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medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Today (22. June) is the feast day of:
1) Alban of England (d. ca. 304?). First known from continental references of the fifth century (Prosper of Aquitaine, Constantius of Lyon), A. is England's protomartyr. The earliest clearly British account of him to survive is that of Gildas in the sixth century; this was shown in 2001 to have been based on a brief, legendary Passio that neither dates A.'s martyrdom nor locates it in any named town. In that Passio, A. is a pagan who during a persecution takes the place of a hunted Christian and is publicly executed on 21. June at a walled town; accompanying miracles cause the presiding official to halt the persecution and the admiring multitude to become Christians. An interpolation from after 445/46 records a visit by St. Germanus of Auxerre to A.'s martyrial basilica.
Gildas identifies A. as a man of Verulamium (now St Albans [Herts]); Bede says that A. was martyred there. The Passio's topography corresponds reasonably well with that of late antique Verulamium and of the abbey dedicated to A. that arose outside it. Verulamium's Roman wall has now been dated to the later third century. Later versions of the Passio give today as A.'s _dies natalis_; St. Ado of Vienne and Usuard entered him in their martyrologies under this date.
With perhaps some interruptions, A.'s putative relics were enshrined at his abbey at St Albans from the late eighth century until its suppression in the sixteenth. Two pages (pre-Conquest and post-Conquest to Dissolution) on the abbey's history, from William Page, ed., _A History of the County of Hertford_, vol. 4 (1914; reprinted., 1971):
http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=37956
http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=37957
The Sacred Destinations page of views of the Cathedral and Abbey Church of St Alban at St Albans:
http://tinyurl.com/lho2fb
Thomas Perkins' richly illustrated _The Cathedral Church of St Albans_ (1903), to assist in seeing how much of what's visible in those Sacred Destinations views stems from the building's nineteenth-century restoration:
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/19494/19494-h/19494-h.htm
A.'s martyrdom as depicted by the thirteenth-century St Albans monk Matthew Paris in an early, partly autograph manuscript of his _Chronica maiora_ (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, Ms 26):
http://tinyurl.com/lgzxgj
Scenes from a Life of A. as depicted by Matthew Paris in another earlier fourteenth-century manuscript (Dublin, Trinity College, Ms E.I.40., fols. 77 ff.) :
http://tinyurl.com/mjr2os
http://tinyurl.com/35po52k
In the later tenth century relics said to be A.'s were deposited in Köln's church of St. Pantaleon, which still keeps most of them them in the late twelfth-century reliquary shown here:
http://tinyurl.com/nvzet7
Father Réginald Grégoire, _Theofano. Una bizantina sul trono del sacro romano impero_ (Milano: Jaca Book, 2000), p. 133-35, advances the view that these relics at Köln were brought from Mainz (legendarily, they came from Rome), in which case they will have been attributed initially to yesterday's Alban of Mainz. From the relics in St. Pantaleon a thigh bone was transferred to St Michael's Abbey, Farnborough (Hamps) in the 1950s and a smaller bone was transferred to St Albans in 2002.
Above and beyond the relics in Köln, A.'s cult spread fairly widely on the Continent. Pretty certainly always dedicated to A. of England is the perhaps originally twelfth-century église paroissiale Saint-Alban at Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole (Lozčre) in Languedoc-Roussillon. An illustrated fact sheet on it is here:
http://tinyurl.com/2kct83
Other views:
http://location48.free.fr/lozere_eglise_saint_alban.jpg
http://tinyurl.com/227r4x
http://tinyurl.com/yw4nyd
Ditto for the originally twelfth-/fifteenth-century église paroissiale Saint-Alban at Bresdon (Charente-Maritime) in Saintonge:
http://tinyurl.com/2be7zm
http://tinyurl.com/28zd6r
http://tinyurl.com/2dsfgx
http://tinyurl.com/33oewu
http://tinyurl.com/2uz6rn
Likewise the originally twelfth-/thirteenth-century église Saint-Albain at Saint-Albain (Saône-et-Loire) in Bourgogne, restored in 1985. Three expandable views are here:
http://tinyurl.com/4ohqx5
An early twentieth-century view providing a better view of the choir:
http://tinyurl.com/427y9l
Other views:
http://tinyurl.com/5vtrnp
http://tinyurl.com/3t258t
Probably dedicated to today's A. (though just possibly to A. of Mainz) was the church of a St. A. at Odense in which the Danish king St. Knud was killed in 1086. For the view of some medieval Englishmen that this church possessed relics of today's A., see Patrick McGurk and Jane Rosenthal, "The Anglo-Saxon Gospelbooks of Judith, Countess of Flanders: Their Text, Make-up and Function", _Anglo-Saxon England_ 24 (1996), 251-308, p. 240.
Even less certainly initially dedicated to today's A. is the originally late fourteenth-/fifteenth-century Albanikirche in Göttingen:
http://tinyurl.com/2wd2be
http://tinyurl.com/2vvftu
This replaced an earlier church on the site first documented from 1254. A church in this general location (at some remove from the center of the later medieval town) is known from 953 and is said to have been dedicated to an A. since at least the early eleventh century. As Göttingen lies within the Saxon territory evangelized in a missionary enterprise begun by St. Boniface and by others from England, the prevailing belief today is that the A. in question was Alban of England. What makes that iffy is the uncertainty over the date of the first dedication to a St. A. coupled with Göttingen's also lying within the former ecclesiastical province of Mainz, in which dedications to A. of Mainz are widespread.
2) Nicetas of Remesiana (d. ca. 414). The theologian and liturgist N. (in Romanian, Niceta) became bishop of Remesiana in the Latin-speaking Roman province of Dardania (now Bela Palanka in Serbia's Pirotski okrug) in about 370. The town was situated on an important Roman road running between Sirmium (Beograd) and Constantinople (Istanbul) and its diocese was a suffragan of that of Serdica/Sardica (Sofia). N. was a friend of St. Paulinus of Nola (no. 4, below), whom he visited at least twice in Italy and who dedicated to him his _Carmina_ 17 and 27. Paulinus praises N.'s apostolic efforts among the Dacians and the Goths.
N.'s manual for catechumens, the _Libelli instructionis_, survives only in part. One of the sections we do have, an explanation of the Nicene Creed, furnishes the earliest known instance of the phrase _communio sanctorum_ ("communion of the saints"). Dom Germain Morin's nineteenth-century conjecture that N. was the author of the hymn _Te Deum laudamus_, further developed by A. E. Burn early in the last century and promoted by F. J. E. Raby in _The Oxford Book of Medieval Latin Verse_ (1959; Raby had earlier denied the ascription), is suspect.
N. is entered for today in the (pseudo-)Hieronymian Martyrology and in the historical martyrologies from Florus of Lyon onward. In some Byzantine synaxaries he is entered under 15. September (the feast day of St. Nicetas the Goth). In Romania, where N. is the patron saint, he is celebrated on 24. June.
3) Paulinus of Nola (d. 431). Meropius Pontius Paulinus, today's well known saint of the Regno, belonged to a wealthy senatorial family of Bordeaux and was educated there by the poet and rhetor Ausonius. Before 381 he was suffect consul and in 380/81 he served as governor of Campania. In 385/86 P. was in Vienne, where St. Martin not yet of Tours cured him of an ocular impairment. In 393, having been instructed in the faith by his friend St. Amandus of Bordeaux, he was baptized in Bordeaux together with another friend, St. Sulpicius Severus. P. then abandoned his worldly career, married the dedicated Christian Therasia, sold his vast estates in Septimania, and went to live in Spain.
In 395 P. and T. moved to the vicinity of Nola in Campania, where at today's Cimitile (NA) they erected a monastery and basilican church in honor of St. Felix of Nola. From there P. carried on an extensive correspondence that included many Christian luminaries (among them Sts. Augustine of Hippo, Jerome, Martin of Tours, Sulpicius Severus, Amandus of Bordeaux, Honoratus of Lérins, Eucherius of Lyon, and pope St. Anastasius I), composing as well a substantial amount of Christian poetry. P.'s cult was immediate. A letter by the priest Uranius describes his passing (BHL 6558).
Cimitile became an important late antique and early medieval pilgrimage center. A brief, illustrated, English-language discussion:
http://tinyurl.com/4ddw86
and two illustrated, Italian-language accounts (the first has a very useful ground plan of the entire site while the second has illustrated subordinate pages reached from the menu at upper right):
http://www.archemail.it/arche9/0cimitile.htm
http://tinyurl.com/26va2bm
Further views (the last two greatly expandable) of ancient parts of this site's Basilica di San Felice in Pincis showing some of the surrounding structure as well:
http://www.napoligold.com/coast/napolisud/soggetto/de24067.jpg
http://www.fondazionepremiocimitile.it/img/02.jpg
http://tinyurl.com/2f7kphu
http://tinyurl.com/2ayagjq
Apse and belltower (P. is traditionally credited with having introduced the use of church bells):
http://www.fondazionepremiocimitile.it/img/05.jpg
Better view (old postcard) of the belltower:
http://www.fondazionepremiocimitile.it/img/basilica1.jpg
P. as depicted (at left; at right, St. Felix of Nola) in the tenth-century frescoes of the left apse of the original church of Santa Maria Assunta at Pernosano di Pago Vallo Lauro (AV), also in Campania:
http://www.meridies-nola.org/altre/pernosano/santi.jpg
Detail (P.):
http://www.meridies-nola.org/altre/pernosano/s.paolino.jpg
Photo credit for those two images: Archivio Sopr. BAPPSAD di Salerno e Avellino e Curia Vescovile di Nola.
Pope St. Gregory the Great opens Bk. 3 of his _Dialogi_ with a legendary story in which P. accompanies to Africa a woman whose son has been taken into slavery from Italy by a son-in-law of the Vandal king, exchanges himself for the captive and becomes the son-in-law's slave and gardener, is identified by the king (who has had a premonitory dream) as someone especially powerful, reveals himself as bishop, and is then sent back by the frightened royals with much grain (prior to their Vandal conquest the provinces that made up the Vandal kingdom had been Rome's granary) and with all the captives from his city.
P. exchanged as a slave in two earlier fourteenth-century French-language collections of saint's Lives (Paris, BnF, mss. Français 183, fol. 176r, and Français 185, fol. 174r; illuminations by the Fauvel Master and by Jeanne de Montbaston, respectively):
http://tinyurl.com/26q62bv
http://tinyurl.com/25jnws7
4) Domitian of Maastricht (d. ca. 560). We know about the Gallo-Roman D. (also D. of Huy; in Dutch, also Domitiaan) chiefly from accounts (BHL 2251) by Heriger of Lobbes in his _Gesta episcoporum Tungrensium_ (ca. 1000). According to Heriger, he succeeded of St. Eucharius in the see of Tongeren/Tongres. That town being in decline, D. moved the seat of his diocese to Maastricht and evangelized in the Maas/Meuse valley. D. is credited with combatting heresy and with the foundation of several churches, including one dedicated to St. Servaas/Servatius in Maastricht itself. Another may have been the predecessor of the collégiale Notre-Dame at Huy in today's Belgium, which -- apart from a finger said to be at Maastricht -- has his relics. The latter have been radiocarbon-dated to between 535 and 640. D. has yet to grace the pages of the RM.
D. has several eleventh-century and later Vitae and Miracula, on which see Philippe George, "Vies et miracles de saint Domitien, éveque de Tongres-Maastricht (535-549)," _Analecta Bollandiana_ 103 (1985), 305-51; 119 (2001), 5-32. His most famous miracle (clearly an emblem of his bringing the true faith to people in the thrall of false beliefs) is the slaying of a dragon that had poisoned the water supply of Huy. A healing saint, he was/is invoked especially in cases of fever.
D.'s later twelfth-century châsse (ca. 1172-1189) at Huy:
http://tinyurl.com/l5mh6j
http://tinyurl.com/28vdndq
D.'s bust on this object:
http://tinyurl.com/yw2wur
http://tinyurl.com/2ukck8
An illustrated, French-language page (views expand slightly) on the originally fourteenth-/fifteenth-century collégiale Notre-Dame de Huy is here:
http://socart.ibelgique.com/collegiale-huy.htm
An illustrated, English-language page on the same church (views at bottom expand considerably):
http://tinyurl.com/28vv8lf
A page of expandable views:
http://www.belgiumview.com/belgiumview/tl2/view0000364.php4
Single views:
http://tinyurl.com/2j27wu
http://tinyurl.com/36ulvy
5) John IV, bp. of Naples (d. 849). Our chief source for this less well known saint of the Regno is his Vita by the Neapolitan hagiographer John the Deacon (BHL 4416). J., whose conventional sobriquet in Italian is "lo Scriba" ("the Scribe"), was a trained calligrapher who had the misfortune to live in interesting times, when the nominally East Roman duchy of Naples was at war with the Lombard principality of Benevento. In 831 the duke of Naples, a military tyrant named Bonus (his epitaph boasted of the many Lombards he had slain), threw the city's then bishop, Tiberius, into prison and commanded that John, who was now a deacon, take his place. John accepted on condition that Tiberius, who had become quite ill, be freed; this was done and John was able to manage things so that Tiberius effectively ran his diocese through John.
This arrangement outlasted Bonus' death in 834; when Tiberius finally died in 842 the then duke, Sergius I (a famous name in the history of Naples), asked pope Gregory IV to formally consecrate John as bishop. After undergoing an examination in Rome concerning his previous conduct in office, John was consecrated there and served until his death.
Also in 831 the then prince of Benevento had the body of St. Januarius stolen from its resting place outside the walls of Naples and "repatriated" to the city of Benevento (where according to legend J. had been bishop until his martyrdom). This occurred during a Lombard show of force outside the city and, indeed, for most of the first half of the ninth century it was risky for Neapolitans to venture out to the extramural catacombs where a number of their early sainted bishops were still interred. At some point in the 840s, when conditions had improved, J. achieved the translation of these bishops' remains back into the city, creating a cult area for them in the Stefania, a predecessor of today's cathedral.
Today is J.'s _dies natalis_. He was interred in the catacombs of St. Januarius but was later reburied in the Stefania and then in the virtually adjacent basilica of Santa Restituta, which in turn became part of the present cathedral. In 1862 his remains were found under Santa Restituta's main altar. J. has never graced the pages of the RM, which latter until its revision of 2001 instead commemorated on this date an earlier Neapolitan bishop of the same name.
6) John Fisher and Thomas More (d. 1535). Fisher is one of the best known Catholic martyrs of the English Reformation. A learned humanist, he was from 1502 spiritual director and confessor to Lady Margaret Beaufort (d. 1509; mother of Henry VII), who under his guidance founded St. John's and Christ's Colleges at Cambridge as well as the readerships in Divinity at Oxford and Cambridge that became the Lady Margaret professorships and of which he was the first incumbent of the one at Cambridge. In 1504 F. became bishop of Rochester and chancellor of the university of Cambridge. Shortly before his execution he was made a cardinal. Today is his _dies natalis_. Considered a martyr at the time of his death, F. was beatified in 1886 and canonized in 1935.
An expandable image of a portrait sketch of F. by Hans Holbein the Younger is here:
http://tudorhistory.org/people/fisher/
The even better known More, a layman, needs no introduction to this list. His _dies natalis_ is 6. July and his dates of beatification and canonization are the same as Fisher's. Here's a view of his portrait from 1527 by Hans Holbein the Younger, now in the Frick Collection in New York:
http://tinyurl.com/4bsz3c
Best,
John Dillon
(last year's post revised)
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