medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture

Today (15. August) is the feast day of:

1a)  The Dormition of the Theotokos.
1b)  The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary.


2)  Tarsicius (d. 257?).  The very little information we have about T. comes from the final four lines of pope St. Damasus I's eight-line epitaph for him (_Epigrammata Damasiana_, ed. Ferrua, no. 15).  This tells us that T. was set upon by a mob of rabid pagans when he was carrying consecrated hosts and that he preferred to die than to subject these to profanation.  An addition to the sixth(?)-century Passio of pope St. Stephen I (BHL 7845) offers a narrative of T. that, while clearly dependent upon the aforementioned epitaph, adds the perhaps invented details that he perished in the Valerianic persecution and that he was an acolyte who had been carrying the Eucharist to imprisoned Christians.  Others both medievally and later have inferred from the epitaph (which circulated in manuscript and whose first four lines celebrate St. Stephen protomartyr) that T., like this Stephen, was a deacon.
 
In the seventh century relics said to be T.'s reposed in an above-ground hall at the cemetery of Callistus.  Paul I (757-67) is said to have translated them, along with those of other martyrs, to what is now Rome's San Silvestro in Capite but was then a monastery church dedicated to Sts. Stephen I and Sylvester.  In that church's atrium, on the facade wall, are two eighth- or ninth-century inscribed calendars of feasts of the saints said to repose within the building, one calendar for male saints and one for female ones.  The calendar of male saints shows T. sharing a feast with pope St. Zephyrinus on 26. July:
http://tinyurl.com/5harwr
T. has been entered under today in the martyrologies since that of the ninth-century St. Ado of Vienne, who adopted the Passio's indication of his _dies natalis_.


3)  Simplicianus (d. 400 or 401).  S. was a priest of Milan, learned in the writings of the Greek Fathers and of Platonist philosophers.  In Rome he had effected the conversion of the rhetor and philosopher Marius Victorinus and in Milan, in 374, he baptized St. Ambrose and instructed him in Christian theology.  Together with Ambrose, he played an important role in the conversion of St. Augustine, who later dedicated to him his _De diversis questionibus_.  In 397 the dying Ambrose named S. to be his successor in the see of Milan.  In that office he consecrated St. Gaudentius as the first bishop of Novara and received from St. Vigilius of Trent a still extant report on the recent slayings of the martyrs of the Val di Non.

Augustine's fourteenth-century tomb in Pavia's basilica di San Pietro in Ciel d'Oro contains a panel showing the young saint receiving instruction from S.:
http://www.santagostinopavia.it/cieldoro/arca/17.jpg

Here's an expandable view of a late fifteenth-century illumination from a French-language translation of the _City of God_ showing Augustine (already in episcopal attire) discoursing with S. about the Trinity:
http://collecties.meermanno.nl/handschriften/showillu?id=11162

S., whose cult seems to have been virtually immediate, was laid to rest in the Milanese church later dedicated to him and variously said to have been begun either by Ambrose or by S. himself.  In its present form this building incorporates late antique and Lombard-period elements but is essentially of the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries.  Its octagonal tiburio has been dated to 1170 and its facade was in part reworked during a "restoration" in 1870.  An illustrated, Italian-language account of Milan's basilica di San Simpliciano is here:
http://tinyurl.com/6es7eh

Exterior views:
http://tinyurl.com/5g8fnj
http://tinyurl.com/fjxan
http://tinyurl.com/66fv5n
http://tinyurl.com/6hhm5j
http://www.dsimmons.org/P1000243.JPG
http://tinyurl.com/6euvne
http://tinyurl.com/56gqhg
Main portal:
http://tinyurl.com/5gmfdf
Detail (twelfth-century capitals):
http://tinyurl.com/6qcmg4
The Italia nell'Arte Medievale page on this church has some good detail views of this portal:
http://tinyurl.com/68go8o

Plan:
http://www.liceoberchet.it/netday/luoghi/simpliciano.htm

Interior views:
http://tinyurl.com/6ra7gk
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/3114068668/sizes/l/
http://tinyurl.com/6rb4jj
A panorama:
http://tinyurl.com/3578a5k
S. in a tondo:
http://tinyurl.com/6dthqr
S. beneath the main altar:
http://tinyurl.com/5zpa6m
Sacellum of the martyrs of the Val di Non:
http://tinyurl.com/5eyo37

In Milanese legend, the three martyrs of the Val di Non (relics of whom have long been kept in San Simpliciano) are said to have flown in the form of doves from this church to Legnano just before the battle there between troops of the Lombard League and those of Frederick Barbarossa on 29. May 1176 and to have perched on the city's great battle wagon ("carroccio") throughout the entire affray, guaranteeing victory to the Milanese and to their league-fellows.  There have been annual commemorations at San Simpliciano since at least 1393.


4)  Alypius of Tagaste (d. after 428).  A lifelong friend of St. Augustine of Hippo, the older and well-to-do A. was his disciple in their native Tagaste and in Carthage.  He later joined Augustine in Milan and together with him was baptized by St. Ambrose.  After returning with Augustine to Africa he went back to Tagaste, where in 394 he was named its bishop.  In his later years he served several times as Augustine's emissary to the imperial court at Ravenna.  We know about him chiefly from Augustine's writings.  Letters by A. are included in Augustine's correspondence.

In this expandable view of Benozzo Gozzoli's fresco of the death of St. Monica, one of a series executed in 1464/65 in the chiesa di Sant'Agostino in San Gimignano, A. is the haloed figure behind St. Augustine in the scene at right of the departing ship:
http://tinyurl.com/e6xqt


5)  Altfrid (d. 874).  The politically very active A. (also Altfried and Alfred) was bishop of Hildesheim from 851 to 874; from 860 onward he is recorded frequently as a counselor to Louis the German and as one of his _missi_.  We have no Vita for him: his place of birth and places of education are as conjectural as is the general location of the presumably noble family from which he sprang.  In 872 A. consecrated a predecessor of today's Hildesheim cathedral, for which he is said to have procured relics of Sts. Cosmas and Bamian (the present cathedral is dedicated to the BVM, to Cosmas and Damian, and, in some accounts, to Sts. Cecilia of Rome and her companions Valerian and Tiburtius).

By the middle of the eleventh century A. was considered a saint at Hildesheim.  But the chief locus of his cult has always been Essen, where since at least the early eleventh century it was believed both that he had founded its abbey (modern scholarship views with suspicion the charter to this effect printed in the _Acta Sanctorum_ in its treatment of A.) and that his wonder-working body reposed there.  Modern conjecture has also assigned to A. a role in the origin of the house of canonesses at Gandersheim, founded in 852 by duke Liudolf of Saxony and his wife Oda.

In 1965 A.'s cult was confirmed papally at the level of Saint.  Today is his earliest recorded _dies natalis_ and his day of commemoration in the RM.  In German dioceses A. is celebrated on his traditional feast day, 16. August.

A.'s entry (upper right) in a fourteenth-century necrology from Essen:
http://tinyurl.com/282n9we

A reliquary chest for A.'s bones in the cathedral treasury at Essen:
http://tinyurl.com/2c4owzu

Illustrated English-language and German language pages on the abbey of Essen (whose church is now the Essener Münster) and on its famous gilded statue of the BVM, the Golden Madonna of Essen:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essen_Abbey
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stift_Essen
http://tinyurl.com/23zs9eg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Madonna_of_Essen
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldene_Madonna

Illustrated English-language and German-language pages on the abbey of Gandersheim:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gandersheim_Abbey
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stift_Gandersheim


6)  Arduin of Rimini (d. 1009).  According to St. Peter Damian writing in his __Liber Gratissimus_ (cap. 29), A. was a priest of Rimini who despite his ordination by a notorious simoniac lived an exemplary life and who died in the odor of sanctity.  According his eleventh-century Vita (BHL 663; perhaps also written by Peter Damian), A. served at an extramural church of St. Apollinaris (in modern accounts sometimes transmuted into Ravenna's Sant'Apollinare in Classe), celebrated Mass daily (when this was not often done), and died at a monastery of St. Gaudentius not far outside the walls of Rimini.  A church dedicated to him is recorded by the same Peter Damian in his Laudatio of St. Maurus of Cesena (BHL 5771).  A. has yet to grace the pages of the RM.

Some expandable views of the originally twelfth-century chiesa di Sant'Arduino at Pietrarubbia (PU) in the Marche:
http://tinyurl.com/58gpr5

A detail of A. from a fresco (dated 1467), formerly in Sant'Arduino at Pietrarubbia and now in the diocesan museum at Pennabili (PU), of the Mystical Marriage of St. Catherine:
http://santiebeati.it/immagini/Original/92243/92243.JPG

Modern popular accounts sometimes confuse the monastery where A. died (close to Rimini, in 1009) with one of a similar dedication in today's San Godenzo (FI) in the Tuscan Appennines (not close to Rimini, founded in 1028).  An illustrated, Italian-language page on that former monastery of a St. Gaudentius is here (expandable images of its restored eleventh-/twelfth-century church are at the foot of the page):
http://tinyurl.com/5k373g


7)  Hyacinth of Poland (d. 1257).  Revered as one of the apostles of Poland, H. (in Polish, Jacek) is said in his not terribly reliable Vita by Stanislas of Kraków (BHL 4052) to have been a Silesian noble educated in Bohemia and in Italy, to have entered the Order of Preachers, and to have missionized widely from Kiev to Scandinavia.  He was canonized in 1594.

The largely fifteenth-century monastery church of St. Nicholas in Gdańsk is associated with H., who is reputed to have persuaded the Pomeranian prince Sviatopolk to give it to the Dominicans in 1227.  Herewith a page of expandable views, some showing medieval aspects of the building:
http://www.gdansk.dominikanie.pl/galeria.php?zdj=19

Best,
John Dillon
(last year's post lightly revised and with the addition of Altfrid)

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