medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture

1)  Nereus and Achilleus (?).  N. and A. are Roman martyrs of the Via Ardeatina, where they had a tomb in the cemetery of Domitilla.  The tradition recorded by pope St. Damasus I in the latter half of the fourth century is that they were Roman soldiers who converted to Christianity, left the army, and were martyred (_Epigrammata Damasiana_, ed. Ferrua, no. 8).  Damasus made some improvements at their grave and set up there his verse epitaph for them, fragments of which have now been recovered.  D.'s successor pope St. Siricius (384-99) erected a subterranean basilica at the site that also encompassed the nearby grave of St. Petronilla.

That church, featured in the seventh-century itineraries for pilgrims to Rome, became a stational church under pope Gregory III (731-41).  Later damaged by an earthquake (probably in 897), it was visited occasionally in the early modern period and was excavated and identified by G. B. De Rossi in 1873-75.  Herewith a colored late nineteenth-century line drawing:
http://tinyurl.com/2wes3d
and views of the restored monument of today, starting with an exterior, above-ground view of the modern superstructure:
http://tinyurl.com/pxqxa3
http://tinyurl.com/q935rq
http://travel.webshots.com/photo/1457238734078661994iyYPpM
http://tinyurl.com/rcda2w
http://travel.webshots.com/photo/1326276507068620345YaCjKo
One of the objects found was a small column, dated to the later fourth century and bearing a relief showing the decollation of A.:
http://tinyurl.com/25kczmy
http://tinyurl.com/33hqdu

In the fifth or early sixth century N. and A. received a set of legendary Acta encompassing various figures from the cemetery of Domitilla in a single narrative whose events will have taken place in the later first or very early second century.  These Acta exist in Greek (BHG 1327) and in numerous Latin versions of which several (BHL 6058, 6060, 6063, perhaps others) survive in witnesses from the ninth century onward.  In the sixth century the extramural _titulus Fasciolae_, which had been entrusted with the supervision of the cemetery of Domitilla, came to be called that of N. and A.  Completely rebuilt in 814, this church was restored in 1475 and again in ca. 1600, when its then titular cardinal, Bl. Cesare Baronio, the guiding spirit of the early RM, brought the martyrs' relics to it from the church of Sant'Adriano al Foro.  Herewith an English-language account of Rome's basilica dei Santi Nereo e Achilleo:
http://romanchurches.wikia.com/wiki/Santi_Nereo_e_Achilleo
Some views:
http://tinyurl.com/3apmyv
http://www.flickr.com/photos/makemydinner/2707984273/sizes/l/
http://tinyurl.com/yatmat4
The paintings of the triumphal arch are survivors (seemingly restored) from the church's ninth-century decor; the painting in the dome of the apse is said to be a copy of a ninth-century one in mosaic destroyed in 1596.  Further views of these:
http://tinyurl.com/pc7n4p
http://tinyurl.com/pxkd24
For those with access to Google Books, Erik Thune's account, in his _Image and Relic: Mediating the Sacred in Early Medieval Rome_ (Roma: L'Erma di Bretschneider, 2002), of this church's mosaics begins here:
http://tinyurl.com/qgsnfk
The cosmatesque throne behind the altar:
http://tinyurl.com/pjwue8

The martyrdom of N. and A. (at right) in a later fifteenth-century copy (1463) of Vincent of Beauvais' _Speculum historiale_ in its French-language version by Jean de Vignay (Paris, BnF, ms. Français 50, fol. 358v):
http://tinyurl.com/26byca6


2)  Pancras of Rome (d. ca. 304, supposedly).  P. is a Roman martyr of the Via Aurelia.  Pope St. Symmachus (498-514) erected a basilica over his grave in the cemetery of Octavilla.  This was rebuilt by Honorius I (625-38), who added a confessio and placed the altar directly over P.'s tomb.  In the sixth or early seventh century P. received a legendary Passio (BHL 6420-28) that made him a wealthy orphan from Phrygia born in the time of Valerian and Gallienus (254-60) and, at the age of fourteen (_sic_), martyred at Rome under Diocletian (r. 284-305; started his persecution in 303).

St. Gregory of Tours (_Miraculorum libri_, 1. 39) tells us that P. was considered especially vigilant in punishing those who had broken their word and that oaths were therefore often taken at his tomb.  P.'s basilica is included in the seventh-century pilgrim itineraries for Rome; it was rebuilt in the late eighth and early ninth centuries and again in the seventeenth century.  P.'s cult spread widely across Europe.  Probably because P. has the same feast day as Nereus and Achilleus (no. 1, above), he too came to be considered a military saint.  There are numerous castle chapel dedications to him from the twelfth century onward.  In the later Middle Ages P. was one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers.

Some views of the originally early twelfth-century Stiftskirche St. Pankratius at Hamersleben (Lkr. Bördekreis-Oschersleben) in Sachsen-Anhalt:
http://koerbecke.bremerweb.de/Kloster%20Hamersleben.jpg
http://tinyurl.com/3a4l8cm
http://tinyurl.com/27p8sbv
http://tinyurl.com/3xpo62
http://tinyurl.com/39kgwc

P. is at left in this set of drawings from the thirteenth-century windows of the west choir in the cathedral of Naumburg in Sachsen-Anhalt:
http://www.brandenburg1260.de/glasfenster1.jpg
This view (not including P.) will give some impression of the arrangement of the figures in these windows:
http://tinyurl.com/yp8nw3

P.'s martyrdom as depicted in an earlier fourteenth-century copy (1326-1350) of a French-language collection of saint's lives (Paris, BnF, ms. Français 185, fol. 232r):
http://tinyurl.com/23vzhva

P.'s martyrdom as depicted in an earlier fourteenth-century copy (1348) of the _Legenda aurea_ in its French-language version by Jean de Vignay (Paris, BnF, ms. Français 241, fol. 134r):
http://tinyurl.com/2ae5qmy

Some views of the fifteenth-century Hooglandsche Kerk (Sint Pancraskerk) at Leiden:
http://tinyurl.com/36fq82
http://www.alovelyworld.com/webned/htmgb/pbs028.htm
http://www.hooglandsekerk.com/nl/gebouw/index.html

P., in a portrait emphasizing his wealth and his youth, at center in the Triptych of Saint Pancrace (ca. 1515) at the paroissiale Saint-Dalmas-le-Selvage (Alpes-Maritimes):
http://tinyurl.com/2sg3vc

Although P. is entered separately from N. and A. in the (pseudo-)Hieronymian Martyrology and some early medieval liturgical books (as well as in today's RM), they were often commemorated jointly.  Here's a page from a twelfth-century French gradual (the Graduel de Bellelay) with an Alleluia for all three:
http://bellelay.enc.sorbonne.fr/feuillet309.php
And here's the same passage, with an illumination of N., A., and P., in a North Italian missal, ca. 1370 (Avignon, Bibliothèque municipale, ms. 0136, fol. 240r):
http://tinyurl.com/2v92b5

A page from a late twelfth-century liturgical calendar, probably (as John Briggs pointed out in 2007) from Chertsey Abbey, with an entry for N., A., and P. made on the wrong day, lined out in red, and replaced just below with a new entry at the proper date:
http://tinyurl.com/25pw6m
More on this ms.:
http://tinyurl.com/2dz6g5
A view of the page for May, listing N., A., and P., in the painted liturgical calendar in the presbytery of the thirteenth-century oratory of San Pellegrino at Bominaco, a locality of Caporciano (AQ) in Abruzzo (the so-called Calendario Valvense):
http://tinyurl.com/o8pgh6


3)  Epiphanius of Salamis (d. 403).  The theologian, monastic founder, and bishop E. was born in the vicinity of Eleutheropolis in Judea.  When he was about twenty he established a monastery near his birthplace; later, after some years in desert communities in Egypt, he returned, was ordained priest, and led the monastery.  In 367 E. became bishop of Constantia (as Salamis was then called) and metropolitan of Cyprus; he served in that capacity until his death some thirty-six years later.  A learned and committed defender of Nicene orthodoxy and a foe of remnant paganism on Cyprus, E. was also an early opponent of the public use of sacred images (icons).  We know about him from his own writings, from those of other ecclesiastics with whom he was in contact, and from a Bios by his disciple John (BHG 596).

Two views of the remains of E.'s late fourth-century three-aisled basilica at the site of Salamis (near Famagusta in Northern Cyprus):
http://tinyurl.com/2vpr7vl
http://tinyurl.com/2vsy657

E. as depicted in a mid-eleventh-century mosaic in the cathedral of St. Sophia in Kyiv (Kiev):
http://tinyurl.com/2a3zmur

E. as depicted in the earlier fourteenth-century frescoes (ca. 1313-ca. 1320) in the eastern arch of the King's Church (dedicated to Sts. Joachim and Anne) in the Studenica monastery near Kraljevo (Raška dist.) in southern Serbia:
http://tinyurl.com/37nntde

E. as depicted in the earlier fourteenth-century frescoes (betw. ca. 1312 and 1321/1322) in the parecclesion of the Most Holy Theotokos in the monastery church of the Theotokos at Gračanica in, depending on one's view of the matter, either Serbia's province of Kosovo and Metohija or the Republic of Kosovo:
http://tinyurl.com/2bto7ta

E. as depicted in the earlier fourteenth-century frescoes (betw. 1335-1350) in the prothesis of the church of the Pantocrator at the Visoki Dečani monastery near Peć in, depending on one's view of recent events, the Republic of 2Kosovo or Serbia's Kosovo province of Kosovo and Metohija:
http://tinyurl.com/25jzjtk


4)  Philip of Agira (d. 7th cent.?).  P. (also sometimes known -- though not in recent scholarship -- as Philip the Syrian, Philip of Thrace, and Philip of Constantinople) was a Greek monk who settled in Argyrium (Greek: Argyrion) near the headwaters of the Salso in east-central Sicily in today's Enna province.  There he became the eponymous founder of one of the principal monasteries of Byzantine Sicily prior to the Muslim conquest, St. Philip of Agira (in Italian, San Filippo d'Agira).  He has a probably later ninth-century Bios attributed to one Eusebius, supposedly P.'s companion on his first-century CE trip from the East to Rome and thence as an evangelist to Sicily but in reality an unknown monk of San Filippo d'Agira who, perhaps drawing on already existing tradition, composed this legend.

This Bios makes P. both an evangelist and a thaumaturge: his compelling the demons of Etna to roll in flight down the mountain as so many rocks is a particularly nice touch.  The Eusebian Bios gave rise to a closely contemporary canon (long hymn) in P.'s honor and from this or from the Eusebian Bios (or from both) in turn comes the late medieval pseudo-Athanasian Bios of P., seemingly written at and for the Basilian house of San Filippo Grande near Messina.  There are also a number of smaller liturgical compositions of medieval date in P.'s honor.  P.'s cult is widespread in central and northeastern Sicily, e.g. at Limina (ME), where he has a major festival,and has been transported elsewhere around the world by emigrants from these places.

The monastery of San Filippo d'Agira appears to have been abandoned during the period of Muslim rule; in the later eleventh century, after the Norman-led conquest, we hear only of a Benedictine monastery here (and not of any ouster of Greek monks, as happened at this time in, e.g., Nardò on the Salentine peninsula).  But toponym remained San Filippo d'Agira (and did so until 1862, when with the demise of the Sicilian kingdom the surrounding town ceased to be abbatial property and was renamed simply Agira).  Herewith some views of the abbey (whose present facade is a twentieth-century post-earthquake creation) and of its church of Santa Maria Latina, parts of which go back to the Norman period:
http://sicilyweb.com/foto/en/agira/g17.jpg
http://sicilyweb.com/foto/en/agira/g20.jpg
http://sicilyweb.com/foto/en/agira/g13.jpg

A thumbnail view of the sixteenth-century chiesa di San Filippo d'Agira at San Gregorio di Catania (CT) in eastern Sicily:
http://tinyurl.com/pm9age

On P.'s Bioi, see Cesare Pasini, ed., _Vita di s. Filippo d'Agira attribuita al monaco Eusebio_ (Roma: Pontificium Institutum Studiorum Orientalium, 1981; Orientalia Christiana Analecta, no. 214) and idem, ed., "Edizione della Vita pseudoatanasiana di san Filippo d'Agira vergata da Georgios Basilikos nel codice Athen. Gennad. 39," _Rivista di studi bizantini e neoellenici_, n.s. 36 (1999), 177-222.


5)  Rictrude (d. 688).  Our chief source for R. (in Latin, Rictrudis, Richrudis) is her Vita written in 907 by the learned Hucbald of St.-Amand (BHL 7247).  According to this text, which combines the traditions of her abbey at today's Marchiennes (Nord) with contextual matter and spiritually incidents derived from other sources, she was a pious, high-status woman of Novempopulana (roughly today's Gascony) who married a leading Frankish noble of Neustria, St. Adalbald, at a time when he was in the service of Dagobert I of Austrasia, who lived with him happily for sixteen years until he was murdered by some of her relatives, and whose spiritual advisor was St. Amandus of Maastricht.  After R. was widowed she entered the abbey at Marchiennes together with her three young daughters (all of whom are saints) and ruled it until her death, when she was succeeded by her daughter St. Clotsind.  R.'s cult is first attested from the tenth century.

Hucbald's _Vita Rictrudis_ gives R. a son who became a priest and later headed a monastery, the sainted Maurontus.  Reasons for disbelieving his historicity are given by Karine Ugé, "The Legend of St. Rictrude: Formation and Transformations (Tenth-Twelfth Century)" _Anglo-Norman Studies_ 23 (2001 for the 2000 conference), 281-97.  R.'s cult, which followed the fortunes of her abbey, is attested by dedications of churches throughout Flanders and Hainaut.  Relics believed to be R.'s are preserved in the originally twelfth-/sixteenth-century church dedicated to her at Ronchin (Nord) in France.  Some views of that church:
http://www.abaelard.de/abaelard/images/030029rictrude.jpg
http://tinyurl.com/qcpre8
http://www.flickr.com/photos/johnhanscom/3525581109/
http://wikimapia.org/8038676/fr/Eglise-Sainte-Rictrude
http://tinyurl.com/phhyc8


6)  Germanus I, patriarch of Constantinople (d. after 17. January 730).  The well educated and talented G. has a legendary, probably eleventh-century Bios (BHG 697) that underlies many accounts of him.  He became patriarch in 715 and was forced into exile in 730 because of his opposition to the emperor Leo III's policy of iconoclasm.  His surviving sermons show considerable literary artistry.  G.'s relics are said to have been removed to France when Constantinople was under Latin rule in the thirteenth century.  But in 1348 Anthony of Novgorod was shown (a reliquary of) G.'s hand, which latter he says was used to consecrate the city's patriarchs.

Some views of originally early eleventh-century church of Ag. Germanos in the homonymous locality of Prespes (Florina prefecture) in NW Greece:
http://tinyurl.com/34tfltb
http://tinyurl.com/33amx55
http://tinyurl.com/39xmuhv
http://tinyurl.com/39f72rh
http://tinyurl.com/39mmo5r

G. as depicted (roundel with red background) 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/23b9gdq

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

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