medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Today (24. May) is the feast day of:
1) Manahen (d. 1st cent.) M. (also Manaen), foster brother of Herod the tetrarch (H. Antipas), is named in Acts 13:1 as an associate of Sts. Barnabas and Paul at Antioch. He enters the martyrologies in the ninth century with Ado and Usuard, who in identically worded entries maintain that he finished his days in that city. The basis, if any, for that assertion is unknown.
2) Zoellus (?). Z. (also Zoelus) is the lone representative in the revised RM of 2001 of Zoellus, Servulus (also Servilius), Felix, Silvanus, and Diocles, a group of martyrs of Lystra in Lycaonia (in today's south-central Turkey) entered under this day in the fourth-century Syriac Martyrology. Thanks to a false reading in the (pseudo-)Hieronymian Martyrology, Ado and Usuard entered the group in their martyrologies, also for today and with some variations from the names as given above, as martyrs of Istria.
3) Servulus of Trieste (d. 283 or 284, supposedly). S. is a co-patron of Trieste, where he has been celebrated on this day since at least the late eleventh century, where he was the titular of a basilica whose dedication was celebrated liturgically on 23. November, and where he and St. Justus flank Christ in the mosaic in the right apse of the cathedral of San Giusto (which latter also houses relics believed to be his):
http://tinyurl.com/yovuqz
http://tinyurl.com/p8s2cp
The Italia nell'Arte Medievale's page on Trieste's San Giusto:
http://tinyurl.com/yptush
S. has a legendary Passio (BHL 7642) of uncertain origin whose earliest witness is of the later twelfth century. This makes him a youthful thaumaturge martyred under Numerian (r. 283-284; active primarily in today's Iraq, Syria, and Turkey). In view both of that Eastern connection and of Trieste's proximity to Istria, it has been thought that S. is in origin perhaps the "Istrian" Servilius/Servulus of Zoellus et socc., also celebrated on this day (see no. 2, above). His cult would seem to be at least early medieval, as the former abbey dedicated to him that gave its name to Venice's island of San Servolo is thought to have been an early ninth-century foundation (the island's psychiatric hospital is the lineal descendant of a more general hospital operated by the abbey).
4) Donatian and Rogatian (d. 3d or early 4th cent.). D. and R. are martyrs of today's Nantes (Loire-Atlantique). According to their fifth(?)-century Passio (BHL 2275), they were young brothers. In French they are the _enfants nantais_. D. had been baptized and was preaching the Christian faith when he came to the attention of the authorities during a persecution and was jailed. The unbaptized R. was quickly apprehended and ordered to sacrifice to the idols. When he refused, he too was jailed. Both underwent torture before being executed. After the promulgation of the edict of Milan their bodies were placed in a little martyrium. They are Nantes' patron saints.
D. and R. are entered for today in the (pseudo-)Hieronymian Martyrology. Their cult seems to have been continuous at Nantes. In the Middle Ages it spread widely in Brittany and elsewhere in West France.
The baptistère Saint-Jean at Le Puy-en-Velay is said to preserve on its north wall a thirteenth-century mural painting of D. and R. confessing their faith. I could find no images of that on the Web. But the site is well visited, so perhaps some subscriber to the list has one to share. For the painting's existence, see this notice from Patrimoine de France:
http://tinyurl.com/5nwffu
Nantes' present cathédrale Saint-Pierre-et-Saint-Paul was begun in the fifteenth century and completed in the nineteenth. The lower portions of the west front were the first to be built (the cathedral replaced an eleventh-/twelfth-century predecessor and incorporated the latter's crypt). The west front has five portals: the three clearly visible here
http://tinyurl.com/5lq8o4
plus one each on the south side of the south tower and on the north side of the north tower. The latter is known as the porte St Donatien et St Rogatien; its sculptures, now dated to 1455-1465, include these statues of D.:
http://tinyurl.com/6gxdc9
and of R.:
http://tinyurl.com/56q4sj
NB: The facade has been cleaned relatively recently:
http://tinyurl.com/rccs2j
While we're here, a page of views of the cathedral's crypts:
http://nantescathedrale.free.fr/crypte.htm
and another with a somewhat different view of the eleventh-century crypt:
http://tinyurl.com/6fo9fj
More views of the cathedral:
http://tinyurl.com/6y9seu
http://tinyurl.com/5n84fy
The Musée Dobrée in Nantes preserves a late fifteenth-/early sixteenth-century carved corner post with statues of D. and R.:
http://tinyurl.com/on22nq
http://tinyurl.com/247yaa
Today's basilique Saint-Donatien at Nantes is a nineteenth-century rebuilding of what originally had been a late fifteenth-century church. Here's a view of the martyrs' resting place in its crypt:
http://tinyurl.com/24aw4qq
5) Thirty-eight Martyrs of Philippopolis (d. 304, supposedly). The very little we know about this group of martyrs of Thrace comes from the Synaxary of Constantinople, from other synaxaries, and from a brief Martyrion of Sts. Severus and Memnon (BHG 2399). Nine of the thirty-eight are said to have come from Byzantium; the remainder are said to have been of Philippopolis (today's Plovdiv). We have their names, the name of the Roman proconsul under whom they are said to have suffered, their place of martyrdom. and -- if their connection with Severus and Memnon is historically accurate -- dubious testimony to their having been victims of the Great Persecution at its outset.
Herewith some views of the second-century Roman theatre at Plovdiv (the largest Roman building in today's Bulgaria), including its reconstructed _scaenae frons_:
http://tinyurl.com/ow873q
http://static.flickr.com/121/294929663_b2d1adbbff.jpg
http://tinyurl.com/6h29pt
http://tinyurl.com/5nalm7
http://tinyurl.com/2b6ln36
http://static.flickr.com/105/295417120_129a016470.jpg
6) Elpidius (d. late 4th cent., supposedly). This less well known saint of the Regno is the patron saint of today's Sant'Arpino (CE) in Campania between Naples and Capua. One of the successors of ancient Atella, the town is first attested under E.'s name in an act of sale from 820; it so appears again in 1175 when it was called villa Sancti Elpidii. The initial sentences of an otherwise lost Vita of E. (BHL 2520b), seemingly either from Atella or from its Norman-founded successor Aversa, survive in a thirteenth-century manuscript in the Biblioteca nazionale at Naples. These correspond well enough with the opening of lections for his Office at Salerno printed in 1594 to permit the inference that the latter probably summarize a Vita of similar content. According to the Vita, E. was bishop of Atella under the emperors Arcadius and Honorius (i.e. 395-408); the Salerno lections omit Honorius (d. 423) and place E.'s floruit in the year 395 under pope St. Siricius (384-399) an
d Arcadius.
Both texts make E. bishop of Atella. The Salerno lections add that E. was famous for healing the physically ill and for expelling demons from the possessed, that after a fire had destroyed most of the town he consoled the survivors and preserved their faith, that his reputation for sanctity caused others to resettle there and so to increase the town's population, that he swiftly built a (new) church with an altar for invoking divine aid on which he celebrated the Eucharist daily, and that he died shortly after the passing of his nephew the deacon Elpicius and of his cousin the priest Cyon. The latter two worthies were in late medieval Salerno honored as saints along with E.; in 1578 putative relics of all three were recorded as being in the crypt of Salerno's cathedral and in 1958 the then archbishop of Salerno conducted a formal recognition of these remains.
In another tradition E. (also spelled Elvidius) figures in the synthesizing and highly legendary eleventh- or twelfth-century _Vita sancti Castrensis_ (BHL 1645), which brings together twelve saints from southern Italy and makes them all Africans who in the fifth century escaped Vandal persecution, made their way in an unseaworthy vessel to Campania, and died there in various places. In that account, where he is one of the twelve, he is associated with St. Priscus of Capua and with a Benignus who has been identified with tomorrow's St. Canio of Atella. In the same tradition, the Passio sancti Canionis_ (BHL 1541) has E. in his sleep receive a vision of Canio's soul being carried by angels to heaven.
E. is also the patron saint of Casapulla (CE) in Campania, whose late eighteenth-century church dedicated to him replaced one consecrated in 1467. That church had one or more predecessors of the same dedication documented from 1174 onward.
E. was dropped from the RM in 2001. Today is his feast day in Sant'Arpino and in Salerno. At Casapulla E. is celebrated liturgically and civically over a period of three days beginning on the evening of 23. May and ending on the evening of 26. May.
7) Vincent of Lérins (d. between 434 and 450). The theologian V., author of the _Commonitorium_ ('Remembrancer'), an anti-Augustinian treatise on distinguishing heresy from true doctrine, was buried at his abbey in the isles of Lérins (in today's Alpes-Maritimes). Although his grave was revered, he appears not to have had a medieval cult. Cardinal Baronio entered V. in the RM. His liturgical celebration at Lérins dates from the very end of the sixteenth century.
8) Symeon the Younger (d. late 6th or early 7th cent.). Like his fifth-century namesake, S. was a stylite. He spent most of his life in self-denial atop one pillar after another. The last, on a mountain near Antioch on the Orontes, became the site of a monastery named for him and, thanks to S.'s great reputation as a thaumaturge, was a popular pilgrim destination. He has an interesting Bios, edited by P. Van den Ven as _La vie ancienne de S. Syméon Stylite le jeune (521–92)_, Subsidia Hagiographica, 32 (Bruxelles: Société des Bollandistes, 1962–70).
One side of a sixth-century pottery pilgrim token from S.'s pillar site near Antioch:
http://tinyurl.com/24spmov
For context and for not very good images of both sides of such a token, see Averil Cameron, _The Mediterranean World in Late Antiquity: AD 395-600_ (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 76-78. For those with access to Google Books, that's available here:
http://tinyurl.com/2uqxkec
S. as depicted in the late twelfth-century frescoes (1192) of the church of the Panagia tou Arakou in Lagoudera (Nicosia prefecture), Cyprus:
http://tinyurl.com/3a5wpm7
http://tinyurl.com/2cqhzp4
The frescoes in this church were cleaned and conserved during a campaign on Cyprus by Dumbarton Oaks that ran from 1962 to 1973.
Best,
John Dillon
(last year's posts combined and revised)
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