medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Today (1. September) is the feast day of:
1) Priscus of Capua (?). This less well known saint of the Regno is recorded for the today in the (pseudo-)Hieronymian Martyrology, in the Gelasian Sacramentary, and in various other early medieval sources. A saint of this name was depicted in the late fifth- or early sixth-century portrait mosaics of Campanian saints that once adorned the church thought to have been dedicated to our P. at what is now San Prisco (CE), between Capua and Caserta. St. Ado of Vienne, followed by Usuard, presented P. as one of Christ's disciples. The fourteenth-century Venetian hagiographer Pietro de Natalibus identified P. as the owner of the house in which the Last Supper took place.
P.'s perhaps tenth-century Cassinese Vita (BHL 6927) makes him a bishop expelled from Africa during a pro-Arian persecution of the later fourth century. According to this account, P. settled at Capua, destroyed the temple of Diana on the site of the later Sant'Angelo in Formis, and was martyred for his pains. The even more legendary eleventh- or twelfth-century _Passio sancti Castrensis_ (BHL 1644) includes a P. among the dozen bishops who fled Vandal persecution in Africa and settled down in various parts of Campania. Until its revision of 2001, the RM distinguished the P. of the (ps.-)HM from P. the exiled African bishop, entering both under today's date.
Who P. really may have been is unknown. Delehaye's guess (_Comm. perpet. in Mart. Hieron._, ad loc.), in which others have concurred, was that the church at today's San Prisco had been dedicated to Priscus of Nocera (16. September) and that the (ps.-)HM's entry for our P. was an error originating in a false assumption about the identity of that church's titular.
The aforementioned church had become ruinous when it was massively rebuilt in the eighteenth century. Now the chiesa arcipretale di San Prisco, it has a facade and belltower said to have been designed under the direction of the distinguished architect Luigi Vanvitelli (d. 1773). An exterior view is here:
http://utenti.quipo.it/casertaoltrelareggia/Schede/2000_2001/Scheda_84.htm
and an illustrated page on its late antique cappella di Santa Matrona (a survivor, with noteworthy mosaics, from the old church) is here:
http://www.sanprisco.net/archeologia/sacello/sacello.htm
2) Terentianus of Todi (?). T. is the legendary protobishop of today's Todi (PG) in Umbria. He has an originally sixth-century Passio in several versions (BHL 8000-8003) that has him martyred under the emperor Hadrian along with one Flaccus, a priest of the idols (_sacerdos idolorum_) whom T. had converted. According both to the Passio and to the (pseudo-)Hieronymian Martyrology, T. died at Todi on this day. The Passio further notes that T. and F. were buried at the eighth milestone from Todi in a rocky place called Colonia.
A cemetery has existed since pre-Roman times in a karstic area about a dozen kilometers northeast of Todi in today's Gualdo Cattaneo (PG). An originally eleventh-century church, dedicated to Sts. Terentianus and Flaccus but now generally referred to simply as San Terenziano, was built over a cave here in which relics believed to be those of T. and F. were preserved in simple sarcophagi of local travertine (now located in the lower church). Two glass balsamaries from the third or fourth century, found in the 1980s in the immediate vicinity of the earlier resting places, suggest the antiquity of a cult on this site. Flaccus' absence from the (ps.-)HM, coupled with the legendary character of the Passio, has kept him out of at least recent editions of the RM.
Here's an exterior view of T.'s (and F.'s) church at San Terenziano di Gualdo Cattaneo (upper portion rebuilt in the thirteenth century):
http://tinyurl.com/3yj2lx
In 1260 relics said to be those of T. were brought from Todi to today's Capranica (VT) in northern Lazio, where they are housed in the originally thirteenth-/fourteenth-century church of San Terenziano al Monte. A chapel at today's Cavriago (RE) in Emilia-Romagna dedicated to Sts. Eusebius and Terentianus is documented from the late tenth century; by the thirteenth century this had expanded and was being referred to simply as _S. Terencianus_. Its eighteenth-century successor is also a chiesa di San Terenziano and its titular is now understood to be our T. T. is the patron saint of both Capranica and Cavriago.
3) Victor of Le Mans (d. 490). According to the two early episcopal Gesta of Le Mans, V. became bishop there in 450, participated in councils at Angers (453) and at Tours (461), and died on this day in 490. St. Gregory of Tours records in his _In gloria confessorum_ (cap. 56) that V. was greatly venerated in G.'s own time and that he was famous for having obtained the cessation of a fire that was devastating his city. V. has a legendary Vita (BHL 8600, etc.) that connects him with other saints of his region (Liborius, Martin of Tours) and that adds nothing to our knowledge of him.
4) Constantius of Aquino (d. during the years 561-73). This less well known saint of the Regno was a bishop of today's Aquino (FR) in southern Lazio, the birthplace of the Roman satirist Juvenal and later the seat of the county into whose comital family St. Thomas Aquinas was born. C. is mentioned twice by St. Gregory the Great (_Dialogi_, 2. 16; 3. 8): in the second of these passages he is said to have foretold that he would have but two successors in his see, a prophecy soon effectuated -- according to Greg -- by a Lombard sack followed by pestilence. His legendary Vita (ca. 1125) by the Cassinese scholar and forger Peter the Deacon is lost. C. is Aquino's patron saint and a co-titular of its present basilica cattedrale San Tommaso [d'Aquino] e San Costanzo.
In the absence of any available view of a medieval building or building part dedicated to C., herewith two views of Aquino's twelfth-century church of Santa Maria della Libera:
http://www.nuovipanorami.it/italia/lazio/aquino.html
5) Verena (?). V. is a popular but poorly documented saint of today's northern Switzerland, where since the tenth century her cult has been centered upon Zurzach (canton Aargau), and southern Germany. She is first heard from in the late ninth century, the presumed date of composition of the earlier of her two legendary Vita, BHL 8540t. Written for a pious and noble lady who in all probability was St. Richardis (d. ca. 895) and preserved in numerous witnesses from the end of the ninth or the beginning of the tenth century onward, this makes her an Egyptian who accompanied the Theban Legion to northern Italy, who was at Milan when Maurice and most of the legion were (acc. to their legend) martyred at Acaunus (also Acaunum and Agaunum), who hearing of their death traveled Acaunus, and who then settled down at today's Solothurn, living ascetically as a holy virgin.
A re-working of this Vita from the later tenth or eleventh century (BHL 8541) brings V. to Zurzach, where she tends lepers, lives chastely, dies, and is buried _non sine miraculis_. An accompanying Miracula (BHL 8542) attests to the vigor of V.'s posthumous cult at Zurzach. In the later Middle Ages V.'s legend acquired fresh details.
V.'s cult is first attested from the monasteries of Reichenau, St. Gallen, Muri, and Einsiedeln. It traveled down the Rhine to the dioceses of Trier and Köln and flourished as well in its local diocese of Konstanz. In the later Middle Ages Habsburg possession of Zurzach led to V.'s adoption as a Habsburg family saint and to a further expansion of her cult west to Vienne and east along the Danube. In the twelfth- or thirteenth-century calendar of southwest German origin shown here (Cologny, Fondation Martin Bodmer, cod. Bodmer 30; fol. 6r) she follows Giles (Egidius) on this day:
http://www.e-codices.unifr.ch/en/cb/0030/6r/small
Two illustrated, German-language pages on V.'s putative resting place, the originally eleventh-century Verenamünster in Zurzach (images expandable; V.'s present sarcophagus is early seventeenth-century):
http://tinyurl.com/3xwpztb
http://tinyurl.com/3yudz5g
A sixteenth-century reliquary of V. in the Münster Unserer Lieben Frau in Radolfzell am Bodensee (Lkr. Konstanz) in Baden-Württemberg:
http://www.heiligenlexikon.de/Fotos/Verena2.jpg
The former parish church of St. Verena at Magdenau in today's Degersheim (canton St. Gallen), once the property of a nearby Cistercian abbey, is thought to be originally of the eleventh or twelfth century. Some views of this since expanded church:
http://tinyurl.com/365scfh
http://tinyurl.com/32ezct8
http://tinyurl.com/35ffh9m
http://tinyurl.com/2vf8e88
Outside of Solothurn one can visit a cave said to have been inhabited by V. (it's first recorded from 1442 but it's not clear that the association with V. is that early):
http://www.lochstein.de/hrp/orte/verena/verena.htm
http://tinyurl.com/23ecrza
Views of the originally early sixteenth-century (ca. 1514) Pfarrkirche St. Verena in the village of Roggenbeuren in Deggenhausertal (Lkr. Bodenseekreis) in Baden-Württemberg:
http://tinyurl.com/n2cw5h
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2041/2211129849_0edd3e19b5_o.jpg
http://tinyurl.com/led9ao
http://tinyurl.com/mw8xtw
A painting of ca. 1524 showing V. engaging in acts of mercy, now in the Württembergisches Landesmuseum Stuttgart, (Inv. Nr. 1928-89):
http://tinyurl.com/nf6jsw
6) Lupus of Sens (d. 623). L. (in French: Loup, Leu) is said to have succeeded St. Artemius as bishop of Sens in 609. His unreliable eighth- or ninth-century Vita (BHL 5082) makes him a nobly born native of the territory of Orléans, very devout, a tireless shepherd of his flock, and an exemplary guardian of Sens who was exiled unjustly by Chlotar II, distinguished himself in exile as a person of exceptional holiness, and was on that account restored by Chlotar. Lifetime and posthumous miracles confirmed his sanctity. Thus far the Vita. L.'s cult was widely promoted within the metropolitan diocese of Sens, whose relics of L. were authenticated by Innocent III in 1210.
Here's L. as he appears on the trumeau of the west portal of his church at Saint-Loup de Naud (Seine-et-Marne), a former priory of Sens:
http://www.art-roman.net/stloupdn/stloupdn6x.jpg
Some views of this originally eleventh(?)- and twelfth-century church:
http://www.art-roman.net/stloupdn/stloupdn.htm
http://en.structurae.de/structures/data/photos.cfm?ID=s0014309
More views are accessible from here (near bottom of the page):
http://ica.princeton.edu/langland/index.php?p=1400&s=
An expandable view of L. receiving Chlotar and the return of Sens' miraculous church bell that the king had had stolen (BHL 5082, cap. 20), as depicted in a late thirteenth-century copy of French origin of the _Legenda aurea_ (San Marino, CA, Huntington Library, ms. HM 3027, fol. 117v):
http://tinyurl.com/25us759
L. as depicted in an earlier fourteenth-century (ca. 1326-1350) collection of French-language saint's Lives (Paris, BnF, ms. Français 185, fol. 252r):
http://saints.bestlatin.net/images/gallery/lupus_bnfms.jpg
L. as depicted in an earlier fourteenth-century (1348) copy of the _Legenda aurea_ in its French-language version by Jean de Vignay (Paris, BnF, ms. Français 241, fol. 234v):
http://tinyurl.com/2d4obt3
Some views of the originally thirteenth- and fourteenth-century église Saint-Leu-Saint-Gilles in Paris (expanded in the nineteenth century):
http://en.structurae.de/structures/data/photos.cfm?ID=s0013255
http://wikimapia.org/1265086/%C3%89glise-Saint-Leu-Saint-Gilles
http://tinyurl.com/ntpvuh
http://tinyurl.com/l4uuy5
In France, L. and St. Giles (no. 7, below; with further visuals of L.) are frequently co-titulars.
An illustrated, French-language page on L.'s originally fourteenth-century church at Fleury-la-Vallée (Yonne):
http://paroisses89.cef.fr/neuilly/spip.php?article12
An illustrated, French-language page on L.'s originally fifteenth-century church in Jouels (Aveyron):
http://www.jouels.com/villages/eglise.htm
L. as depicted in a late fifteenth-century (ca. 1480-1490) copy of the _Legenda aurea_ in the version by Jean de Vignay (Paris: BnF, ms. Français 245, fol. 80v):
http://tinyurl.com/2etf4sq
7) Giles, abbot in Occitania (d. 7th cent.?). G. (in Latin, Egidius or Aegidius; in French, Gilles) is the saint of abbey that gave its name to today's Saint-Gilles-du-Gard (Gard) between Arles and Nîmes and located near the mouths of the Rhone. He has a seemingly originally ninth- or tenth-century Vita (BHL 93, etc.) that makes him a Christian of Athens who early attained fame as a healer (his first three miracles are cures), who fleeing this fame took ship and wound up in southern Gaul, and who there became an hermit and later founded a monastery (which he prudently persuaded a pope to make exempt) at which he died and was buried.
Rounding out this Vita's fairly standard projection of an early founder are incidents linking G. anachronistically (by modern standards) to various figures of symbolic standing: Saints Caesarius of Arles and Privatus of Mende, a Gothic king Flavius (perhaps Liuva I dimly recalled), and a king Carolus who in the Middle Ages was interpreted as Charlemagne. These anchor the abbey in the region's ecclesiastical history and, through the king-tales, present a claim for a history of royal patronage from rulers of the region's two secular powers: the (Visi)Gothic and the Frankish kingdoms.
That said, these incidents also affirm the saint's moral superiority over the secular power. In the episode with Flavius, G. is wounded by an arrow intended for a hind that was being pursued by the king's hunt; G. both gives the animal sanctuary and, knowing that virtue is perfected in infirmity, refuses medical attention for himself. In the case of king Charles, G. obtains through his prayers divine remission for an unspeakable sin that the monarch had not dared to confess.
G.'s abbey is gone, but its late eleventh- to thirteenth-century church is not. Herewith illustrated, English-language and French-language accounts of the building:
http://tinyurl.com/yqt3kw
http://viatolosana.free.fr/pat/vt_pat02_stgilles.php
Five pages of views, mostly of sculptural details, begin here:
http://www.art-roman.net/stgilles/stgilles.htm
G.'s cult, presumably spread at first by pilgrims, extended far and wide in the Latin West. Considered a protector of those suffering from fever, fear, or mental illness, he ultimately became one of the late medieval Fourteen Holy Helpers.
Expandable views of scenes from G.'s Vita as depicted in stone and in glass at the cathedral of Chartres are accessible from here:
http://tinyurl.com/63yxf5
Expandable views of various manuscript illuminations of G. (one with St. Lupus of Sens) are accessible from here:
http://tinyurl.com/5oed6x
An expandable view of G. (with a hind who seems to have grown antlers) as depicted in a late thirteenth-century copy of French origin of the _Legenda aurea_ (San Marino, CA, Huntington Library, ms. HM 3027, fol. 118v):
http://tinyurl.com/2bxevp3
G. exorcising a demon, as depicted in an earlier fourteenth-century French-language collection of saint's Lives (Paris, BnF, ms. Français 183, fol. 112v; illuminations attributed to the Fauvel Master):
http://tinyurl.com/28lmdqq
G.'s first miracle (giving his tunic to a sick man who then is cured), as depicted in an earlier fourteenth-century (1348) copy of the _Legenda aurea_ in its French-language version by Jean de Vignay (Paris, BnF, ms. Français 241, fol. 235v):
http://tinyurl.com/2eldrre
G. (at left; St. Lupus of Sens at right) as depicted in the early fifteenth-century (ca. 1410) Hours of René d'Anjou (an Horae BVM for the Use of Paris; London, British Library, MS Egerton 1070, fol. 101r):
http://tinyurl.com/yksh5p9
An Italian-language page on the history of the former priory of Sant'Egidio at Sant'Egidio di Prato Pantano in today's San Giovanni Rotondo (FG) in Apulia and of its village, together with views of the remains of its originally late eleventh-century church dedicated to G. and situated on a pilgrim route in the general vicinity of the sanctuary of St. Michael on the Gargano peninsula:
http://tinyurl.com/2enzajw
Views of the originally earlier thirteenth-century (restorations in the early nineteenth century and recently) St Giles Church, Skelton, City of York:
http://tinyurl.com/2bc9ykv
http://tinyurl.com/2e8h2rg
http://tinyurl.com/2bn2zr3
In a what some might consider a slight overstatement, the judges of this year's York Design Awards are reported to have called this church, the winner in the Conservation Projects competition, “York’s version of St[e] Chapelle”:
http://tinyurl.com/2fudl4y
An illustrated, German-language page on, and other views of, the mostly thirteenth- to fifteenth-century St.-Aegidius-Kirche in Berne (Lkr. Wesermarsch) in Niedersachsen (the tower is a survival from a twelfth-century predecessor of the same dedication):
http://tinyurl.com/2auztl8
http://tinyurl.com/2w7jgqg
http://www.kirche-wesermarsch.de/files/1123950500m.jpg
http://www.flickr.com/photos/63273094@N00/4179908400/
http://www.neundorfer-ulf.de/kirche-berne/kirche-ansicht.jpg
http://www.neundorfer-ulf.de/kirche-berne/kriche%201.jpg
Three illustrated, English-language pages on the mostly later medieval St Giles cathedral (_latiore sensu_) in Edinburgh, extensively restored in the nineteenth century:
http://tinyurl.com/2fyhmaj
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Giles%27_Cathedral
http://tinyurl.com/bc76bl
Views (in the first, at right of center) of the originally fourteenth-century Kostel sv. Jiljí (a replacement for a church of the same dedication recorded from the late twelfth century) adjacent to the Premonstratensian abbey at Milevsko (Písek dist.) in the Czech Republic:
http://tinyurl.com/234t358
http://kostelycz.cz/foto/57milevskoj3.jpg
http://www.fop.trigas-geo.cz/excurs/ex20060827/img/ta21.jpg
http://www.fop.trigas-geo.cz/excurs/ex20060827/img/ta19.jpg
http://kostelycz.cz/foto/57milevskoj6.jpg
http://kostelycz.cz/foto/57milevskoj5.jpg
Two illustrated, English-language pages on the originally fourteenth- and fifteenth-century St Giles Church in Norwich:
http://www.norwich-churches.org/St%20Giles/home.shtm
http://tinyurl.com/379bmzg
Best,
John Dillon
(last year's post revised and with the addition of Verena)
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