medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Today, February 23, is the feast day of:
Serenus/Cerneuf the Gardener (d. c307) The Greek Serenus took to an ascetic
life, raising vegetables in his garden to feed himself and visitors. When
persecution broke out, he was at first ignored. But then, says legend, the
wife of one of the imperial guardsmen fell in lust with S. and he rejected
her (Or she trampled his garden and he chased her away from it.) She
complained that he had insulted her. The husband complained to the governor.
Serenus was acquitted of the charge but in the course of examination it was
discovered that he was a Christian so he was beheaded.
Alexander Akimetes (d. 430) Alexander was a Greek army officer who sold his
goods and became a monk. He proved to be a zealot, and was imprisoned after
he set fire to a pagan temple. When released, Alexander went to the desert,
where he converted a band of robbers and assembled them into a monastery.
Then Alexander went on and established a monastery on the Euphrates. Still
not willing to settle down, though, he then formed a traveling monastery,
starting with 150 monks (later 300) he wandered from place to place. He
seems to have founded a system of round-the-clock monastic worship, the
monks working in shifts.
Montanus of Toledo (d. c530) The Spanish Montanus was born c450, and in 522
became archbishop of Toledo. He convened two of the famous councils of
Toledo, and was an active opponent of heresy.
Mildburga/Mildburg/Milburg (d c715) A daughter of King Merewald of Mercia
and of his queen, St. Ermenburga, a princess of the royal family of Kent,
she was sister to St. Mildrith (Mildreda), abbess of Minster-in-Thanet and
St Mildgytha. In the 670s or 680s she became second abbess of the double
monastery founded by her father at today's Much Wenlock in central
Shropshire. The charters show Mildburga acquiring other estates for the
monastery. She was credited with miraculous healing powers and a life of
conspicuous sanctity as well as the gift of levitation and an inexplicable
power over birds. Her tomb was an important cult center until Vikings
destroyed the convent; in 1101 the cult was revived when some boys in the
eleventh century were playing in a field when they began to sink into the
ground; nearby Cluniac monks then dug at that spot and found her tomb,
expanding their foundation to include it. Her relics worked impressive
miracles, including healing lepers and the blind, and making one poor
sufferer vomit out an incredibly long worm that had caused a wasting
sickness.
We know about Mildburga chiefly from the so-called Kentish Royal Legend
(Ţá hálgan; between 725 and 974) and other Old English texts of the Mildrith
Legend and from the perhaps authentic charters preserved in the "Testament
of St Mildburg" preserved in her later eleventh-century Vita (BHL 5959)
attributed to Goscelin of Saint-Bertin.
St. Boniface's Epistle 10 (dated to 716), which recounts the visions of
the Monk of Wenlock, calls the abbey there the monasterium Milburge
abbatiss(a)e. This formulation has been taken to indicate that Mildburga
was still alive at or close to the time of the letter's composition. When
Mildburga's cult began is uncertain. She is already a saint in the Kentish
Royal Legend and her resting place at Wenlock is listed in the
eleventh-century Old English resting-place list Secgan be pam Godes sanctum
pe on Engla lande terost reston. The abbey at Wenlock was re-founded as a
Cluniac priory in the later eleventh century and in 1101 remains believed to
be those of M. were miraculously discovered in Wenlock's then ruinous church
of the Holy Trinity (the predecessor of the present one), whence they were
translated to the nearby priory church.
Lazarus Zographus (d. c. 867) The Armenian Lazarus became a monk in
Constantinople, famed as a painter (his nickname means "the painter") who
restored defaced icons in the reign of the iconoclast emperor Theophilus.
Legend says that he was tortured for this. But he survived and with the
failure of the iconoclast movement was restored and even sent as an
ambassador to Rome, where he died.
Peter Damian (d. 1072) Peter was a native of Ravenna, cared for in his youth
by an older brother, Damian, who sponsored his education and whose name
Peter took in recognition of this service. After studying grammar and
rhetoric and teaching for a time, he became a Camaldolese monk at Fonte
Avellana in 1035. There he became abbot, founded other monasteries, lived an
ascetic life, gave simonists a hard time, and started his extensive career
of letters, treatises, and sermons. PD worked to suppress local liturgies,
organized the Camaldolese order, reacted against secular learning (grammar,
by the way, is the work of the devil), advocated a desert spirituality, etc.
He was a crusader against homosexuality. In 1057 he was forced to become
cardinal bishop of Ostia (his letters begging to be relieved of the office
are very sad) and spent the rest of his life as a prominent member of the
papal reform movement, despite his periodic attempts to return to the
monastery, where he would relax by carving wooden spoons. As a papal advisor
he undertook numerous legations in Italy. He died at Faenza while returning
to Rome from one such mission to Ravenna. He was declared a doctor of the
church in 1828. His feast was celebrated on February 23 (his birthday) until
just recently and is now marked for February 21.
John Theristes (11th century) John was an Italo-Greek whose family lived at
Cursano, a town near Stilo in the Locride, the strip of territory running
along Calabria's southernmost Ionian coast. Muslim raiders killed many of
the town's inhabitants (including its head official, his father) and
enslaved his mother, who was already pregnant with him. Born in Sicily and
secretly brought up as a Christian, John managed at age 14 to return to
Calabria, where he became a monk and worked various miracles. The latter
included bringing in by himself a large harvest before a suddenly arising
thunderstorm could spoil it. Hence his appellation 'Theristes' (or
'Theristis'), signifying 'Harvester'. The monastery that he founded at
today's Bivongi (RC) was after his death named in his honor and perpetuated
his cult.
John's Bios survives in two versions (BHG 894, 894a) elaborating a now
lost predecessor reflected in eleventh-century canons (long hymns) in his
honour by Leo of Stilo and by Bartholomew of Rome. In its present forms it
is variously thought to have been written either in the twelfth century or
in 1217/18 and to have been rewritten not long after the latter date,
probably to document some possessions of John's monastery when the latter
was re-chartered under Frederick II. Two early modern Latin translations,
both rather free (but the one in the Acta Sanctorum is considerably more
so), underlie many modern accounts of John.
In the Latin church, John's feast day used to be February 24. The latest
revision of the RM lists him (without the appellation 'Theristes') for
today, his traditional date in Greek churches. At the monastery at Bivongi,
overseen since February 1995 by the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of Italy, his
feast day continues to be the 24th. This may also be where he is on the
calendar of the Roman Catholic diocese of Locri-Gerace.
happy reading,
Terri
--
"It's not the verbing that weirds the language -- it's the renounification."
- Mahk Leblanc
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