medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Today (6. October) is the feast day of:
1) Fides of Agen (?). The cult of the Aquitanian virgin martyr F. (in French, Foy or Foi; in Spanish, Fe; in English, Faith) is first attested from the late sixth or very early seventh century, when she is entered under today in the (pseudo-)Hieronymian Martyrology. She enters the historical martyrologies with Florus of Lyon, whose _elogium_ doesn't specify the persecution in which she is thought to have perished. That defect is remedied in F.'s many Passiones (BHL 2928ff.), where she suffers under Diocletian or Maximian at the hands of a Roman official named Datianus (the well traveled villain of Passiones of several major saints, including Vincent of Zaragoza and George of Lydda). BHL 2928 also makes her both juvenile and beautiful of face but more beautiful of mind and has her convert many to Christianity through her constancy before being executed by decapitation.
F.'s cult appears to have arisen at Agen (Lot-et-Garonne) in Aquitaine, where her relics were kept in a basilica dedicated to her. In the later ninth century part of her head was translated by theft to the abbey at Conques (Aveyron) in Midi-Pyrénées, which latter in the eleventh and twelfth centuries erected her well known pilgrimage church there. An illustrated, French-language multi-page site on this structure begins here:
http://www.art-roman.net/conques/conques.htm
The Sacred Destinations main page and photo gallery for this site:
http://www.sacred-destinations.com/france/conques-abbey
http://www.sacred-destinations.com/france/conques-abbey-photos/
Other pages:
http://tinyurl.com/3f524s
http://tinyurl.com/4esyxa
http://tinyurl.com/2aeaco9
F. in the sculptures of the west tympanum (early twelfth-century):
http://tinyurl.com/54mlcp
A couple of views of F.'s originally ninth-century reliquary statue at Conques (there are many more in the Sacred Destinations photo gallery linked to above):
http://tinyurl.com/2ds3e2j
http://tinyurl.com/3pugjs
Views, etc. of the later twelfth-century église Sainte-Foy at Sélestat (Bas-Rhin) in Alsace:
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89glise_Sainte-Foy_de_S%C3%A9lestat
http://tinyurl.com/3vlry6
F.'s martyrdom as depicted in an earlier fourteenth-century illustrated collection of French-language saint's lives (Paris, BnF, ms. Français 183, fol. 85v):
http://tinyurl.com/ydyky84
F.'s martyrdom as depicted in a later fifteenth-century (1463) illustrated copy of Jean de Vignay's French-language translation of Vincent de Beauvais' _Speculum historiale_ (Paris, BnF, ms. Français 51, fol. 85v):
http://tinyurl.com/y9xjzyx
Views, etc. of the église Sainte-Foi (also Sainte-Foix) at Conches-en-Ouche (Eure) in Normandy, a sixteenth-century rebuilding of an originally thirteenth-century church:
http://tinyurl.com/3go6ua
http://tinyurl.com/4ohvrz
2) Renatus of Sorrento (?). This less well known saint of the Regno is one of the five principal patron saints of the coastal Campanian town of Sorrento (Antoninus, Renatus, Athanasius, Baculus, and Valerius) whose appearances to terrify the enemy and to encourage the participation of the laggard Neapolitans are said in the Vita of St. Antoninus of Sorrento (BHL 582; later ninth- or tenth-century) to have been instrumental in a victory by a combined fleet from the duchies of Gaeta, Naples, and Sorrento over Muslim raiders who had seized the island of Ischia (perhaps in 849). His cult is first attested from the seventh century, when Sorrento is recorded as having had a burial church dedicated to him. In the eighth-century sermons devoted to him (BHL 7179-7181) he is not yet a bishop. But he is so identified in his iconography (whose earliest representative is a fresco dated to the late tenth or eleventh century) and in his later medieval Office from Sorrento. An extramural Benedictine abbey dedicated to R. and affiliated to Montecassino existed at Sorrento from at least the late eighth century through the Middle Ages and beyond; its church, which was said to have been built over R.'s own oratory, was also the town's cathedral until 1602.
The monastery of course spread R.'s cult locally. The Grotta di San Biagio at today's Castellammare di Stabia (NA), which preserves the aforementioned early fresco portrait of R., was one of its properties. The Angevin conquest of the kingdom in 1266 led to R.'s equation with the even more shadowy Renatus (Réné) of Angers, to his considerably heightened prominence in Campania, and to a reported translation of R.'s relics from Sorrento to Angers by duke Réné (king, if you share the Angevin view of the rightful succession to Giovanna II) in the earlier fifteenth century. Churches and chapels dedicated to R. are attested from Naples in the thirteenth century and from Vico Equense, Nola, Sarno, and Capua in the fourteenth. An altar is dedicated to him in Sorrento's originally fifteenth-century cathedral.
A distance view of R.'s portrait (at right, with St. Benedict of Nursia and Montecassino at left) in the Grotta di San Biagio at Castellammare di Stabia:
http://www.gdangelo.it/renato.jpg
There's a larger version in the illustrated, Italian-language account of the site here:
http://www.gdangelo.it/sanbiagio.htm
3) Enimia (d. 7th cent., supposedly). E. is the eponym of Sainte-Enimie (Lozčre), a picturesque village in the Gorges du Tarn where in 951 a monastery honoring her was either founded by or became a dependency of the abbey of Saint-Chaffre in Le Monastier-sur-Gazeille (Haute-Loire). In the early twelfth century someone at or writing for this monastery produced a tripartite and very legendary Vita, Inventio, and Miracula of E. (BHL 2549-2551; the Miracula is prosimetric). The Vita presents E. as a daughter of a king Clovis who was the son of a king Dagobert who was the son of Clovis, the first Christian king of the Franks, while the Inventio gives her a brother named Dagobert who became king. An attempt to wring sense out of this fictional genealogy has led to the supposition that E. was the daughter of Chlotar II (d. 629), though Clovis II (d. 655) would fit the scheme in a different way. That whole exercise, though, is rather akin to counting the aunts of Lady Macbeth.
According to the Vita, E. was from early childhood very pious and virtuous, dressed meanly though the daughter of a king, regularly washed the feet of paupers and otherwise cared for them, and considered herself a virgin dedicated to Christ. When her parents had arranged a marriage for her she received the gift of a leprosy that marred her physical beauty and physicians could not cure. Freed from the threat of marriage, E. wished to render thanks unto God. An angelic vision informed her that she should go to the spring Burla in the Gévaudan and that there her leprosy would be removed. Guided by an angel, E. made the journey, found the spring, bathed in it, and was cured. On her return journey she fell prey to the same affliction; returning to the spring, she was cured again.
Aware that she was bound to the place, E. settled in as a solitary in a cave high up on a cliff overlooking the Tarn, attracted fellow virgins as disciples, and made attempts to build a church that were repeatedly foiled by a demonic serpent until bishop St. Ilarus of the Gévaudan (Hilarus of Javols; 25. Oct.), who had come to see her, drove it off. Ilarus then built a church for her community and consecrated E. as its abbess. After a long life of many trials the holy E. finally died. At her request the community buried her in a secret location and prepared a deception for anyone who would attempt to translate her remains: they prepared a tomb with E.'s name inscribed thereon and placed in it some days later the body of another virgin, also named Enimia, who had died in the interim. This trick fooled Dagobert, who took the wrong E. when he removed the bodies of many saints from the Gévaudan.
Thus far the Vita, which in the earlier thirteenth century served as the base for a verse version in Occitan by Bertran de Marseille. The _Directorium chori_ of bishop Guillaume Durand the Younger (r. 1297-1323) attests to the existence of a medieval Office for E. in the diocese of Mende (the successor to the ancient diocese of Javols). A diocesan breviary of 1542 is the first to show her feast as falling on this day; previously it had been on 5. October. E. has yet to grace the pages of the RM.
Some views of Sainte-Enimie, with the remains of the monastery overlooking the town:
http://tinyurl.com/2avwp58
http://tinyurl.com/23pgmmn
http://tinyurl.com/247b5e6
Another (at left, the salle capitulaire):
http://tinyurl.com/2ah8hm5
Interior views of the salle capitulaire:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:FR-48-Sainte-Enimie6.JPG
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2128/2340534080_07ecc63ab0_b.jpg
High up above town is the originally late medieval ermitage Sainte-Enimie (the cave traditionally said to have been E.'s is behind the buildings):
http://tinyurl.com/24kghz4
http://tinyurl.com/2d4s59k
Relics believed to be E.'s were kept there until they were reported stolen in 1970.
What is said to be E.'s spring (the Source de la Burle) in Sainte-Enimie:
http://tinyurl.com/2adazxs
http://tinyurl.com/25ra9hb
4) Aldemarus of Bucchianico (fl. ca. 1000). According to his brief, probably late eleventh-century Vita (BHL 251), this less well known saint of the Regno (also Aldemarius; also A. of Capua) was head of the nobly founded monastery of San Lorenzo at Capua, where he performed miracles; later he founded a monastery, dedicated to the BVM, at Bucchianico (CH) in Abruzzo. Within a generation after his death this house and others in today's Chieti province became dependencies of Montecassino; the latter perpetuated the view that A. had founded them as the abbey's emissary. A.'s Vita was transcribed by the Cassinese historian and forger Peter the Deacon at the end of his _Ortus et vita iustorum cenobii Casinensis_ (ca. 1136) and was reworked by him (BHL 252) in his part of the _Chronicon cassinense_. The latter account erroneously has A. die in around 1080.
A. has yet to grace the pages of the RM. Remains said to be his are kept at an altar dedicated to him in Bucchianico's chiesa di Sant'Urbano (pope St. Urban I), a later eighteenth-century replacement for one of the same dedication attested from 1243.
5) Adalbero of Würzburg (d. 1090). Educated at the cathedral school of Würzburg, A. was the last of the male line of the counts of Lambach in what is now Oberösterreich. He became bishop of Würzburg in 1045. In consequence of his support of pope St. Gregory VII against the interests of Henry IV deposed in 1085 and driven out of his city. The anti-king Rudolf of Schwaben brought him back in 1086 but he was driven out again almost immediately. A. spent his last years at the Benedictine monastery he had founded in his ancestral castle at today's Lambach an der Traun. A monk of Lambach wrote his Vita (BHL 30) in about 1200.
A.'s cult was confirmed, at the level of Saint, for German and Austrian dioceses (and for the Benedictines of Lambach?) in 1883. For the remainder of the Roman Catholic Church he is a _Beatus_.
A. completed, in about 1075, the first phase of construction of Würzburg's cathedral of St. Kilian. Two rather different aerial views of this structure:
http://www.pbase.com/bernd/image/64204674
http://tinyurl.com/3dr5bq2
West front:
http://tinyurl.com/47w9v6
West front and south flank:
http://tinyurl.com/3hn5qnm
West front and north flank, ca. 1900:
http://tinyurl.com/46wfn9
North flank:
http://tinyurl.com/3c66jy8
Rear views:
http://flickr.com/photos/21861018@N00/2200874794/sizes/o/
http://flickr.com/photos/zug55/2744012518/sizes/l/
6) Bruno the Carthusian (d. 1101). Today's well known saint of the Regno was born at Köln, where he became a cathedral canon. From there he went on to Reims, where he taught theology and was made chancellor. Seeking a simpler life, B. and some companions founded in the Alps near Grenoble a hermitage that became the Grande Chartreuse, the mother house of the Carthusian Order. In 1090 he was summoned to Rome, didn't like the life there either, and in 1091 together with a few companions established a new hermitage deep in the woods of southern Calabria at a place called La Torre that had been given him by Roger I, count of Sicily.
This second foundation, dedicated to the Virgin and located 800 metres above sea level on the site of the present Santa Maria del Bosco near today's Serra San Bruno (VV), soon generated a third, the nearby Santo Stefano del Bosco (founded sometime during the period 1097-1099). B. remained at Santa Maria della Torre until his death in 1101. He was succeeded by Bl. Lanuin (11. April), one of B.'s early companions at what became the Grande Chartreuse who in addition to having been its prior is said to be named together with B. in all the Norman charters and papal documents concerning the establishments in Calabria. The entirety of this early legal documentation is of controversial authenticity.
In 1291 Santa Maria della Torre was abandoned in favor of Santo Stefano. The latter was handed over in the following year to the Cistercians and remained their property until 1513, when the Carthusians took possession of it. It still exists (though its primitive buildings are all gone), occupying its original site outside of Serra San Bruno. A relatively recent view of the complex is here:
http://www.capovaticanoonline.it/archivi/ft7%20itinerari/701g.jpg
The abandoned building at left center is what remains of the structure rebuilt by the Carthusians in 1513 and destroyed by an earthquake in 1783 (the building's facade and the wall around the complex date from the seventeenth century). Bruno and Lanuin are said to have been buried there; presently they repose in the abbey church. Santo Stefano was suppressed early in the nineteenth century. It was re-opened after Italian unification and was largely rebuilt in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Most of what one sees in this view is thus quite recent.
A virtual exhibit of portraits of B. is here:
http://tinyurl.com/fuzzu
Best,
John Dillon
(last year's post revised)
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