medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
3. August is also the feast day of: The Finding of the Relics of St. Stephen (415).
This feast today (usually; sometimes 2. August) commemorates the finding in 415 of relics believed to be those of St. Stephen protomartyr in a village some thirty miles from Jerusalem. It seems to have become a standard part of the liturgical cycle in Latin-rite Christianity only in the eleventh century. The feast was dropped from the general Roman Calendar in 1960 but is still observed in the Church of England and by Independent and Traditional Catholics. Medievally it also included the commemoration of St. Gamaliel and his sons Sts. Abibo and Nicodemus, who according to the traditional account had given Stephen honorable burial on their property.
A page of the St Albans Psalter (Hildesheim, Dombibliothek, MS St. Godehard 1; written between 1120 and 1145) showing today as the feast of the Invention of saints Stephen, Nicodemus, Gamaliel, and Abibon:
http://www.abdn.ac.uk/~lib399/english/translation/trans010.shtml
Gordon Plumb's views of the early thirteenth-century (ca. 1215) Discovery of the Relics of St. Stephen window in Bourges' cathédrale Saint-Etienne:
http://tinyurl.com/3qhsd3r
An expandable view (at center right) of the invention of Stephen, Gamaliel, Nicodemus, and Abibo as depicted in a late thirteenth-century copy of French origin of the _Legenda aurea_ (San Marino, CA, Huntington Library, ms. HM 3027, fol. 90r):
http://tinyurl.com/24lqdjl
Further visuals, anyone?
Best,
John Dillon
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