medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Today (5. June) is the feast day of:
1) Marcian, Nicander, Apollonius, and companions (?). M., N., A.. et socc. are a group of martyrs from Egypt recorded for today in the (pseudo-)Hieronymian Martyrology, whence their entries, also for today, in the Carolingian martyrologies of Florus, Ado, and Usuard. They have a complex of legendary Passiones forming part of that of the Ten Martyrs of Egypt (BHG 11194, 1194ab; BHL 5260, etc.). These do not agree on the persecution in which the individual saints are said to have suffered and their reliability has been variously assessed. M. and N. _may_ be the saints of these names who in another Passio are reported to have been martyred at Durostorum in Moesia and who in the fourth-century Syriac Martyrology are entered for today.
2) Dorotheus of Tyre (d. 362?). We first hear of D. in the continuation of the Chronicle of George the Synkellos that goes under the name of Theophanes the Confessor. According to this text, put together in the very early ninth century from earlier sources, D. was a learned bishop of Tyre who had been exiled and tortured under Diocletian, who attended the First Council of Nicaea and who then regained his see, who left writings both in Latin and in Greek including a history of bishops of Byzantium and other places, and who at the age of 107 was martyred at Odyssopolis by officers of Julian the Apostate, then engaged in secret persecution of Christians.
D. is absent from Eusebius' _Chronicon_ and from the early list of the bishops of Tyre. A fairly widely held scholarly opinion not shared by the editors of the RM is that, as Cyril Mango and Roger Scott put it, "Dorotheos of Tyre does not seem to have ever existed" (Mango and Scott, tr., _The Chronicle of Theophanes Confessor_ [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997], pp. 40-41). There are brief accounts of D. in Greek liturgical manuscripts of the ninth or tenth century onwards and he has an entry in the Synaxary of Constantinople.
D. as depicted in a June calendar portrait in the earlier fourteenth-century frescoes (betw. ca. 1312 and 1321/1322) of 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/2doxaof
3) Eutichius of Como (d. 539). E.'s name is often normalized classically as 'Eutychius'. But his marble tombstone, now preserved in the Civici Musei di Como, shows the common late antique practice of using an 'i' in names of Greek origin where the vowel in Greek had been upsilon. The inscription on this stone, which was found in the 1870s in Como's church of St. Abundius, tells us that E. was a bishop, that he was aged 57 at his death, and that he was laid to rest on the nones of June in the year 539. The liturgical tradition of Como makes E. a native of that city and a man given to solitary prayer.
E. was laid to rest among his predecessors the ancient basilica of Sts. Peter and Paul, the predecessor of today's Sant'Abbondio. In the later Middle Ages (legendarily, in the thirteenth century; in fact, perhaps only in the fifteenth century) E. was translated to Como's church of San Giorgio in the neighborhood (medievally, a suburb) where he is said to have been born. A lay confraternity and an adjacent pilgrim hospice were named for him.
E. used to repose in a marble sarcophagus of the late thirteenth or fourteenth century whose three historiated panels are illustrated in photographic reproduction atop his entry in the _Bibliotheca Sanctorum_ (vol. 5, cols. 321-22). A partial view heads the non-expandable thumbnails on p. 2 of this six-page, Italian-language account of San Giorgio:
http://www.sistemalagodicomo.it/chiese.php?n=C&s=Como&id=408&p=1
And another, depicting E.'s legendary translation to San Giorgio, is the third on this page, which also has views of the modern tomb in which E. (or some of what's left of him) has reposed since 1933:
http://www.sistemalagodicomo.it/chiese.php?n=C&s=Como&id=408&p=3
San Giorgio also has a reliquary case housing what is said to be part of the chin of St. Thomas Becket and some bones said to be those of E. Three views follow:
http://tinyurl.com/623ecv
http://tinyurl.com/64acjh
http://tinyurl.com/5vf2gv
4) Dorotheus of Gaza (d. ca. 570). The ascetic writer D. (sometimes D. the Archimandrite) was born in Antioch on the Orontes. An enthusiastic student in his youth, he had an excellent education, after which he became a monk under the Palestinian desert fathers Sts. Barsanuphius and John of Gaza (J. the Prophet). Briefly an hermit, he founded and directed a monastery of his own near Gaza. D., who was especially keen on the virtue of humility, composed monastic works in a variety of genres; he also established a hospital next to his monastery. D. was the teacher of St. Dositheus, who died young and whose Bios he wrote (BHG 2117, 2118, 2119; Latin version: BHL 2334). Unlike Dorotheus of Tyre (no. 2, above), this undisputedly historic D. has yet to grace the pages of the RM.
5) Boniface of Mainz (d. 754). B., whose original name was Wynfreth, was born in Devon. He is sometimes referred to as B. of Crediton (Ian Wood's account of him in the _Oxford Dictionary of National Biography_ adds, "apparently without justification"). A largely successful missionary and eccclesiastical organizer in today's Germany and The Netherlands, he was the first archbishop of what became the see of Mainz. B. and a large body of followers were martyred at Dokkum in today's Dongeradeel in Netherlandic Friesland. In accordance with his wishes he was buried at Fulda, in whose cathedral crypt he now reposes:
http://tinyurl.com/pbarv4
http://tinyurl.com/2vxgepw
OK, so that tomb isn't very medieval. Herewith two views, courtesy of the Bischöfliches Dom- und Diözesanmuseum in Mainz, of what is said to be the oldest representation of B. (later ninth-century):
http://tinyurl.com/onpkks
http://tinyurl.com/69p9ns
B. as depicted in the Sacramentary of Fulda (Göttingen, Universitätsbibliothek, cod. theol. 231; ca. 975), baptizing a convert and, lower register, being martyred:
http://tinyurl.com/5bgx3y
B. (upper register, center) depicted with the saints of Eichstätt in the Pontifical of bishop Gundekar II (1057–1075):
http://tinyurl.com/6fq63c
An illustrated, German-language page on the originally eleventh-/fourteenth-century Münsterkirche St. Bonifatius at Hameln in Land Niedersachsen:
http://tinyurl.com/27wwoda
More views (and a more realistic dating of the present crypt) will be found on pages of the church's website, starting here:
http://www.muenster-hameln.de/das-muenster/geschichte.htm
An illustrated, German-language page on the Stiftskirche Sankt Bonifatius in Freckenhorst (Lkr. Warendorf) in Westphalia, consecrated on this day in 1129 (many expandable views at bottom):
http://bonifatius-lambertus.de/kirchen/st-bonifatius/
Two more view (west front; cloister):
http://tinyurl.com/5mray3
http://tinyurl.com/6kavcl
A later fourteenth-century seated B. (with an opening for a relic) now in the Museum Hameln in Hameln:
http://tinyurl.com/6lvh5k
In 2004 one could purchase a specimen of this B. in marzipan and honey in the diocese of Fulda, which latter was then celebrating the 1250th anniversary of his martyrdom:
http://tinyurl.com/6p8xtx
6) Eoban, Adelar, and companions (d. 754). The companions in martyrdom of Boniface of Mainz (see above). E. was the first bishop of Utrecht; in the later Middle Ages A. was considered the first bishop of Erfurt. They have had feasts of their own (sometimes including their companions other than B.) in these dioceses as well as in that of Fulda. Remains interpreted as those of E. and A. were discovered in 1154 in the collegiate church of St. Mary -- today's Mariendom -- in Erfurt while it was under construction; for the remainder of the Middle Ages and beyond E. and A. were venerated there by pilgrims at these saints' supposed tomb. E. was the name-saint of the fifteenth-/sixteenth-century Latin poet Helius Eobanus Hessus.
7) Francus of Assergi (d. late 12th cent.). According to his late medieval Vita (BHL 3143), today's less well known saint of the Regno was born of wealthy, landholding parents at today's Roia (AQ) in Abruzzo around the time when king William I took Brindisi and occupied Apulia and Calabria (i.e. 1156, when William recovered Apulia from an invasion force sent by the eastern emperor Manuel I). F. was educated by a local priest; later, when the parents were away, an older brother made him guardian of a sheepfold. Moved by the Holy Spirit, F. abandoned his ovine charges and entered the abbey of St. John at Collimento in today's Lucoli (AQ). After ten years had passed, the exceptionally humble and virtuous F. declined to accept unanimous election to the post of abbot. After twenty years as a monk he became an hermit, dwelling in a hidden cave outfitted with fresh water to which he had been guided by a male bear that also led him to a supply of honey.
In time others sought F. out and he also wandered about from place to place operating many miracles in the central Appennines (e.g. saving a man from a cliffslide, diverting an avalanche, driving off wolves, saving an infant who had been seized by wolves, saving a man from being struck by a falling tree). Ultimately he settled in a cave in a cliff above today's Assergi (AQ), where he enjoyed the companionship of a she-bear and three of her offspring. After fifteen years as an hermit F. died one night; the inhabitants of the town, awakened while it was yet dark by the ringing of bells and the crowing of cocks, found his cave by the light it emitted, and brought the holy man's corpse to Assergi's monastery church of Santa Maria in Silice, after which further miracles occurred. Thus far F.'s Vita.
F.'s cult was immediate: a very early thirteenth-century calendar from Santa Maria in Silice is said to have had an entry for his feast, which at Assergi has always been celebrated on this day. In 1757 F.'s cult was approved for the diocese of L'Aquila by the Sacred Congregation of Rites and in 1964 he was included in a new, Rome-approved Propers for the diocese.
An Italian-language account of the originally eleventh-century former abbey of San Giovanni at Collimento di Lucoli is here:
http://tinyurl.com/mg8rle
and views (dating from before the great earthquake in the Aquilano of 6. April 2009) of its recently restored, mostly fourteenth- and fifteenth-century church are here:
http://tinyurl.com/nmax9c
http://tinyurl.com/moh8y4
Those views were taken before the great earthquake in the Aquilano of 6. April 2009. This more recent photo show no damage:
http://tinyurl.com/2f3r3jj
But the damage was actually severe:
http://tinyurl.com/2v7jyfd
The former monastery church of Santa Maria in Silice at Assergi is now that town's chiesa di Santa Maria Assunta (also known as San Franco); its facade is of the early fifteenth century. A set of expandable views of the church (left-click only) is here:
http://tinyurl.com/o29w3m
A closer view of some of the carving of the portal, seen behind a modern statue of F. being brought out in procession:
http://tinyurl.com/re4bt7
The town is very close to the Gran Sasso. Here's a view of it with the church at left and the mountain above:
http://tinyurl.com/papnx9
F.'s remains are in the reliquary shown here:
http://tinyurl.com/oaptoc
A few kilometers higher up one may visit a spring, the fontana di San Franco, at a spot where F. is said to have lived:
http://cetemps.aquila.infn.it/tempaq/immagini/san_franco.jpg
Assergi too suffered considerable damage from the aforementioned earthquake and from some of its many aftershocks. Herewith some views of the church's stabilized belfry:
http://tinyurl.com/2g6745g
Best,
John Dillon
(last year's post revised and with the addition of Dorotheus of Gaza, revised from 2008)
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