medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture

Today (29. June) is the feast day of:

1a)  Peter, apostle (d. 64?).  P. was a Jew of Galilee who became a Roman martyr of the Vatican cemetery.  He is entered for today in the _Depositio martyrum_ of the Chronographer of 354 and in the earliest sources for the Roman liturgy.  The seventh-century guidebooks for pilgrims to Rome all mention P.'s memorial basilica on the Vatican hill.  That building did not long survive the Middle Ages, but twentieth-century excavation beneath its successor revealed a small monument attributed to the second century and thought by some to have been P.'s memorial.  P. comes first in the early lists of the bishops of Rome.

P. as portrayed on the earlier fourth-century (ca. 335) Sarcophagus of Marcus Claudianus in the Museo Nazionale Romano (Museo delle Terme) in Rome:
http://tinyurl.com/38a3ocg

P. as portrayed in a sixth- or seventh-century icon at the monastery of St. Catherine in Sinai:
http://www.icon-art.info/masterpiece.php?lng=en&mst_id=1883


1b)  Paul, apostle (d. 67?).  P. was a Jew of Tarsus in Cilicia who became a Roman martyr at an unknown location (traditionally, Aquae Salviae = modern Tre Fontane) not far from the Via Ostiensis.  The _Depositio martyrum_ of the Chronographer of 354 locates his burial site in the vicinity of that road.  P. is entered for today in the earliest sources for the Roman liturgy.  The seventh-century guidebooks for pilgrims to Rome all mention the memorial basilica over his grave, now generally known as San Paolo fuori le Mura.

A view of the portrait of P. whose discovery in the Roman cemetery of St. Thecla was announced a little over a year ago and which repeatedly has been said to be his earliest known pictorial representation:
http://tinyurl.com/mmbwcj
Another roundel in the same ceiling contains the very recently publicized portrait of a young man interpreted as the apostle John.  According to the BBC in a related piece published just one week ago, unnamed Vatican officials are now dating the ceiling to the later fourth century _or to the early fifth_ (emphasis mine):
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/10382828.stm
If that reporting is accurate, then the portrait of P. in that ceiling may not be his oldest known portrayal.

A few other images of P.:

a)  in the Roman cemetery of Praetextatus:
http://divdl.library.yale.edu/dl//images/eikon/ei0666s.jpg

b)  a sixth-century fresco in the so-called Grotto of St Paul at Ephesus:
http://tinyurl.com/2acsfer
http://www.archaeology.org/online/news/jpegs/stpaul3.jpeg

c)  a thirteenth-century fresco belonging to the Fabbrica di San Pietro in the Vatican:
http://www.christusrex.org/www1/vaticano/Fb-Paul.jpg


1c)  Some images of P. and P. either together or as a matching or flanking pair:

a)  in what is often said said to be a (later) fourth-century sepulchral slab for a boy named Asellus, now in the Vatican's Museo Pio Cristiano:
http://www.christusrex.org/www1/vaticano/PC-Asellus.jpg
http://tinyurl.com/28jcan2

b)  in a painting in the Roman cemetery of Marcellinus and Peter:
http://tinyurl.com/29yxjdx

c)  in a mid-eleventh-century Novgorod School icon, now in the Museum of History and Architecture, Novgorod:
http://www.icon-art.info/masterpiece.php?lng=en&mst_id=473

d)  in the twelfth-century mosaics of  the Cappella Palatina in Palermo:
http://tinyurl.com/2ujbjyq

e)  in the earlier thirteenth-century apse mosaic (1220) of the basilica di San Paolo fuori le Mura in Rome:
http://tinyurl.com/358xl34

f)  in an illumination in the earlier thirteenth-century Pontifical of Chartres (Orléans, Bibliothèque municipale, ms. 144, fol. 93v):
http://tinyurl.com/3977kuw 

g)  in a restored thirteenth-century fresco in the ex-monastery of Santo Spirito at Roio (AQ) in Abruzzo:
http://tinyurl.com/2wb2nka

h)  in the later thirteenth-century (either ca. 1263-1270 or slightly later) frescoes of the choir in the monastery church of the Holy Trinity  at Sopoćani (Raška dist.) in southern Serbia:
Peter:
http://tinyurl.com/3x73ubq
http://tinyurl.com/36dc2zq
Paul:
http://tinyurl.com/3xwqfx4
http://tinyurl.com/39yv2q8

i)  in the earlier fourteenth-century frescoes (betw. 1315 and 1321) in the endonarthex of the Chora Church (Kariye Camii) in Istanbul:
Peter:
http://tinyurl.com/2uwnaqh
http://tinyurl.com/3x8a7pn
http://tinyurl.com/393s3zc
http://tinyurl.com/2utxhux
Paul:
http://tinyurl.com/3x8a7pn
http://tinyurl.com/2wtzvyr
http://tinyurl.com/329gajh
http://tinyurl.com/2vnpx8j

j)  The martyrdoms of P. and P. as depicted in the earlier fourteenth-century frescoes (betw. 1335 and 1350) of the narthex in the church of the Holy Ascension at the Visoki Dečani monastery near 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/ygj7y86


2)  Syrus of Genoa (?).  A saint named S. has been venerated at Genoa since at least the sixth century, when pope St. Gregory the Great (_Dialogi_, 4. 55) mentions a church there dedicated to S. the martyr.  By the middle of the tenth century it was believed at Genoa that the city had had an early bishop of this name, who according to his Vita (BHL 7973) had been born not far from Genoa in a place called Imiliana, where he later served as a priest and also cured the demonically possessed daughter of an official, and that this S. succeeded St. Felix as bishop, rid the city of a noxious basilisk, died a confessor on the day of Sts. Peter and Paul, and was laid to rest in the basilica of the Apostles.  Bl. Jacopo da Varazze, who in the thirteenth century wrote a second Vita of S. (BHL 7974) and who was also one of Genoa's historians, says that he could find no information about S. that was older than the tenth century.

S.'s historicity is questionable.  That he died in 381, as is frequently stated, is conjecture.  The Syrus venerated at Genoa in the sixth century could very well have been S. of Pavia (in the same late antique province of Liguria); conversely, he may have been a local saint who in Gregory's time was thought of as having been a martyr.  The since rebuilt church of San Siro in modern central Genoa, whence S.'s relics were translated to the cathedral in about 1019, dates from a little after 1007.  Its predecessor was evidently still the church of the Apostles when BHL 7973 was written.  In the dioceses of Genoa and Ventimiglia - San Remo -- and perhaps in all dioceses of today's Liguria -- S. is celebrated liturgically on 7. July.

The church of San Siro at Struppa (GE) dates from shortly before 1025; after many alterations it has been restored to an early "romanesque" appearance.  Here's an illustrated, Italian-language account:
http://www.vegiazena.it/leggende/sansiro/s-siro03.htm
Other views:
http://tinyurl.com/6gk747
http://www.flickr.com/photos/libertyplace/1541700040/
http://tinyurl.com/66yena
http://tinyurl.com/6lh23b
http://tinyurl.com/6ghutq
http://tinyurl.com/5zcdcw

Also dedicated to S. is the originally twelfth- or thirteenth-century but much rebuilt basilica collegiata di San Siro in San Remo (GE), restored in the earlier twentieth century and a co-cathedral of the diocese of Ventimiglia - San Remo.  An illustrated, Italian-language account:
http://www.info-sanremo.com/chiesa-san-siro.html
Other views:
http://tinyurl.com/33hwqsv
http://tinyurl.com/6p99sf
http://tinyurl.com/5t7h7r
http://static.panoramio.com/photos/original/1597041.jpg


3)  Cassius of Narni (d. 558).  We know about this bishop of Narni in Umbria from his inscription (_CIL_, X. 2, no. 4164) on his and his wife Fausta's grave slab in Narni's cathedral of San Giovenale as well as from passages in the _Dialogues_ of pope St. Gregory the Great and in one of G.'s sermons.  C. separated from Fausta in order to enter Holy Orders.  He was consecrated bishop of Narni on 9. October 536.  C.'s time in office coincided with Justinian's Gothic War, a dangerous period for Italian cities.  According to Gregory, he carried out his ministry with zeal and prudence and on one occasion cured of demonic possession a swordbearer of the Gothic king Totila.

A view of C.'s and Fausta's later sixth-century grave slab (along with some cosmatesque pavement, all taken from what had been the floor of the sanctuary) mounted in the fifteenth-century wall before the cathedral's rebuilt sacello di San Giovenale:
http://members.tripod.com/romeartlover/Narni14.jpg
A couple of views from further back:
http://tinyurl.com/57xzbj
http://tinyurl.com/6ddqmc
Those last two images come from the Italia nell'Arte Medievale page on the cathedral:
http://tinyurl.com/6fokye
An illustrated, English-language account of the cathedral's sacello di San Cassio:
http://www.ktucitywalks.co.uk/131.html


4)  Gero of Köln (d. 976).  The son of a margrave of Thüringen, G. was a court chaplain under Otto I.  He was elected archbishop of Köln in 969 and in that year had made for him at Reichenau the sumptuously illustrated Gospel manuscript that bears his name.  An illustrated, English-language account of the Gero-Kodex (Darmstadt, Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek, Hs. 1948), with expandable views of two portraits of G., is here:
http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/2007/03/gero-codex.html

In 971 G. was sent to Constantinople to escort the future empress Theophanu to Rome, where in 972 she married the future Otto II.  G. returned to Köln with the relics of St. Pantaleon that T. had brought with her and deposited them in the church of the Benedictine monastery founded by Otto I's brother St. Bruno, archbishop of Köln.  Both the church and the monastery soon became known by the name of St. Pantaleon.

St. Pantaleon underwent major transformations in the eighteenth century and was heavily damaged in World War II.   Most of what one sees today is restoration work.  Herewith an illustrated, German-language account:
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Pantaleon_%28K%C3%B6ln%29
Another:
http://www.romanische-kirchen-koeln.de/pantaleon.html
A virtual panorama of the interior:
http://www.romanische-kirchen-koeln.de/750.html

For Köln's cathedral G. had made the ornamental crucifix now known as the Gerokreuz.  An illustrated, German-language account of that is here:
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerokreuz
According to the early eleventh-century chronicler Thomas of Merseburg, G. miraculously caused a crack in the crucifix' head of Christ to close without trace by inserting in it a consecrated host and a splinter from a relic and by then successfully praying for the repair to work (apparently, ordinary filler and paint simply would not do).  A mid-fourteenth-century depiction of this miracle (heavily overpainted at the end of the nineteenth century) can be seen in altarpiece of the cathedral's Stephanuskapelle:
http://www.heiligenlexikon.de/Fotos/Gero_von_Koeln.jpg
Here's a view of G.'s tomb (after 1260) in the cathedral's Stephanuskapelle:
http://www.koelner-dom.de/uploads/pics/v090000.jpg
A German-language account of it:
http://www.koelner-dom.de/index.php?id=16689
G. has yet to grace the pages of the RM.


5)  Emma of Gurk (d. 1045).  E. (in Latin, Hemma) founded the short-lived Benedictine double monastery of Gurk in Kärnten (Carinthia) whose assets were used in the late eleventh century for the erection of the diocese of Gurk.  According to the early thirteenth-century Elogium (BHL 3803; shortly after 1227) for her Office at Gurk, she was the very wealthy widow of a landgrave of Friesach who had earlier lost both her sons (supposedly murdered in an insurrection).

A German-language page on E. with a view of a fifteenth-century statue of her:
http://www.kath-kirche-kaernten.at/pages/bericht.asp?id=405
E.'s legend as depicted (early sixteenth-century) in the Basilika Maria Himmelfahrt at Gurk (the former cathedral of the homonymous diocese, whose seat is now in Klagenfurt):
http://www.gurktal.or.at/dom-1.htm   
Two illustrated pages on this church, one in German and one in English:
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dom_zu_Gurk
http://tinyurl.com/2uvouy


6)  Salome and Judith of Niederaltaich (Bl.; d. late 11th cent., supposedly).  According to their legendary late twelfth- or early thirteenth-century Vita (BHL 7465), the virgin S., a relative of a king of England, lost her sight in the vicinity of Regensburg while returning from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.  She then fell into the Danube, was rescued with difficulty, contracted leprosy, stayed in the area to recover and a few years later immured herself as a recluse in the choir of the convent church of today's Niederaltaich (Lkr. Deggendorf).  Her cousin Judith, a young widow, went looking for her, found her by accident, and immured herself as a recluse in the atrium of the same church.

The directory of saints on the website of the diocese of Münster recognizes both S. and J., whereas the similar service hosted by the archdiocese of Köln (<http://www.heilige.de/>) recognizes only J.  Neither has ever graced the pages of the RM.

Best,
John Dillon
(last year's post revised)

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