medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Today (8. May) is the feast day of:
1) Victor Maurus (d. 303, supposedly). V. is also called Victor of Milan, a better name for him as his cult has always been centered on that city and as the Mauretanian origin used to distinguish him from other saints Victor could easily be legendary, though it is already present in the Ambrosian hymn _Victor, Nabor, Felix, pii_. This makes him a Roman soldier stationed at Milan and martyred for the faith at Lodi. His later Passio (BHL 8580; other versions at 8581 and 8582) adds details that one may read in English translation here:
http://www.ucc.ie/milmart/Victor.html
V.'s fourth-century martyr's chapel is now the sacello San Vittore in Ciel d'Oro in Milan's basilica di Sant'Ambrogio. Views of his representation in its probably fifth-century mosaics will be found on these pages:
http://tinyurl.com/2hk7om
http://tinyurl.com/2goysl
For those with access to JSTOR, much clearer black-and-white renditions of this image will be found in Gillian Mackie, "Symbolism and Purpose in an Early Christian Martyr Chapel: The Case of San Vittore in Ciel d'Oro, Milan ", _Gesta_ 34 (1995), 91-101, at pp. 92 and 94. A partial reproduction in color is here:
http://tinyurl.com/2px4r2
Milan's perhaps originally eighth-century former monastery church of San Vittore in Corpo, attested from the late tenth century onward and rebuilt in the sixteenth century, has relics believed to be V.'s whose authenticity was confirmed by the archdiocese in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The basilica di Sant'Ambrogio has another set, whose authenticity was confirmed by the archdiocese early in the twentieth century. The seventeenth-century church of San Vittore in Isola Bella (VB) in Lago Maggiore has another set.
2) Acacius of Byzantium (d. ca. 304, supposedly). According to his legendary Passio (BHG 13), A. (also Acatius, Achatius, Agatius, Agathius [the form used for him in the _AA.SS._], Archatius, etc.) was a centurion of Cappadocian origin who came from a family of Christian priests, who had been educated in the faith, and who during the Diocletianic persecution was arrested in Thrace, interrogated, beaten severely, and sent to Byzantium for trial by the governor of the province of Europa. While in prison there he converted many to Christianity and was visited by angels who healed his broken body. He was executed by decapitation on 8. May in an unspecified year. Some faithful recovered his body and buried it in a place called Staurion. Thus far A.'s Passio.
The later fourth century Syriac Martyrology enters under 10. May an A. martyred at Nicomedia who may very well be our saint. The early medieval (pseudo-)Hieronymian Martyrology lacks an A. under that date but under 8. May has an entry for Acacius the soldier and Maximus the priest, both martyred at Constantinople. By the early fifth century it was believed in Constantinople that A. reposed in/under that city's church of St. A. in Heptascalon, seemingly a Constantinian foundation. It is possible, as David Woods has argued (in _Vigiliae Christianae_ 55 [2001], 201-207), that A. really was martyred at Nicomedia and that our evidence to the contrary reflects a later-arising Constantinopolitan cult (in which case the eponym of the aforementioned church will not have been our A.).
In the later Middle Ages a version of the legend of St. Bartholomew's miraculous translation by sea to Lipari had come to include similar marine translations of St. Gregory the Thaumaturge and of A. to different locations in Calabria (the _locus classicus_ is in Jacopo da Varazze's chapter on B. in the _Legenda aurea_ [cap. 99 in Maggioni's ed.; cap. 123 in older eds.]), thus making both putative saints of the Regno. By the later sixteenth century A. was being venerated at Squillace (CZ) overlooking the Ionian litoral in Calabria. As his feast day there is 7. May, the date under which A. is commemorated in the Synaxary of Constantinople, it is likely that his cult at Squillace goes back to the central Middle Ages, when its church was Greek.
In the sixteenth century an arm said to have come from A.'s relics at Squillace was translated to relatively nearby Guardavalle (CZ), where as at Squillace A. is now the patron saint. Other relics of A. said also to have come from Squillace are in Cuenca and in Avila. In Calabria A. is called Agazio; in Spain he is Acato. Herewith two views of his putative relics in the cathedral of Squillace:
http://tinyurl.com/387re5g
http://santiebeati.it/immagini/Original/90216/90216A.JPG
3) Arsenius the Great (d. ca. 450). A. is one of the major Egyptian Desert Fathers. The offspring of a family of senatorial rank, he exchanged a career at the court at Constantinople for a cell in Egypt. Various sayings of his are preserved in the _Apophthegmata patrum_. A. has a Bios that exists in several versions (BHG 167y, 167z, 167za, 168), of which the oldest is thought to be of the late fifth century, and a well known, imaginative Encomium by St. Theodore the Stoudite (BHG 169).
A. as depicted in an earlier tenth-century fresco (ca. 913-920) in the monastery church of St. John (a.k.a. Ayvalı kilise) in Güllu Dere (Uşak province) in Turkey:
http://tinyurl.com/2bn2hpx
A. (at right, with Sts. Anthony of Egypt and Euthymius the Great) in a later twelfth-century fresco (ca. 1180) in the church of Agioi Anargyroi in Kastoria (Kastoria prefecture) in northwestern Greece:
http://tinyurl.com/24zatvz
A. (at right; at left, St. Euthymius the Great) as depicted in the earlier thirteenth-century (1230s) narthex frescoes in the church of the Ascension in the Mileševa monastery near Prijepolje (Zlatibor dist.) in southern Serbia:
http://tinyurl.com/yjd4o5s
Detail:
http://tinyurl.com/247zc6v
A. as depicted in the very late thirteenth- or early fourteenth-century frescoes in the church of the Peribleptos (now Sv. Kliment Novi) in Ohrid:
http://tinyurl.com/244xjb8
A. as depicted in the earlier fourteenth-century frescoes (ca. 1315) in the church of the Sotiros Kalothetou monastery in Veroia/Veria (Imathia prefecture) in northern Greece:
http://tinyurl.com/292qrqk
A. (at right; at left, St. Anthony of Egypt) as depicted in the earlier fourteenth-century (1330s) frescoes in the nave 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/26y77xp
Detail:
http://tinyurl.com/2a8y64h
A. (at right, with Sts. John Climacus and John of Damascus) in a late fifteenth- or early sixteenth-century Novgorod School icon now in the Museum of History and Architecture in Novgorod:
http://www.icon-art.info/masterpiece.php?lng=en&mst_id=1602
4) Boniface IV, pope (d. 615). Today's less well known saint of the Regno came from Marsican territory in today's Abruzzo. The son of a physician, he had been papal dispensator under pope St. Gregory I, whom he imitated by turning his own house into a monastery. He was elected pope in 608. In 609 he dedicated Rome's church of Santa Maria ad Martyres. In 609-610 B. was hospitable to the exiled bishop St. Mellitus of London. The last letter that we have from St. Columban is addressed to B. Written on behalf of the Lombard king Agilulf and his wife Theodolinda, it urges the pope to repair the divided state of the Church in Italy. B.'s response is not preserved.
Boniface VIII promoted B.'s cult, elevating his remains to a newly built altar in Old St. Peter's (over which the later pope then placed his own tomb).
Some views of Santa Maria ad Martyres:
Exterior:
http://tinyurl.com/2yvf83
http://tinyurl.com/335cfax
http://tinyurl.com/2ctht3
Interior:
http://tinyurl.com/yudug2
http://tinyurl.com/28lkvty
http://tinyurl.com/25o8hwo
Many expandable views:
http://tinyurl.com/4ltb4b
The legendary tradition of the monastery of Sant Pere de Rodes in Catalunya (a house first documented from 878) associates B. with relics of St. Peter that had been placed for safekeeping at the site. Herewith two pages with expandable views of the remains of the monastery's eleventh- and twelfth-century structures:
http://tinyurl.com/2bedf5
http://www.monestirs.cat/monst/aemp/ae42rode.htm
5) Benedict II, pope (d. 685). According to an entry in the early medieval _Liber diurnus Romanorum pontificum_, B. was elected in 683 to succeed pope St. Leo II but his consecration was delayed for close to a year by Constantinople's slowness to ratify this action. B. used this delay to persuade the imperial court to ordain that ratification of the election of the bishop of Rome would henceforth be the responsibility of the exarch of Italy. The _Liber pontificalis_ tells us that B. was a native of Rome, a friend to the poor, humble, gentle, pious, kind, patient, and very generous. It credits him with the restoration of St. Peter's and of San Lorenzo in Lucina as well as the embellishment of several other churches.
6) Wiro (d. late 7th cent., supposedly). W. is the patron saint of the diocese of Roermond in The Netherlands. Medievally he was also a patron of the diocese of Utrecht. His ninth-century Vita (BHL 8973) makes him an Irish missionary bishop; though discounted by modern scholars, this suspect datum, sometimes altered to make him Anglo-Saxon, is presented as established fact in many English-language "popular" accounts of W. and of his supposed companions, St. Plechelm and St. Otger. The Vita also credits W. with the foundation of a church and monastery at Odilienberg near Roermond.
The monastery, obviously in already in existence at the time of the Vita's writing, later transformed itself into a house of canons regular who moved to Roermond in 1361, taking with them relics believed to be W.'s. At Roermond these relics have had a history of repeated neglect and rediscovery in different churches. Utrecht is said to have W.'s head.
The former monastery's eleventh- and twelfth-century church was restored in the later nineteenth century, destroyed by German soldiers in 1945, and rebuilt in the later twentieth century to resemble its predecessor. Two discussions with multiple views:
http://limburgchurches.tripod.com/odilienbergwiro.html
http://www.kerkgebouwen-in-limburg.nl/view.jsp?content=736
7) Metro (d. 8th or early 9th cent.?). According to Rather of Verona's _Invective_ against M.'s forcible translation (2 versions: BHL 5942, 5943), written in 962, M. was a repentant sinner who a) chained himself to a great stone in front of the cathedral, b) proclaimed that he wished to suffer until his sins were fully expiated and threw the key to his chain into a branch of the Adige that flowed near the spot, and c), exposed to the elements, endured all sorts of hardships for seven years until the key was found in the belly of a fish by two fishermen who brought it to the bishop. The bishop, recognizing God's will, released M. from his chain, had him washed and decently dressed, and admitted him to Communion. M. died soon thereafter; miracles at his grave proclaimed his sanctity. Rather concludes by noting that, though M.'s remains had been found to be missing on 27. January 962, the populace continues to venerate him at his empty tomb.
The church of Verona has continued to venerate M., whom since at least the eleventh century it has considered a martyr and whose presumed remains were quickly returned or replaced (they spent the rest of the Middle Ages in the church of San Vitale and are said to be now in Santa Maria del Paradiso). His feast on this day follows an early Veronese practice re-established in 1961.
From at least the late thirteenth century until the Reformation M. was also venerated at today's Gernrode (Lkr. Quedlinburg) in Sachsen-Anhalt, where a celebration of his translation with an Office in a breviary showing similarities to one used at Verona in the eighth century argues for an early transfer of liturgical texts to go with the body of the saint. A high-ranking noble named Gero, the founder of Gernrode, was with Otto I in Italy in 961/62 and it is supposed that it was he who arranged for M.'s removal. Views of the Office for M.'s translation, of his entry in the breviary's calendar, and of his early sixteenth-century tomb at Gernrode will be found towards the bottom of this page:
http://www.stift-gernrode.uni-goettingen.de/Feiern.htm
Best,
John Dillon
(last year's post lightly revised and with the additions of Acacius of Byzantium and Benedict II)
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