medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
On Thursday, June 30, 2011, at 2:51 pm, Terri Morgan sent:
> Emiliana (?) There is a church dedicated to St. Emiliana in Rome, but
> it's suspected that the dedication actually came from a street name.
>
The only Roman church of such nomenclature that I'm aware of is the _titulus Aemilianae_ recorded in the subscriptions to the acts of the Roman synod of 499. That church is generally considered to have been a predecessor of today's church of the Four Crowned Martyrs (in Italian: Quattro Coronati); though the latter dedication is attested since at least the Roman synod of 595, this church was still being referred as that of Emiliana in 855, when it was the scene of an imperial attempt to force the Roman clergy to accept the future Anastasius Bibliothecarius as pope. Restored several times in the early Middle Ages, it was badly damaged in Guiscard's sack of Rome. Rebuilt, the church was reconsecrated in 1116 by Paschal II, from which time onward its titulature has apparently been exclusively that of the _SS. Quattuor Coronati_.
As the latter rebuilt church is not known to be dedicated to Emiliana, the church referred to by Terri (here repeating a sentence from Phyllis Jestice in 2003 <http://tinyurl.com/62oafzm>) must -- if it exists at all -- be somewhere else in Rome. Can anyone say where?
The nineteenth-century suspicion that the _titulus Aemilianae_ derived its name from from that of a street is no longer widely accepted. That the street in question (a putative _vicus Aemilianus_ inferred from a reference in Suetonius to an _Aemiliana_ that now is usually construed as the neighborhood of this name in the Campus Martius) ever existed is very doubtful. The current general suspicion is that, like other late antique titular churches, this one too derived its name from that of its founder/donor.
There's no record of this Aemiliana/Emiliana having enjoyed a medieval cult. Baronius is said to have entered her, under today and replacing the very legendary St. Lucina, in the second edition of the Roman Martyrology.
Best,
John Dillon
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