medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
On Sunday, July 17, 2011, at 12:13 am, Terri Morgan sent:
> Alexis of Rome (?) Suppressed in 1969 because he's fictitious, Alexis
> was popular in western Europe and remains popular in the East. The
> legend is that Alexis was of senatorial family. He fled from his
> wedding, became a beggar, and went on a long pilgrimage. His story
> splits there – one version says that he lived in poverty in Edessa,
> while another claims that he eventually returned – unrecognized - to
> live under the stairs of his own family home for seventeen years and
> was only recognised after his death.
A. is also (perhaps better) known as Alexius. He is also sometimes called A. the Beggar, a designation that gets one around the suspicion that the Rome of the earliest form of his legend (Syriac, late fifth-century; BHO 36ff.) may have been intended as "new Rome", i.e. Constantinople. "Suppressed" is a bit strong for someone who was dropped from the general Roman Calendar in its reform promulgated in 1969 but who remains on particular calendars. A. remains as well in the Roman Martyrology, where, though he is still said to have died in Rome on the Aventine (so specific a location is not known to antedate the seemingly late tenth-century establishment there of a monastery dedicated to him), he is now (rev. ed. of 2001) merely called a man of God venerated under the name Alexius.
In Orthodox and other Eastern-rite churches A. is celebrated on 17. March.
A few visuals (none, alas, from the Blago archives of images in Serbian churches, as that site is still off-line).
What is said to be A.'s skull, donated in 1398 by the emperor Manuel Palaeologus to the monastery dedicated to A. in Kalavryta (Achaea prefecture) in Greece:
http://tinyurl.com/3g8th5n
A.'s return to Rome and A.'s passing as depicted in a damaged eleventh-century fresco in the lower church of Rome's basilica di San Clemente:
http://tinyurl.com/3rkjzpl
http://tinyurl.com/3knu68b
http://www.flickr.com/photos/hen-magonza/4642145636/
http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4068/4641534107_610878812d.jpg
A. as depicted in a perhaps late eleventh- or early twelfth-century fresco in the katholikon of the monastery of the Panagia Mavriotissa at Kastoria (Kastoria prefecture) in northwestern Greece:
http://tinyurl.com/268sclp
http://tinyurl.com/25qyr63
A. (at right; at left, St. John the Calybite) as depicted in the early thirteenth-century frescoes (1230s) of the Mileševa monastery near Prijepolje (Zlatibor dist.) in Serbia:
http://tinyurl.com/yecf8jy
An expandable view of A. (at left) as depicted in a late thirteenth-century copy of French origin of Jacopo da Varazze's _Legenda aurea_ (San Marino, CA, Huntington Library, ms. HM 3027, fol. 77r):
http://tinyurl.com/3zjmm5w
A. 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 at Staro Nagoričane in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia:
http://tinyurl.com/26puvsz
http://tinyurl.com/2bxpdk5
A.'s death under the stairs as depicted in an earlier fourteenth-century French-language collection of saint's Lives (Paris, BnF, ms. Français 183, fol. 115v; illuminations attributed to the Fauvel Master):
http://tinyurl.com/3rtrztx
A. under the stairs as depicted in an earlier fourteenth-century copy (1348) of the _Legenda aurea_ in its French-language version by Jean de Vignay (Paris, BnF, ms. Français 241, fol. 161r):
http://tinyurl.com/3lvengp
High and low at A.'s funeral as depicted in a later fifteenth-century (1463) copy of Vincent of Beauvais' _Speculum historiale_ in its French-language version by Jean de Vignay (Paris, BnF, ms. Français 51, fol. 305v):
http://tinyurl.com/3bhwque
A. as depicted by Dionsiy in a later fifteenth-century fresco (1480 or 1481) in the Dormition cathedral in the Kremlin, Moscow:
http://www.dionisy.com/eng/dionisy/1009/index_photos.shtml?06
A. under the stairs as portrayed in a late fifteenth-century boss (1480-1494) in the cloister of the abbey of Alpirsbach (Lkr. Freudenstadt) in Freudenstadt:
http://www.heiligenlexikon.de/Fotos/Alexius_von_Edessa.jpg
A. (at right; at left, St. John the Calybite) as depicted by Dionisy and sons in the early sixteenth-century frescoes (1502) of the Virgin Nativity cathedral of the St. Ferapont Belozero (Ferapontov Belozersky) Monastery at Ferapontovo in Russia's Vologda Region:
http://www.dionisy.com/img/136/frag_lg.jpg
Best,
John Dillon
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