medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture

Today (6. July) is the feast day of:

1)  Dominica (d. ca. 303, supposedly).  Today's less well known saint of the Regno, Dominica (in Italian, Domenica) is the local martyr of Tropea (VV) on the northern shore of Calabria's Capo Vaticano.  She has a Passio in Latin (not recorded in the online Bibliotheca Hagiographica Latina Manuscripta) and one in Greek (BHG 462); both are quite legendary.  The former (a brief set of breviary readings from Tropea of uncertain date; first attested to in the work of the sixteenth-century Messinese hagiographer Francesco Maurolico) makes D. a Campanian by birth and is silent about the place of her martyrdom.  According to this account angels conducted her soul to heaven and brought her body miraculously to Tropea.

The undated but seemingly rather late Greek Passio is silent about D.'s place of birth or residence (though it does give her parents Greek names, Dorotheus and Cyriaca, the latter being the Greek equivalent of Dominica).  It says nothing about her place of martyrdom but notes, curiously, that the official who had her put to death was of Campanian origin.

Both Passiones present D. as a young woman who is denounced as a Christian, while her parents either remain free and encourage her to make the required cult sacrifice (Greek Passio) or else are sent into exile (Latin Passio).  D. declines to do this, is brought before Diocletian, infuriates him by persisting in her refusal of idolatry, is sentenced to death, survives various execution attempts, and is finally decapitated.  The story's similarity to that of the Cyriaca martyred at Nicomedia under Diocletian, together with the similarity of these saints' names, has led many to suspect that this was originally a south Italian cult of a Greek saint named Cyriaca that used a localizing adaptation of one of the Passiones of C. of Nicomedia.  D. was dropped from the RM in its revision of 2001.

Tropea, whose paleochristian necropolis was discovered near its twelfth-century cathedral early in the twentieth century, was a Roman coastal fortress (Belisarius was there in 535, towards the start of the Justinianic reconquest of Italy) until the ninth century, when it fell for a while into Muslim hands (Nicephorus Phocas the general, grandfather of the homonymous emperor, regained it for the empire in 890), and again until the eleventh century, when it became part of Roger I's domains during the Norman-led conquest of Byzantine Calabria.  As a Byzantine garrison town it will have had an at least partly Greek-speaking population during the early Middle Ages.  The cathedral, much rebuilt after after various earthquakes, was restored to a "Norman" appearance in the 1920s.  The "Mondes Normands" site has four enlargeable views of the cathedral's exterior here (on a page curiously labeled "Abruzzes"):
http://tinyurl.com/8kph6
Other exterior views:
http://www.zerodelta.net/immagini/calabria087.jpg
http://www.zerodelta.net/immagini/calabria086.jpg
http://www.zerodelta.net/immagini/calabria085.jpg


2)  Romulus of Fiesole (?).  R. (in Italian, Romolo) is first attested from a surviving late antique inscription (fourth-, fifth-, or sixth-century) at Fiesole, now badly worn, that says that he served the church from his earliest years, that he had been a lector for fifteen years, and that he had been ordained deacon.  What follows is unfortunately very largely illegible.  When we next hear of him, in a donation of 966, his church in Fiesole is described as that of _S. Romuli confessoris, ubi sanctissimum eius corpus quiescit humatum_.  By 1028, when his remains were translated to Fiesole's then new cathedral, R., now considered a bishop, was no longer a confessor but instead a martyr.  That remained the standard view of him throughout the central and later Middle Ages and beyond.  R. has a highly legendary, late eleventh- or twelfth-century Passio that makes him a disciple of St. Peter himself (BHL 7330).

An Italian-language history of Fiesole's originally early eleventh-century cathedral of San Romolo:
http://www.cattedralefiesole.it/cattedrale.php
Four pages of views of it are here (keep clicking on "Avanti"; the views themselves are expandable by left-clicking):
http://www.cattedralefiesole.it/galleria_foto.php
More exterior views:
http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immagine:Duomofiesole.jpg
http://tinyurl.com/nmjnzo
http://www.comune.fiesole.fi.it/contenuti/foto/neve/04.jpg
More interior views:
http://flickr.com/photos/idlelight/12631940/
http://www.travelblog.org/Photos/3556.html?popped=1

Here's R. at right between the Madonna and St. Donatus of Fiesole in an early fifteenth-century polyptych by Bicci di Lorenzo in the cathedral of Fiesole:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/75881025@N00/12631964
http://tinyurl.com/lfusdm
And here he is in a portrait by Beato Angelico now in the National Gallery in London:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/it/a/a1/San_Romolo.jpg


3)  Sisoes (d. ca. 430).  Byzantine synaxaries record for today a feast of St. Sisoes the Great; although their notices of him are too brief to be helpful, they must refer to the early desert father S. to whom are ascribed numerous sayings in the _Apophthegmata Patrum_ that are not attributed in these collections either to S. the Theban or to S. of Petra.  From the sayings attributed to him scholars have deduced that S. was in his youth a companion of St. Macarius the Elder at Scetis, that when that community grew he left it in about 356 and withdrew to St. Anthony's Mountain in the Thebaid where he lived, mostly alone, for at least seventy-two years, and that in his great age he and his disciple Abraham moved to Clysma on the Red Sea where he fell ill and is presumed to have died.

S. as depicted in a fresco from 1527 by Theophanes Strelitzas (T. of Crete) in the monastery church of Agios Nikolaos Anapafsas in the Meteora district of Greece's Trikala prefecture:
http://tinyurl.com/l4k9mz


4)  Palladius of Ireland (d. after 431).  The little  that we know for certain about P. comes entirely entirely from two references by his younger contemporary St. Prosper of Aquitaine.  The latter tells us in his _Chronicle_, under the year 429, that P. was responsible for persuading pope St. Clement I to send St. Germanus of Auxerre to Britain in order to combat Pelagianism there, and, under the year 431, that the same pope sent P. to Ireland to be its Christians' first bishop.

Prosper's slightly later _Contra collatorem_ attributes to Celestine successful outcomes in both islands.  Muirchú's late seventh-century Vita of St. Patrick has P. die not long after his arrival in Ireland.  As far as P. is concerned, both statements could easily be inferences from silence.

In at least the later Middle Ages it was believed that P. had been a missionary to the Scots in Scotland, that he had died at today's Auchenblae in Fordoun parish (Aberdeenshire), where his relics sanctified a chapel dedicated to him.  Here's a view of the remains of that originally thirteenth-century structure:
http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/299281
Herewith an English-language description of, and a few views of, the Fordoun Stone, an inscribed cross slab that had once lain beneath the chapel's altar:
http://tinyurl.com/n9uq8y
http://tinyurl.com/mh95mm
http://www.archaeoptics.co.uk/wp-content/images/fordoun.jpg
http://tinyurl.com/mw8cf8


5)  Monenna (d. 517).  M. (also Moninne and Darerca; sometimes identified with the St. Modwena of Burton upon Trent) was the founding abbess of the monastery of Killevy in southern Armagh.  According to what is thought to be her earliest Vita (BHL 2095; preserved in a manuscript of the fourteenth century), she was the daughter of a nobleman of today's County Louth who took the veil from St. Patrick himself and, together with a small group of fellow religious, later spent some time with St. Brigid at Kildare.  The date of her death is furnished by the annals of Ulster.  A later Vita by one Conchubran (BHL 2096; before 1100) improves her genealogy, gives her three trips to Rome, and includes Scotland and Mercia within the scope of her activities.


6)  Justus of Condat (or of Saint-Claude).  The earliest calendars of the abbey of Saint-Claude (previously, of Saint-Oyend/Oyand) at today's Saint-Claude (formerly Condat) in Franche-Comté record under today a feast of the otherwise unknown J., identified as a Saint.  In the abbey's tradition he was a monk there in the time of its sixth-century abbot St. Antidiolus.  J.'s cult was confirmed papally in 1903.  He entered the RM in the revisions of 2004.

In 847 a Frankish nobleman donated to the abbey of Saint-Oyend (as the house was then called) property at today's Salaise-sur-Sanne (Isère).  At the priory that was established there the abbey built in the twelfth century a new church into whose crypt were translated relics of J.  This church received a new nave in the eighteenth century but its twelfth-century crypt and apse remain, along a with a sixteenth-century belltower.  The priory was suppressed during the Revolution but except for a brief period during the Terror the church remained in service until 1881 when its was replaced by the present église Saint-Juste-de-Saint-Claude.  Archeological investigation in it from the 1960s onward has revealed Gallo-Roman sarcophagi and tombs and walls from the Carolingian period.  Recently renovated, it now serves as a space for concerts and for exhibitions.  Herewith some views of the ancien prieuré Saint-Juste (in the second set, these are are followed by views of other places):
http://tinyurl.com/256mxpw
http://tinyurl.com/24modtu 
Capitals in the crypt:
http://tinyurl.com/2729cfd
http://tinyurl.com/2a49wfk


7)  Goar (d. 7th cent.?).  We first hear of G. from 765, when Pepin III gave to the monastery of Prüm in the Eifel a _cella sancti Goaris_ in the diocese of Trier near today's Oberwesel (Lkr. Rhein-Hunsrück-Kreis) in Rheinland-Pfalz.  He has an eighth-century Vita by a monk of Prüm (BHL 3565) that makes him a native of Aquitaine who was ordained priest by a bishop of Trier and who with that worthy's permission settled down as a hermit in the vicinity of Oberwesel, where he built a cell and a church, celebrated Mass every day but Friday, recited the psalter in its entirety, was kind to pilgrims, declined appointment to the see of Trier, and died on this day in an unspecified year.  An earlier ninth-century Vita et Miracula by Wandalbert of Prüm rewrites the original and adds numerous miracles attesting to G.'s efficacy (BHL 3566).  From the at least the ninth century onward G. was also celebrated at Trier.

G. is the eponym of two towns in Rheinland-Pfalz: Sankt Goar, the town that grew up next to his cult site, and Sankt Goarshausen on the opposite bank of the Rhine.  Herewith an illustrated, English-language page on the originally mid-fifteenth-century former Stiftskirche St. Goar in Sankt Goar (now a Lutheran parish church), re-worked in the nineteenth century and incorporating the crypt of its late eleventh-century predecessor:
http://tinyurl.com/l3k9by
Two German-language accounts of this church:
http://tinyurl.com/nrp3kv
http://tinyurl.com/2fey4uq
Exterior views:
http://www.rheinhessen-luftbild.de/img412.htm
http://tinyurl.com/23bb3bj
http://tinyurl.com/27slzlr
http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/xBt-8CZCibptdvgp5NYs6Q
Further views (interior):
http://tinyurl.com/2cojzzv
http://tinyurl.com/n79e8
The vault paintings in that last view are dated from between 1469 and 1489.  They had been whitewashed over and were discovered in the early twentieth century.  The saint holding the church is presumably G.
G. is also the subject of one of the church's few surviving glass windows from ca. 1450:
http://www.heiligenlexikon.de/Fotos/Goar.jpg

An expandable view of the originally eleventh-century crypt is here:
http://www.welterbe-atlas.de/rheinorte/st-goar/
Another view of the crypt:
http://www.wernernolte.de/bilder/krypten/kr_goar.jpg
In the second quarter of the fourteenth century G.'s remains were translated to a raised tomb (_Hochgrab_) in the crypt.  This tomb, though apparently not the relics within, survived the Reformation.  It is said to have been broken in the later fifteenth century when the crypt was being provided with an exterior door for the use of soldiers who were to be housed therein.  When in 1660 the town's newly built Catholic Pfarrkirche St. Goar und St. Elisabeth was consecrated the effigy cover of the tomb was brought into it from the Stiftskirche.  It now is mounted on a wall above a side altar at the chancel end of the right aisle:
http://www.kath-kirche-stgoar.de/files/grabplatte-goar3.jpg
A closer view of the fourteenth-century tomb cover:
http://www.heiligenlexikon.de/Fotos/Goar2.jpg

Mounted on the belltower of the Catholic Pfarrkirche is the oldest surviving portrayal of G., a vault boss from the predecessor of the fifteenth-century Stiftskirche:
http://drakkin.com/Koln/St-Goar/relief.jpg
http://www.kath-kirche-stgoar.de/files/goar-1.jpg
http://tinyurl.com/29qk4jc
 
Best,
John Dillon
(last year's post revised and with the addition of Justus of Condat)

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