medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Today (19. August) is also the feast day of:
1) Oswin of Deira (d. 651). O. (also Oswine) was the last king of independent Deira. We know about him chiefly from St. Bede the Venerable (_Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum_, 3. 14 and 24) with regnal dates furnished by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. He became king in 643 or 644. Bede tells a story in which O. humbly accepts a reproof from St. Aidan. O. was killed in 651 by men in the service of the Northumbrian king Oswiu, whose seizure of Deira the militarily outnumbered O. chose not to contest. Oswiu's wife Eanflĉd, a member of the Deiran royal house, is said to have persuaded him to show penitence by founding a monastery at the place of O.'s murder, Ingetlingum (generally said to be Gilling in Richmond [W Yorks]). O.'s entry for today in the early eighth-century Calendar of Saint Willbrord (traditional name) attests to his early cult in the North.
In about 1111 a monk of St. Albans wrote a Vita, Inventio, and Miracula of O. (BHL 6382-85) asserting that O.'s body had been discovered in 1065 at the monastery of Tynemouth, which latter since 1090 had been a dependency of St Albans. Symeon of Durham (which latter also claimed the monastery at Tynemouth) offers a slightly different story asserting Durham's claim to the relics through a gift to the monks of Jarrow who later formed the initial community of St Cuthbert's monastery in Durham. On 20. August (O.'s traditional _dies natalis_) 1110 his putative remains at Tynemouth were translated to that town's newly finished church of St. Mary. O.'s shrine there was dismantled in 1539.
In at least post-Conquest England O.'s feast day was celebrated on 20. August. He is not in the RM, whose entries furnish the ordinary calendar for these "saints of the day" notices. In such cases, I try to find a day on which the saint currently _is_ celebrated. For O. that's today in the Roman Catholic church dedicated to him at Tynemouth (in Roman Catholic contexts any preference for tomorrow's date would would be trumped by tomorrow's St. Bernard of Clairvaux).
An English Heritage page on (the remains of) Tynemouth Priory and Castle:
http://tinyurl.com/23mzxst
A view of the east end and the attached chapel:
http://tinyurl.com/y62lou
Other views:
http://www.tynemouthcatholic.org/slideshow.html
An aerial view of the site:
http://tinyurl.com/37jxnms
(The modern building at the upper left is the Tynemouth Coast Guard Station.)
Another:
http://tinyurl.com/35awyh2
2) Sebaldus of Nürnberg (d. before 1072). S. (in German, also Sebald) was legendarily an hermit at Nürnberg. His cult there is attested in liturgical texts from the later eleventh century onward. He had a reputation as a healing saint and many miracles were reported at his tomb. Herewith some views of Nürnberg's Sebalduskirche, begun in the 1230s as a "romanesque" structure but already showing "gothic" elements (e.g., the west choir) prior to its consecration in 1273; continued in that style from 1309 (towers, expanded side aisles) into the later fourteenth century (east choir, 1379) and beyond (late gothic decor into the sixteenth century). An illustrated, English-language site on the church is here:
http://archive.cyark.org/saint-sebald-church-info
Other exterior views:
West facade:
http://tinyurl.com/dw7mx
http://tinyurl.com/ceoea
Last Judgment portal:
http://tinyurl.com/2vanjb6
Last Judgment portal (detail):
http://www.baukunst-nuernberg.de/sebald_weltgericht.jpg
North side:
http://tinyurl.com/5p6v6d
http://tinyurl.com/82ems
http://tinyurl.com/6ctu9w
http://tinyurl.com/2dso5m8
S. as pilgrim:
http://peregrinations.kenyon.edu/photobank/3.jpg
East choir:
http://tinyurl.com/cwonf
http://tinyurl.com/2gxpfyb
Scenes of S.'s miracles:
http://tinyurl.com/2ad5pzt
Various views of the interior are here:
http://tinyurl.com/2by2tur
http://tinyurl.com/bvzb3
http://tinyurl.com/2d9g6ow
S. as pilgrim:
http://tinyurl.com/38dyep6
http://tinyurl.com/33dja4z
Sebaldus-shrine in its early sixteenth-century housing:
http://tinyurl.com/6yyomw
http://tinyurl.com/34p456n
Devotional image from 1449:
http://www.enid.uib.no/pictures/starck.htm
Some expandable views of later medieval stained glass in this church will be found on this page of _Vidimus_, no. 12 (Nov. 2007):
http://tinyurl.com/6y33re
S. carrying a model of his church as depicted in a drawing of ca. 1521 by Hans Sebaldus Beham, now in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC):
http://tinyurl.com/2e6jd97
The Sebalduskirche was heavily damaged in the bombing of 1945 that devastated the Old City of Nürnberg. Here's a view of it among the ruins:
http://tinyurl.com/5utpo5
There's another view on the aforementioned page of _Vidimus_. Much of what one sees now is restoration work, completed in the 1950s.
3) Leo II of La Cava (Bl.; d. 1295). This less well known holy person of the Regno was in his late thirties when succeeded the reforming abbot Amicus early in 1268 as head of the monastery of the Most Holy Trinity at today's Cava de' Tirreni (SA) in coastal Campania. He took part in the Second Council of Lyon in 1274 and there received from pope Gregory X a bull confirming the abbey in all its previous rights and privileges. The abbey of La Cava had been Cluniac since its early days and L. took advantage of his trip to Lyon by stopping off at Cluny on his way back. By the end of his lengthy rule L. had already come to be viewed as saintly. His cult was immediate. It was confirmed papally, along with those of other Blesseds of La Cava, in 1928.
Best,
John Dillon
(last year's post lightly revised and with the addition of Bl. Leo II of La Cava)
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