medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Today (7. July) is the feast day of:
1) Pantaenus (d. ca. 190?). The philosophically trained P. was head of the catechetical school at Alexandria in the later second century. His student and successor, St. Clement of Alexandria, is our authority for his having come from Sicily. A tradition preserved by Eusebius (_Historia ecclesiastica_, 5. 10) and by St. Jerome (_De viris illustribus_, 36) has him preach in India. A very few of his teachings are preserved in the writings of other Christian theologians.
2) Ethelburga of Faremoutiers (d. later 7th cent.). St. Bede the Venerable (_Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum_, 3. 8) relates what little we know about E. (in Anglo-Saxon, Æthelburh; also Æthelburg). A daughter or stepdaughter of king Anna of the East Angles (d. 654), she took the veil at the double monastery of Faremoutiers in Brie where she later succeeded as abbess. At her request she was buried her unfinished church of the Apostles; her body is reported to have been found incorrupt when some seven years later it was moved to the abbey's church of St. Stephen. E.'s feast on this day is recorded in the later tenth-century calendar of the Bosworth Psalter, composed for a house at Canterbury (whether Christ Church or St Augustine's is uncertain).
3) Hedda (d. 705 or 706). The third bishop of Winchester, H. (in Anglo-Saxon, Hædde; also Heddi) was consecrated by St. Theodore of Tarsus/Canterbury. St. Bede the Venerable (_Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum_, 5. 18) praises him more for innate virtue than for book learning. As one would expect, H. played a leading role in relations between the organized church and the rulers of the West Saxon kingdom. His cult would appear to have been immediate. Pehthelm, bishop of Whithorn, who had been a deacon under H.'s partial successor St. Aldhelm, bishop of Sherborne, told Bede that earth taken from the spot where H. had died was mixed with water and used to heal ailing men and cattle and that the resulting hole in the ground was rather large.
4) Willibald (d. 787?). W., the first bishop of Eichstätt, was a son of St. Richard of England (this anachronistic name is conventional) and the brother of St. Winnebald (also Wynnebald) and of St. Walburg (also Walburga). Our chief source for him is his late eighth-century Vita (BHL 8931) by the nun Hugeburc (also Huneburc) of Heidenheim, often called her _Hodoeporicon_ of W. This proffers a Latin-language version of W.'s oral account, presumably given in Anglo-Saxon (his native tongue and hers), of his journey from Wessex to Rome and the Holy Land and back to Italy in the years 720-729. A twelfth-century Vita from Eichstätt (BHL 8932) is based on Hugeburc but adds matter seemingly from diocesan tradition whose reliability is not always easy to guage.
On his return to Italy W. became a monk at the abbey of St. Benedict at Montecassino during the rule of its second founder, St. Petronax. In 739 pope St. Gregory III ordered him to Germany to assist St. Boniface in his mission. W. arrived in 740, was ordained priest by Boniface in that year, and was raised to the episcopate in 741. Though Boniface may have intended that W. operate from Erfurt, W. instead moved on to Eichstätt where he founded a monastery organized according to his experience of Montecassino and assisted his brother Winnebald's foundation of the monastery at Heidenheim in what later would be the diocese of Eichstätt. He was at the latter's deathbed in 761. In the following year he is recorded as _Willibaldus episcopus de monasterio Achistadi_. Documentation of W.'s cult (including an Elevatio said to have occurred in 989) is lacking until the eleventh century. A better documented Elevatio took place in 1256.
Here's a link to an English-language translation of Hugeburc's _Hodoeporicon_ of W.:
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/willibald.html
W. is the saint at upper left in this not awfully good reproduction of an illuminated page in the later eleventh-century Pontifical of bishop Gundekar II (Diözesanarchiv Eichstätt, Codex B 4):
http://tinyurl.com/6fq63c
There's a better view of the upper register (with W.) here:
http://tinyurl.com/njvvcd
The Sankt Nicolaus Kirche in Scheer (Lkr. Sigmaringen) in Baden-Württemberg keeps this twelfth(?)-century reliquary bust of W.:
http://tinyurl.com/2ub5hvs
W. reposes in Eichstätt's cathedral. Since 1514 he has been honored in that church with this monumental altar by the sculptor Loy Hering:
http://images.timm4.de/src/238273_eich_willibald.jpg
http://tinyurl.com/m957yl
Some detail views are here:
http://www.bistum-eichstaett.de/?id=731
W. is at top left in this view of a tapestry from ca. 1520 depicting members of St. Walburg's spiritual and genetic kinship, now in Eichstätt's Diözesanmuseum:
ttp://tinyurl.com/26lyd5c
The tapestry is one of several fifteenth- and sixteenth-century tapestries honoring Walburg (who succeeded Winnebald at Heidenheim) acquired by the museum in 2004. Fpr descriptions and smallish views, click on the menu items under "Raum XII" here:
http://www.dioezesanmuseum-eichstaett.de/rundgang/raum-xii/
5) Benedict XI (Bl.; d. 1304). The Dominican Niccolò Boccasino was a native of Treviso; his father was a notary. He lectured on theology, wrote commentaries on books of the Bible, and was elected provincial for Lombardy in 1286 and master general in 1296. In 1297 N. supported Boniface VIII against a challenge by the Colonnas and by the Franciscan Spirituals to the legitimacy of his election and as papal legate negotiated a peace between England and France. For his services N. was created cardinal priest of Santa Sabina in 1298. In 1300 he became cardinal bishop of Ostia and thus dean of the college of cardinals. In 1301 as papal legate in Hungary he backed the claim of the Angevin candidate to its throne. N. thus won the gratitude of Charles II of Sicily, whose troops occupied Rome when on 23. October 1303 the Bonifacian cardinals elevated him to the papacy after Boniface's death. Why he took the name Benedict is not known.
In his brief pontificate B. rolled back some of Boniface's punitive measures against his opponents but did so in a way that satisfied few and that did not prevent renewed factional fighting in the Eternal City. In April 1304 he found it prudent to administer from Perugia rather than from Rome. The three cardinals he created were all Dominicans; one of his other acts was the annulment of Boniface's bull _Super cathedram_ (1301) limiting the ability of members of the mendicant orders to preach and to hear confessions. B. died on this day in Perugia, where he was buried before the altar of the Dominican convent church (then Santo Stefano). Miracles were reported and a cult arose. B. was beatified in 1736.
Perugia's chiesa di San Domenico, begun in 1304 to replace Santo Stefano, was not consecrated until 1459. It contains an early fourteenth-century funeral monument (cenotaph) to B. that was removed from Santo Stefano only in the eighteenth century and that was re-assembled and mounted in its present location in 1959. Here are some views of it:
http://tinyurl.com/kmr6e8
http://tinyurl.com/lnhoue
http://tinyurl.com/nz3u7g
http://tinyurl.com/lbn622
Starting in 1310 the Dominicans built a church in Treviso whose dedication to St. Nicholas suggests that it's also a home-town memorial to N./B. Herewith some views:
http://i1.trekearth.com/photos/12134/treviso_sannicolote.jpg
http://i1.trekearth.com/photos/12134/treviso_snwnte.jpg
In 1352 Tommaso da Modena adorned the adjoining convent's chapter house with frescoed portraits of distinguished Friars Preacher, including one of N. as cardinal and another of B. as pope:
http://tinyurl.com/ln96rb
http://tinyurl.com/lrml6x
Some of the other portraits:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Tommaso_da_Modena
6) Odo of Urgell (d. 1122?). The poorly documented O. (in Catalan, Ot; in Spanish, Odón) was bishop of Urgell. A successor canonized him in 1133. O. has a brief Vita (BHL 6300) published as lections for his Office in an early modern breviary for the Use of Urgell and a somewhat longer Vita (BHL 6301) published, allegedly from a legendary of the same diocese, by the seventeenth-century hagiographer Juan Tamayo de Salazar in his _Martyrologium Hispanum_. No manuscript witness is recorded for either in the Bibliotheca Hagiographica Latina Manuscripta. Tamayo's Vita is said not to disagree with the little information provided in the lections and, as is the case with other Vitae in this collection, is quite possibly of Tamayo's own authorship.
To judge from what is reported of the lections (which the Bollandist J.-B. Sollier, who relied instead on Tamayo's Vita, chose not to reproduce in the _Acta Sanctorum_), O. came from Pallars (Tamayo says that O.'s father was count of Pallars and a scion of the counts of Barcelona), performed military service before entering the church, lived very ascetically, defended against adverse possession the property of his church, reformed his diocese, and ruled for more than twenty-eight years. His death date of 1122 comes from Tamayo's Vita and seems to be fairly accurate.
O. is a patron saint of the diocese of Urgell. He entered the RM in 1608.
The originally twelfth-century cathedral of Santa Maria in La Seu d'Urgell / La Seo d'Urgel (Lleida / Lérida) is thought to have been begun during O.'s pontificate. Herewith a page of views:
http://www.foroxerbar.com/viewtopic.php?t=8089
Best,
John Dillon
(last year's post lightly revised and with the addition of Odo of Urgell)
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