma della Terra di San Sebastiano; entered in the _AA.SS._ as Gemma virgo Sulmonensis) has a cult that is documented from the sixteenth century onward.  Her Italian-language Vita by the Marsican historian Muzio Febonio (d. 1663; a nephew of the RM's Bl. Cesare Baronio), our only more than summary narrative source, is thought to have been based on an undated Vita whose probably sixteenth-century manuscript exemplar, variously described as "antico" (in this case, "old") and -- less intelligently -- as "ancient" (by Paul Burns in his revision of _Butler's Lives of the Saints_), was then in the possession of the church holding her remains at today's Goriano Sicoli (AQ) in Abruzzo and in 1738 was already lost.

According to Febonio's account, G. was the daughter of a peasant family that when she was born raised sheep and swine at today's San Sebastiano di Bisegna (AQ).  Later they moved to Goriano Sicoli, continuing the family occupation there.  G. was taught needlework and other womanly skills.  She was also very devout.  When she was twelve the local lord, intending to use her sexually, brought her to work on his lands and there made sexual advances to her.  These she refused and in the process shamed the lord into giving her what she really wished, namely a hermit's cell at Goriano Sicoli's church of St. John the Baptist with a window allowing a view of the altar.  After obtaining her father's consent G. moved into this cell and lived there austerely for over forty years.  When she died at the age of fifty-four bells were head to sound throughout Goriano Sicoli's valley (the Subequana).  Other miracles confirmed her sanctity.

Still according to Febonio, one year after G.'s death the bishop of the local diocese (Valva and Sulmona; now Sulmona and Valva) conducted a recognition of her remains, at which time they were found to be incorrupt and she was given an elevation in the church with an altar of her own.  Although Febonio gives the year of G.'s death as 1429 (spelled out as "anno ... mill'e quattrocento ventinove"), the bishop he names was in office for only five months in 1427.  If Febonio was correct about the identity of the bishop, then G. will instead have died in 1426.  Similarly, since G.'s feast has been recorded from before Febonio's time as falling on 12. May (which is when it's still observed in Abruzzo), scholars early modern and modern, but not the editors of the 2001 RM, have concluded that her _dies natalis_ as given by Febonio (13. May; again spelled out in words) is erroneous.

The _AA.SS._ gives a Latin version of an anonymous Italian-language Vita of G. that is either an abridged translation of Febonio's Vita or a full translation of an abridgment of that text.  Febonio's Vita is edited in full on pp. 285-97 of Giorgio Morelli's edition of Febonio's _Dei santi marsicani_, in Vittoriano Esposito and Giorgio Morelli, eds., _Muzio Febonio nel quarto centenario della nascita (1597-1997). Atti del convegno, Avezzano, 9 maggio 1998_ (L'Aquila: Libreria Colacchi, 2000), pp. 203-331.

G.'s cult was confirmed in 1890 at the level of Beata; locally she's considered a saint.  In 1748, when Goriano Sicoli was prospering from its wool and silk trade, G. was declared the town's patron saint.  The church in which she resides is now called the santuario di Santa Gemma and is dedicated to her.  This edifice was rebuilt in the early nineteenth century.  If we can show on this list a twentieth-century rebuild of the church that harbored a late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century anchorite from East Anglia we can certainly show an earlier rebuild of the church that harbored a late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century anchorite from Abruzzo.  Herewith two views, one exterior, the other interior:
http://tinyurl.com/25ggklw
http://www.abruzzovacanze.net/imgview.php/343/0
Those were taken before the earthquake of 6. April 2009 in the Aquilano, in which sixty per cent of Goriano Sicoli's structures were seriously damaged.  Herewith a few post-earthquake views of the same church:
http://tinyurl.com/29z4h4q
http://tinyurl.com/2enlbfq
http://tinyurl.com/2fkg3m2
http://tinyurl.com/2985blo

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

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