medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Today (9. June) is the feast day of:
1) Vincent of Agen (?). V.'s cult at Agen is attested to from the late sixth century onward, when according to St. Gregory of Tours (_In gloria martyrum_, 104); _Historia Francorum_, 7. 35) he had a martyrial church there that was pillaged by troops of king Guntram (d. 592) whose insult to the saint then caused them to suffer bad ends. Gregory adds that V. was a deacon, that the church in question was at the place where he had suffered, and that a Passio of him already existed at Agen. Of the several extant versions of V.'s legendary Passio (BHL 8621-8624), BHL 8622, whose earliest witness is of the later eighth century, is likely to be either that early Passio or else very close to it.
According to that account, V. arrived as a stranger at a town in the vicinity whose still pagan worship of a solar deity culminated in a festival that was then in progress. Having inquired as to the nature of the ceremony, V. was told that it involved the rolling of a wheel of fire downhill from a temple into a river below. When the wheel was released from the temple it miraculously traced the sign of the cross in its downward path. The local headman arrested V. forthwith, subjected him to torture for a while, had him decapitated, and left the body exposed to the elements. Much later a Christian, told in a dream where to find the martyr's body, did so, found it incorrupt, and translated it to a place some four or five miles distant called Pompeiacum where V. was honorably entombed. Later still, during Gothic rule (418-507), an Arian priest tried to suppress V.'s cult and suffered lengthily in consequence.
Thus far the Passio. St. Venantius Fortunatus has two poems (_Carmina_, 1. 8 and 9) on the saint, his cult, and his churches at the sites of his martyrdom and of his burial. As a martyred deacon of Agen V. is entered under today in the (pseudo-)Hieronymian Martyrology and in the martyrologies of Florus of Lyon, St. Ado of Vienne, and Usuard. From the later ninth century onward the abbey of Conques claimed to have relics of V. taken from Agen (also the abbey's source for its body of St. Fides); by the end of the Middle Ages the abbey was conceding that V.'s relics at Pompeiacum were equally powerful (so BHL 8624).
Pompeiacum is now usually thought to be today's Le Mas-d'Agenais (Lot-et-Garonne), whose originally late eleventh-/early twelfth-century église Saint-Vincent (altered in the later nineteenth century) is dedicated to today's V. Herewith some views of that edifice:
http://tinyurl.com/37m782j
http://tinyurl.com/32k6lc4
http://tinyurl.com/3ym9tfl
V.'s reliquary in the church:
http://masdagenais.com/IMG/jpg/DSC07623.jpg
Today's V. is also the titular of the originally fourteenth-century église Saint-Vincent at Sarrant (Gers). Rebuilt and enlarged in 1568, and with a belltower from 1870, it retains its later medieval chevet. A couple of exterior views of that:
http://tinyurl.com/3yda4ra
http://tinyurl.com/372kquc
2) Primus and Felicianus (d. ca. 304, perhaps). P. and F. are Roman-area martyrs of the Via Nomentana included in the _Depositio martyrum_ of the Chronographer of 354. In the seventh century pope Theodore I (642-49) translated their remains to Rome's church of Santo Stefano Rotondo, where they flank the Cross in a recently restored seventh-century mosaic:
http://tinyurl.com/ysvul3
http://www.jemolo.com/alta/imgro451.jpg
http://tinyurl.com/2csp8g9
Detail (Primus):
http://www.jemolo.com/alta/ro452.jpg
Since perhaps the ninth century P. and F. have been the titulars of a church in Pavia. Its present facade is dated to the later twelfth century; additions to the building and reworkings of it from the later Middle Ages through the eighteenth century render a determination of its original date highly conjectural. Herewith two views of the facade:
http://tinyurl.com/2fwcono
http://tinyurl.com/25b4nov
Certainly by the ninth century these saints' legendary Passio (BHL 6922) had come into existence. This makes them brothers martyred in the Great Persecution, interrogated separately and then tortured and executed jointly. The English-language translation of the third nocturn lesson from their proper reproduces the essential story line:
http://tinyurl.com/2gl7t
Differently sized views of the martyrdom of P. and F. in a late thirteenth-century _Legenda Aurea_ (San Marino, CA, Huntington Library, ms. HM 3027, fol. 65r) are available towards the bottom of this page:
http://tinyurl.com/33p2qn
P. and F. as depicted in a later fourteenth-century (ca. 1370) Roman missal of north Italian origin (Avignon, Bibliothèque municipale, ms. 136, fol. 241v):
http://tinyurl.com/mbyfqh
P. and F. as depicted in an early fifteenth-century (ca. 1414) breviary for the Use of Paris (Châteauroux, Bibliothèque municipale, ms. 2, fol. 186r):
http://tinyurl.com/lvkrst
For P. and F.'s possible cultic afterlife as Sardinia's Sts. Priamus and Lucianus, see the notice of Emilius, Priamus, and Lucianus (28. May) at:
http://tinyurl.com/2u3a5e4
Probably thanks to their celebration on the same day as St. Victor of Agen (no. 1, above), P. and F. have given their names to a pair of (supposed) martyrs in the legendary Passio of Sts. Fides and Caprasius of Agen (BHL 2930).
3) Ephraem the Syrian (d. 373). E. (also Ephraim, Ephrem, Ephram). E. was born into a Syriac-speaking community in the Roman garrison town of Nisibis in upper Mesopotamia, today's Nusaybin in Turkey's Mardin province. His energy and learning led to his early ordination to the diaconate and to appointment as teacher by his bishop (St. Jacob of Nisibis, d. ca. 339). E. was extraordinarily productive both as an hymnographer and as a biblical commentator. The Roman cession of Nisibis to Persia in 363 entailed the removal of its Syriac Christian population to Edessa, the center of Syriac Christianity.
Shortly after E.'s death legendary accounts of him at variance with the evidence of his writings began to circulate. Some of his writing was translated into other "Eastern" languages, including Greek and Coptic, and a large corpus of pseudo-Ephraemic texts arose. Many of the latter were still ascribed to E. when in 1920 pope Benedict XV proclaimed him a Doctor of the Church.
E. as depicted in the earlier eleventh-century mosaics (restored between 1953 and 1962) in the katholikon of Hosios Loukas near Distomo in Phokis:
http://tinyurl.com/yjjsw6u
A not awfully good reproduction of the thirteenth-century depiction of E. in the Meryem Ana Kilisesi at Diyarbakır (formerly Amida) in southeastern Turkey:
http://tinyurl.com/69uovw
E. as depicted in a thirteenth-century menaion from Cyprus (Paris, BnF, ms. Grec 1561, fol. 113r):
http://tinyurl.com/2b47a8q
E. as depicted ca. 1300 in a fresco attributed to Manuel Panselinos in the Protaton church on Mt. Athos:
http://tinyurl.com/262wd85
Detail:
http://tinyurl.com/2cszv72
E. (at lower right, with St. George and St. John Damascene) as depicted on a panel from an early fourteenth-century triptych now in Saint Catherine's Monastery, Sinai:
http://tinyurl.com/5ctk4u
E. as depicted in the earlier fourteenth-century (ca. 1311-ca. 1322) frescoes of the church of St. Nicholas Orphanos in Thessaloniki:
http://tinyurl.com/2g3c6ch
E. as depicted in an earlier fourteenth-century fresco (1317-1318; conservation work in 1968) by the court painters Michael and Eutychius in the church of St. George in Staro Nagoričane in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia:
http://tinyurl.com/yfab5ae
E. at right (St. Theodosius [prob. the Coenobiarch] at left) as depicted in the earlier fourteenth-century frescoes (betw. ca. 1312 and 1321/1322) of the parecclesion of St. Nicholas 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/yewp8vz
Detail (E.):
http://tinyurl.com/yahh6dy
The Dormition of E. as depicted in a mid-fifteenth-century icon in the Iviron Monastery on Mt. Athos:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/65486023@N00/7905714/
Differently sized views of a late fifteenth-century French illumination depicting E. with other monks, in a collection of writings of E. in Latin translation and of others in Latin (San Marino, CA, Huntington Library, ms. HM 1068, fol. 1r), are accessible from the second item on this page:
http://tinyurl.com/lon23j
4) Maximian of Syracuse (d. 594). We know about M. from the correspondence of pope St. Gregory the Great. He was a Sicilian who moved to Rome, entered Gregory's monastery of St. Andrew, served under Pelagius II and Gregory as papal apocrisarius in Constantinople, and ended his life as bishop of Syracuse and papal legate for all Sicily. M. was one of G.'s sources for miracle stories in the _Dialogues_. G.'s letter to M. (_Ep._ 4. 11) on the incompatibility of simultaneous monastic and clerical service by the same person was included in revised form in Gratian's _Decretum_.
5) Columba of Iona (d. 597). C. (also Colum Cille) was a member of a northwest-Irish branch of the royal kin-group of the Uí Néill. We know very little about his life prior to his founding, along with several close relatives, of the monastery of Iona in the Irish kingdom of Dál Riata in the southwest of today's Scotland. During his thirty-four years at Iona C. organized a family of monastic settlements, including some back in Ireland (e.g. Durrow, founded by C. on a return trip between 585 and 589). The Irish vernacular poem _Amra Coluim Cille_ ("Eulogy of Colum Cille"), written shortly after C.'s death, speaks in some detail about his learning and his monastic vocation. The major source for C.'s life, a Vita by his later seventh-century successor at Iona, Adomnán (BHL 1886, 1887), also documents his early cult, which was already popular as well as monastic. In the central Middle Ages various anonymous poems in Latin and in Irish were ascribed to C.
6) Richard of Andria (d. ca. 1199). It's not every saint of the Regno whose hagiographic dossier includes a memorandum of ocular testimony by a member of the kingdom's leading nobility. This is the _Historia inventionis et translationis gloriosi corporis s. Richardi Anglici confessoris et episcopi Andriensis_ (BHL 7205, 7206) ostensibly by (but in all likelihood written for) Francesco II del Balzo, duke of Andria, count of Montescaglioso, member of the Sacro Regio Consilio of the mostly mainland kingdom of Sicily. Dated 15. September 1451, this outlines in a first-person narration how the duke had in 1438 been informed by a certain Tassus that the remains of Andria's sainted bishop Richard, lost from sight close to a century earlier during Louis of Hungary's invasion of the kingdom (Louis' mercenaries sacked Andria in 1350), could be found buried in Andria's cathedral.
The duke goes on to say how he and the then bishop oversaw the recovery of these relics and their translation to the main altar and how cathedral documents had later been discovered giving a brief biography of the saint (for whom there was then no Office), establishing his _dies natalis_ as 9. June, listing post-mortem miracles resumed in the duke's account, and indicating that R. had been canonized at some obscurely expressed time in the now distant past (generally interpreted by those giving some credence to this account as indicating the pontificate of Boniface VIII). According to the duke, these documents (the Miracles excepted) having later been lost, confirmation of R.'s cult was obtained from Eugenius IV (d. 1447).
That R. was a twelfth-century bishop of Andria is certain from other mentions. That he was English is not otherwise attested. No independent record exists of either the alleged original canonization or the alleged confirmation by Eugenius IV.
In 1438 duke Francesco began a major reconstruction of Andria's twelfth-century cathedral, built over an earlier (9th- or 10th-century) church; an early addition (1440) was a special chapel housing R.'s remains. Dedicated to Our Lady of the Assumption, this building was redecorated in baroque mode in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; in the nineteenth century a neo-classical porch was added. A restoration in 1965 returned much of the interior (but not R.'s chapel) to a "gothic" appearance. Herewith an aerial view of downtown Andria with the cathedral at lower right:
http://virtualglobetrotting.com/map/39869/view/?service=1
Two views of the facade and belltower:
http://www.crsec.it/Andria%20Cattedrale.jpg
http://tinyurl.com/lpcy2v
After having been closed for restoration the cathedral was re-opened in March 2009. This brief video has recent exterior and interior views:
http://tinyurl.com/kl288y
The crypt, a remnant of an early medieval predecessor church, houses tombs believed by some to be the resting places of Frederick II's wives Isabella (Yolande) of Brienne and Isabella (Elizabeth) of England (F.'s residence of Castel del Monte is only some 18 km. distant from Andria). For those who read Italian, an account of what was discovered when the tombs were opened in 1994:
http://www.stupormundi.it/intrigo.html
A plan of the crypt:
http://andriarte.it/Cattedrale/Cripta/pianta.html
Some views of the pronaos to the crypt (the tombs in question are located lower down in two of the walls heree):
http://andriarte.it/Cattedrale/Cripta/pianta.html
http://andriarte.it/Cattedrale/Cripta/pronao.html
http://andriarte.it/Cattedrale/Cripta/pronao_ingresso.html
http://andriarte.it/Cattedrale/Cripta/absidiola.html
Sculptural fragments from the tombs:
http://andriarte.it/Cattedrale/Cripta/avanzi_scultorei.html
Some views of the nave and the apse:
http://tinyurl.com/2vk448v
http://andriarte.it/Cattedrale/Cripta/visita_navata_sx.html
http://andriarte.it/Cattedrale/Cripta/navata-finestra.html
http://andriarte.it/Cattedrale/Cripta/visita_abside.html
http://andriarte.it/Cattedrale/Cripta/abside_sx.html
http://andriarte.it/Cattedrale/Cripta/abside_dx.html
http://andriarte.it/Cattedrale/Cripta/abside_nicchia.html
http://andriarte.it/Cattedrale/Cripta/finestra_esterno.html
http://andriarte.it/Cattedrale/Cripta/abside_porta_sx.html
The fresco in the apse:
http://andriarte.it/Cattedrale/Cripta/altare_cristo.html
The fresco, with a reconstruction at right:
http://andriarte.it/Cattedrale/Cripta/affreschi_0.html
This Italian-language page on artistic treasures of the diocese includes expandable views of two late fifteenth-century enamels (portraits of Christ and the BVM) that until 1965 had, with others, adorned R.'s reliquary cabinet in the chapel dedicated to him in the cathedral (the Cappellone di San Riccardo):
http://www.diocesiandria.it/opere.htm
Another chapel in the cathedral houses Andria's "Sacra Spina", a single thorn supposedly taken from the Crown of Thorns. Its tip is said briefly to turn red in years when the feast of the Annunciation and Good Friday coincide. 2005 was such a year:
http://digilander.libero.it/davide.arpe/AndriaSpina2005.htm
The thorn's Official Site is here:
http://www.diocesiandria.it/sacraspina/#
This thorn is said to have come to Andria as a gift of Charles II late in his reign (1285-1309), very possibly in 1308 when his daughter Beatrice of Anjou married Bertrand des Baux / Bertrando del Balzo, lord of Andria (yes, these del Balzo are a branch of the medieval Provençal family who were once the lords of Les Baux). Its miraculous reddening is not recorded prior to the early modern period.
Best,
John Dillon
(last year's post revised and with the addition of Vincent of Agen)
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