medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Today (1. June) is the feast day of:
1) Justin Martyr (d. ca. 165). J. was born of pagan parents in Flavia Neapolis (today's Nablus) in Palestine. A philosopher by training, he became a Christian and devoted himself to expounding the truth of his religion. His surviving works are an _Apology_ to the emperor Antoninus Pius and to his adoptive sons Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus, another addressed to the Senate of Rome, and the _Dialogue with Trypho_, Trypho having been a rabbi whom he had met at Ephesus. At some point J. moved to Rome, where he and a number of companions (see no. 2, below) were put to death in the reign of Marcus Aurelius. Acta of their trial before the city prefect Junius Rusticus (162/63-167/68) exist in three recensions (BHG 972z, 973, 974), of which the shortest (Recensio A; BHG 972z) could be the original form of the text. Relics said to be J.'s are kept, with others said to be of St. Lawrence and of St. Stephen, in a tomb in Rome's basilica di San Lorenzo fuori le Mura:
http://tinyurl.com/2dz9ytg
Usuard entered J. in his martyrology under 13. April; his reason for selecting that date is unknown. 13. April is also where J.'s elogium was located in the RM until its revision of 2001 when he was moved to today, already his feast day in the general Roman Calendar prior to 1969 and his standard date of commemoration in the Greek church. In Byzantine synaxaries J. appears twice under today's date, once with the companions and once by himself; in the latter instance only he is given the attribute "the Philosopher", a form of identification encountered in the textual tradition of the writings but absent from the martyrial Acta.
J. as depicted (first without attribution and then as "the Philosopher"; the latter image less well preserved) in the June calendar portraits 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/27y8222
http://tinyurl.com/24fv3o9
J. writing and J.'s martyrdom as depicted in a later fifteenth-century copy (ca. 1470) of the _Legenda aurea_ in its French-language version by Jean de Vignay Mâcon, Bibliothèque municipale, ms. 3, fol. 197r):
http://tinyurl.com/2fbjyhn
A Justin venerated in Umbria and in adjacent portions of Lazio who was associated at least in the early modern period with the local saint Crescentinus or Crescentianus (supposedly a solder martyred under Diocletian) may also have been local but is now often identified with the famous Justin Martyr and is celebrated liturgically on this day. A noteworthy witness to that cult is the originally eleventh-/twelfth-century abbey church of San Giustino d'Arna (later, d'Arno) at today's _frazione_ of Ripa in Perugia (well outside the city centre). A brief, illustrated, Italian-language account is here:
http://tinyurl.com/nhmjdm
J. is a patron saint of Fabrica di Roma (VT) in northern Lazio, whose chiesa collegiata di San Silvestro (rebuilt in the sixteenth century) is said to house relics of him beneath its main altar. In the same general area, J. is the patron of San Giustino (PG) in Umbria and a co-patron of Valentano (VT) and Roccasinibalda (RI) in Lazio. One wonders whether the J. of the now ruined eleventh-/twelfth-century chiesa dei Santi Cipriano e Giustino at Campello sul Clitunno (PG) in Umbria was at one time that church's sole dedicatee. Some views of that (with Giustino mislabeled as Giustina!):
http://tinyurl.com/6p55fc
While we're at the famous Fonti del Clitunno, herewith a few views of the nearby, probably later seventh-century Tempietto del Clitunno:
http://www.go-silvignano.com/images/g_halfhour_05.jpg
http://tinyurl.com/2dm8hga
http://tinyurl.com/5qfa84
http://tinyurl.com/2ck7bco
http://tinyurl.com/269pjgb
An advertisement for Judson Emerick's very thorough study of this early medieval church:
http://www.psupress.org/books/titles/0-271-01728-7.html
2) Chariton, Charito, Evelpistus, Hierax, Paeon, and Liberianus (d. ca. 165). These are Justin Martyr's named companions who appear in their collective Acta (see no. 1, above); the latter's title adds "and of their community", suggesting that there were unnamed others as well. When C., C., et al. were added to the RM in 2001 (the elogium for J. under 13. April had not mentioned them), its editors elected to call the second saint by the male-gendered named Charitus (using the genitive form _Chariti_) despite the fact that in recent scholarly editions of the Acta in all three recensions this person bears the female-gendered name Charito and uses a feminine form of _Christianos_ when she tells the magistrate: "I am a Christian by the gift of God". Perhaps someone with access to the corrected RM of 2004 can tell us what name form is used for her there.
In his response to the interrogating magistrate (Rusticus) E. indicates that he has been Justin's disciple; the others almost certainly were as well. E. says that he is a native of Cappadocia (the B recension also has him identify himself as an imperial slave); H., that he is a Phrygian (in the B recension, specifically from Iconium).
Chariton as depicted in the June calendar portraits 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/235c8l5
3) Proculus of Bologna (d. ca. 304, perhaps). The (pseudo-)Hieronymian Martyrology has a Proculus at this date, place of martyrdom unspecified. Our P.'s cult in Bologna was known to the late fourth-/early fifth-century writers St. Victricius of Rouen and St. Paulinus of Nola. His church there goes back to the early eleventh century. Later medieval members of the adjacent monastic community created various Vitae for P., including a twelfth-century one (BHL 6954) that made him a military martyr under the early sixth-century emperor Justin I and a thirteenth-century one identifying him as the Proculus of Narni and thus a bishop (BHL 6956, drawing on the early medieval _Legenda XII Syrorum_, whose own account of that P.'s feast had already in the twelfth century been read in the dioceses of Bologna and Ravenna on 1. June).
Herewith two Italian-language pages on Bologna's chiesa di San Procolo (both unfortunately showing only the nineteenth-century neogothic facade):
http://kidslink.bo.cnr.it/besta/lavoro/3s3r/procolo.html
http://tinyurl.com/4um2nj
P. as depicted (at right) in a fourteenth(?)-century triptych in the Museo di Santo Stefano in Bologna (at left, St. Benedict of Nursia and Montecassino; at center, a pope St. Sixtus [probably Sixtus II]):
http://tinyurl.com/yz3vnrx
Michelangelo's statue of P. (1494) on St. Dominic's monumental shrine in Bologna's basilica di San Domenico:
http://tinyurl.com/3y4g37
4) Fortunatus of Montefalco (d. ca. 400). We know about F. from his late seventh- or early eighth-century Vita (BHL 3087) by the priest Audelaus. According to this text, F. was a poor priest of a church about twelve miles distant from Spoleto who engaged in manual labor in order to make ends meet and who with the little he earned was constantly generous to to widows and orphans, to paupers, and to pilgrims. One day, while plowing a field he turned up a couple of _denarii_ (low-value coins), put them away, and went back to work. An angel came by in the guise of a pilgrim came by and asked for aid; F. offered him the _denarii_ and as he did so these were turned into _aurei_ (high-value coins of gold). F. gave them to the pilgrim/angel and went back to work. Though he did not operate miracles in his lifetime, he did so after his death. A popular cult arose and a church, consecrated by a bishop of Spoleto, was later built to house his remains.
Today's Montefalco (PG) in Umbria is a fortified hilltown that acquired its present name in the later 1240s and that in the fourteenth century was the administrative center of the duchy of Spoleto. Its extramural church of San Fortunato, believed to have succeeded the late antique basilica of F.'s Vita, was given in the earlier fifteenth century to Observant Franciscans who erected an adjacent convent and who in ca. 1450 had the church redecorated with frescoes by Benozzo Gozzoli and pupils. Herewith two views of Gozzoli's portrait there of F. enthroned:
http://www.beniculturali.it/dpc/gozzoli/images/12a.jpg
http://tinyurl.com/4bze8d
5) Caprasius of Lérins (d. after 434). The Provençal hermit C. accompanied St. Honoratus and the latter's brother Venantius on a journey to the East that ended at Modon in the Peloponnese, where Venantius died. C. returned with Honoratus to Provence, where they founded the famous monastery of Lérins. Late antique ecclesiastical writers of Gaul (Sts. Eucherius of Lyon and Sidonius Apollinaris) praise his sanctity. C. entered the martyrologies with that of Florus of Lyon in the early ninth century.
6) Ronan of Locronan (d. 6th cent.?). The eponym of Locronan (Finistère), this Breton saint has a legendary Vita (BHL 7336), seemingly of the thirteenth century and written at Quimper. According to that account, the Irish-born R. established an hermitage in the forest of Névet, where he was visited by, and dispensed counsel to, king Grallo (the very legendary fourth-century Gradlon) and where he had to contend with accusations by a local wife of being a werewolf and of having tried to seduce her. R., so this story goes, then moved on to the vicinity of Hillion, where he died after establishing a new hermitage. A dispute over the possession of his body was resolved by its miraculous transportation back to his first hermitage, where a chapel (later destroyed by Northmen and then rebuilt) was erected in his honor. Later still R.'s remains found their way to Quimper, where they were kept in the cathedral and worked miracles.
The site of R.'s memorial chapel came to be called Locronan. His cult there is attested from the 1030s onward. Herewith some views of Locronan's fifteenth-century église priorale Saint-Ronan and of the adjacent chapelle du Pénity:
Exterior:
http://www.locronan.biz/locronan-church-photo.html
http://tinyurl.com/6k8zlr
http://tinyurl.com/4e4y76
http://photos.viaouest.com/IMG/galerie/l/locronan2-big.jpg
Interior (église):
http://www.flickr.com/photos/41324014@N00/497807123/
R.'s cenotaph in the Pénity:
http://tinyurl.com/2d7o4mg
7) Wigstan (d. 849). The Anglo-Saxon king's son W. (also often Wystan; in Latin, Wistanus) is first attested in the early eleventh-century catalogue _Secgan be þam godes sanctum þe on Engla lande œrost reston_, which tells us that he rests at the monastery of Repton (in today's Derbyshire). In the early twelfth century the chronicler John of Worcester records W.'s royal parentage in Mercia, his death on this day in 849, and his burial at Repton and William of Malmesbury, writing in the _Regesta regum Anglorum_ (2. 212; also in his _Gesta pontificum Anglorum_, c. 161), tells us that W., preferring a life of religion to secular rulership, declined to succeed his father as king and was subsequently murdered on the orders of another Mercian royal whose request to marry W.'s widowed mother (the queen) W. had refused. W.'s early thirteenth-century Vita (BHL 8975) is a reworking of a Passio that is thought also to underlie the twelfth-century accounts.
The eighth-century crypt beneath the later tenth- to fifteenth-century St Wystans church at Repton may initially have been a baptistery. It was expanded to accommodate at least one royal burial (king Wiglaf; d. 839). At some point in ninth or tenth century it received two additional access points; this and a cluster of early graves in the east end of the church together suggest veneration there of a regionally important saint. According to Thomas of Marlborough, the author of one version of the thirteenth-century Vita, in the early eleventh century king Cnut removed W.'s bones from Repton to the abbey at Evesham in today's Worcestershire, though some of W.'s relics were later returned to his earlier resting place. In the later Middle Ages a church dedicated to W. at Wistow in Leicestershire was reputed to mark the site of his murder.
A few expandable views of W.'s church at Repton, including one of the crypt, are here:
http://www.derbyphotos.co.uk/areas_p_z/repton.htm
Further exterior views of the church:
http://tinyurl.com/lbwy6d
http://tinyurl.com/nre2g2
An illustrated, English-language page on the crypt (views expandable):
http://www.reptonchurch.org.uk/Crypt.htm
A further view of the crypt:
http://tinyurl.com/krtn7a
8) Symeon of Trier (d. 1035). According to his early eleventh-century Vita (BHL 7963) by abbot Eberwin of Trier, S. (also Simeon; sometimes called "of Syracuse") was a Greek-speaking native of Syracuse who grew up in Constantinople and who became a monk first in Palestine and later at St. Catherine's in Sinai. He was sent from the latter to Normandy to collect a debt from duke Richard II and traveled part of the way with his future biographer, who was then returning from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. When S. arrived at his destination the duke was dead, his successor would not pay, and S. returned to Palestine as tour guide to a group of pilgrims from Trier. Later he moved to Trier and became an hermit in a gate in the Roman city wall. Here's a view of the gate, saved from destruction in 1803 because it housed a chapel dedicated to S.:
http://tinyurl.com/yvz9ng
S. was canonized papally in 1042.
Best,
John Dillon
(last year's post revised and with the addition of Chariton, Charito, Evelpistus, Hierax, Paeon, and Liberianus)
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