medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Today (27. August) is the feast day of:
1) Rufus of Capua (?). Today's less well known saint of the Regno is entered under today in the (pseudo-)Hieronymian Martyrology as follows: _in Capua natale Rufi_ (some witnesses have _in Campania_ instead). Other liturgical sources from the Gelasian Sacramentary onward enter him under today without geographic specification, as did his portrait caption in the now lost late fifth-/early sixth-century mosaics of the church of St. Priscus at today's San Prisco (CE) in Campania, an extramural survivor from Old Capua. Early medieval historical martyrologies identify R. with increasing amounts of detail as the patrician Rufus whose daughter is said by Agnellus of Ravenna to have been cured by St. Apollinaris of that city. In this tradition, which dates him to the Neronian persecution, R. is regularly said to have suffered martyrdom at Capua.
An alternative tradition, present in all but the first of the Capuan calendars published by Michele Monaco in his _Sanctuarium Capuanum_ of 1630 and reflected as well in the thirteenth-century legendary of Bovino, makes R. a bishop of Capua who suffered under Diocletian and/or Maximian and gives him a companion in martyrdom, Carponius (_aliter_, Carpophorus). One version of their acta (BHL 7378) may be read in the _Acta Sanctorum_. Prior to its revision of 2001 the RM distinguished this pair from the earlier R. in a separate entry also under 27. August.
Capua's church of Santi Rufo e Carponio (as it is now called) is said to be documented as already existing in 1053. Later in the eleventh century it passed to the Benedictines of Montecassino, who made modifications and who added the present belltower. In 1641 reliquary niches were carved into the interior of its main apse; worked over again in the eighteenth century, the building has recently been restored in a way that permits more of its medieval fabric to be seen. The columns of its nave are spolia. A brief Italian-language description with a few thumbnail views is here:
http://www.capuaonline.it/storiadicapua/srufoecarponio/
Expandable views of the interior are here, including one of a fragment of this church's twelfth-century pavement in _opus sectile_ and several showing frescoes dated to the same century:
http://www.al-asset.it/viaggi/2003/Capua/capua.htm
Two views of the originally late eleventh- or early twelfth-century church of San Rufo at Piedimonte di Casolla (CE) in Campania, first documented from 1113:
http://www.terra-nostra-caserta.it/territ43.jpg
http://www.terra-nostra-caserta.it/territ42.jpg
R. is the patron saint of the town of San Rufo (SA) in southern Campania's Vallo di Diano, thought to be a thirteenth-century foundation.
2) Phanourios the Newly Revealed (?). P. (in English occasionally latinized to Fanurius) is a saint whose cult appears to have its roots in the fourteenth century when, according to his earliest miracle account (preserved in the sixteenth-century Vat. Gr. 1190), a fourteenth-century Cretan priest, stopping off at Rhodes while on a mission to recover colleagues captured by Muslims and held in Asia Minor, received assistance from P., then locally venerated there. The priest brought P.'s cult back to Crete, where it has flourished ever since and whence it has spread throughout the Greek Orthodox church and into other Orthodox churches as well. A chapel in the city of Rhodes dedicated to P. and said to have been built in 1426 contains frescoed representations of his miracles in what are thought to have been part of the chapel's original decor.
P. is unrecorded prior to this discovery. Modern accounts make him a megalomartyr (which, if correct, would date P. to somewhere in the first four centuries of the Common Era). As his iconographic tradition closely resembles one of St. George of Lydda, the prevailing scholarly view is that P. is in origin that saint and that an icon of G. identified by his cult name Phanerotis ('The Revealer') was misread as one of the previously unknown Phanourios. The latter name too is similar to Greek words for 'become visible' and 'reveal'. It will thus surprise few to learn that P. has long been especially venerated as a revealer of lost property (e.g. farm animals or household objects). P. has yet to grace the pages of the RM. Today is his feast day in Orthodox churches.
An interior view of P.'s chapel in Rhodes:
http://tinyurl.com/lptwze
A mid-fifteenth-century icon of P. at Patmos by the painter Angelos is shown here (in an image from Google Books):
http://tinyurl.com/kpo4x2
3) Monica (d. 387). The mother of tomorrow's St. Augustine of Hippo needs no introduction to this list. Herewith views of her death scene at Ostia as imagined by Benozzo Gozzoli in his fresco cycle on A. (1464/65) in the church of Sant'Agostino at San Gimignano (SI) in Tuscany:
http://www.abcgallery.com/G/gozzoli/gozzoli99.html
http://www.abcgallery.com/G/gozzoli/gozzoli101.html
Other depictions of M. in these frescoes will be found in the reproductions here:
http://www.abcgallery.com/G/gozzoli/gozzoli-3.html
http://www.abcgallery.com/G/gozzoli/gozzoli-4.html
http://www.abcgallery.com/G/gozzoli/gozzoli-5.html
M. at A.'s baptism, as depicted in a later fifteenth-century copy from Bruges of Vincent of Beauvais' _Speculum historiale_ in its French-language version by Jean de Vignay (Paris, BnF, ms. Français 310, fol. 22r):
http://tinyurl.com/39psxt8
M. spent most of the Middle Ages at Ostia, residing in the church of Sant'Aurea. See:
http://www.ostia-antica.org/dict/south/saurea.htm
In 1430 pope Martin V had M.'s relics brought to Rome. Miracles reported from this translation led to the establishment of her cult.
Marjorie Greene's medrelart album on M., with with further views of the saint's former resting place at Ostia as well as views of her present one in Rome's Sant'Agostino is here:
http://medrelart.shutterfly.com/756
4) Poemen the Great (d. later 5th cent.?). The Egyptian Desert Father P. (also Pimen, a pronunciation spelling in Greek and the way his name came into other languages), a monk of Skete (or Sketis) in Lower Egypt, has by far the largest number of sayings attributed to him in the _Apophthegmata patrum_ and is mentioned in the brief narratives of other Fathers' sayings in the same collection. These are the sources for the little we know of him, as they were also for the authors of his several Bioi (BHG 1553z-1555c). Contradictory matter in them and the apparent use by desert ascetics of _Poimen_ as a title of leadership make it probable that not all these sayings are those of a single person.
P. is said to have survived St. Arsenius the Great (d. ca. 450) and (always assuming that the same P. is meant) to have been visited by a monk who had been exiled from Syria under Marcian (r. 450-457). Late in life he and several of his biological bothers who lived with him left Skete under the pressure of hostile raids and established themselves in a ruined temple at Terenouthis, also in Lower Egypt.
The first of P.'s alphabetical sayings has him addressed while still a young man as 'Poemen, shepherd of the flock' and told that his name would become known throughout Egypt. The sayings that follow address a wide range of concerns and are notable for their gnomic quality. P.'s feast today is first recorded in the Palestinian-Georgian calendar preserved in the tenth-century codex Sinaiticus 34; it is standard in the Byzantine Liturgy.
P. 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/3x6t5qy
5) Licerius (d. 540?). According to his first Vita (BHL 4916; earliest witness is of the tenth century), L. (also Glycerius; in French, Lizier, Licar, Licer, Glycère, etc.) was a Spanish disciple of St. Faustus of Riez who became bishop of Couserans in Aquitaine, who was noted for his generosity to the poor and for various miracles, and who by his prayers saved the town from a Visigothic attack. His relics, said to have been re-discovered in the ninth century (if that report is correct, then the Vita's silence on this point may make it older), were translated in the eleventh century to a new cathedral dedicated to him (consecrated, 1117) in what is now the town of Saint-Lizier (Ariège). Herewith some views of that originally twelfth- to fourteenth-century church (no longer a cathedral) and of its cloister:
http://i1.treklens.com/photos/15118/pic_0291.jpg
http://olivierfrance.com/france%20summer%2006%20040.jpg
http://tinyurl.com/6ju6zv
http://www.pays-couserans.fr/IMG/jpg/cpar_st_lizier2.jpg
http://www.ariege.com/st-lizier/patrimony.html
http://www.cosmovisions.com/monuSaintLizier.htm
http://www.fotopedia.com/items/flickr-3675742188
http://www.petermathews.net/images/full-490-st-lizier.jpg
http://tinyurl.com/6oe99g
http://tinyurl.com/63mylp
Cloister:
http://tinyurl.com/6hav59
http://tinyurl.com/6pcocv
http://tinyurl.com/6ecrjx
http://tinyurl.com/572y7o
http://tinyurl.com/5m8ho2
http://tinyurl.com/6q22jn
This earlier sixteenth-century (1531) reliquary bust of L. by Antoine Favier is kept in the the church's treasury:
http://tinyurl.com/343g95u
http://www.histariege.com/saint_lizier_fichiers/image008.jpg
6) Caesarius of Arles (d. 542). We know about the late antique churchman C. from his numerous sermons, from his letters, from his theological treatises and monastic writings, and from a two-book Vita (BHL 1508-1509) written by friends shortly after his death. A Gallo-Roman aristocrat, he trained early at Lérins and there either acquired or sharpened the predilections for an ascetic lifestyle and a Christianity of some intellectual rigor that he exemplified throughout his life and that, once he had become metropolitan bishop of Arles early in the sixth century, he attempted for forty years with mixed success to promote among his suffragans and among members of his lay flock.
C. enjoyed better relations with the Ostrogothic court at Ravenna than he often did with his fellow aristocrats and senior clergy in and around Arles. When the Ostrogoths ceded Provence to the Burgundians in about 532 the papal vicariate in Gaul that he had attempted to exercise since receiving it in 513 became largely a dead letter. C. is said to have been the first metropolitan in the West to receive a pallium from the pope.
C.'s cult was immediate. It was furthered by the prominence of the women's monastery that he together with his sister Caesaria had established at Arles and by the rule that he had written for it, adopted by queen St. Radegund in the mid-sixth century for her own community near Poitiers. Formally dedicated to St. John, the monastery was for most of its existence known as that of St. C. Originally built in the Alyscamps, it was moved in 524 to a site near the city wall and adjoining a fourth-century basilica that may once have served as the city's cathedral. A small site devoted to the basilica's excavation is here:
http://tinyurl.com/69gmh8
Most of what's left of C.'s monastery is early modern. But its originally twelfth-century former chapel of Saint-Jean (much rebuilt in the thirteenth century with modifications in the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries), survives as the église Saint-Blaise:
http://www.memo.fr/LieuAVisiter.asp?ID=VIS_FRA_ARL_041
http://tinyurl.com/6qha2h
Some of C.'s possessions survive. Shown on this page, in addition to C.'s inscribed funerary plaque, are two pallia and shoes said to have been his:
http://catho13770.free.fr/?p=97
A belt buckle from C.'s grave:
http://la-france-orthodoxe.net/images/arles23.jpg
C.'s tomb was restored in 883. Here's a view of a surviving fragment of the inscription placed on it then:
http://tinyurl.com/6jkj3b
C., prescribing to nuns from his (and their) Rule, as depicted in a tenth-century manuscript of the latter (Bamberg, Staatsbibliothek, MS Msc. Lit. 142, fol. 65r):
http://tinyurl.com/276o4ed
Two views of a twelfth-century statuette representing C., kept in the église abbatiale Saint-Césaire at Maurs (Cantal) in Auvergne:
http://tinyurl.com/5lay36
http://tinyurl.com/5qydhg
Of course, not every relic or other object named for C. bears directly upon him. These re-assembled skull fragments for example (called the crâne de Saint-Césaire):
http://tinyurl.com/5omgjo
http://tinyurl.com/6b3d3a
are actually from the skull of a Neanderthal who had been dubbed "Pierrette" when it was found in a dig at Saint-Césaire (Charente-Maritime) in 1979.
7) Gebhard of Konstanz (d. 995). G. (in Latin Gebhardus and Gebehardus), whose father was count of Bregenz, belonged to the upper strata of southwest German nobility. Educated at the cathedral school of Konstanz, he is first recorded as that city's bishop in 979 (as bishop he is Gebhard II). In subsequent years G. is recorded as a close associate and advisor of Otto II, of the empress Theophanu, and of the young Otto III. In 983 G. founded as a dependency of his see the abbey of Petershausen near Konstanz (Petershausen is now in Konstanz but the abbey and its church of St. Gregory the Great, with its relic of the head of that holy pontiff, are no more). Today is G.'s _dies natalis_. He was buried in the abbey he had founded.
G.'s seemingly early twelfth-century Vita (BHL 3292), written by a monk of Petershausen, tells us of his constant care for the poor and the weak of his diocese and relates a number of lifetime miracles, including his crossing the Po with dry feet (easy to do if you're in a boat, but that's not how this version of a not uncommonly reported miracle is said to have taken place). G. received Elevationes at the abbey in 1134 and 1259.
In some south German and Swiss dioceses G. is celebrated on 26. November along with bishop St. Conrad of Konstanz (d. 975), who is said to have designated him as his successor (though G. seems actually to have succeed a bishop Gaminolf). G. is a patron saint of the archdiocese of Freiburg im Breisgau.
G. (at right; at left, St. Gregory the Great) in a glass window of 1540 from Petershausen, now in Paris in the musée du Louvre:
http://www.heiligenlexikon.de/Fotos/Gebhard_II.jpg
Best,
John Dillon
(last year's post revised and with the additions of Poemen the Great and Gebhard of Konstanz)
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