medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Today (25. December) is the feast day of:
1) The Nativity of Jesus Christ. Good cheer to all!
A few images:
a) The Nativity as depicted in a seventh-century encaustic icon in St. Catherine's monastery, St. Catherine (South Sinai governorate):
http://tinyurl.com/cf48lpe
b) The Nativity as depicted in the late tenth- or very early eleventh-century so-called Menologion of Basil II (Città del Vaticano, BAV, cod. Vat. gr. 1613):
http://tinyurl.com/2cx5b29
c) The Nativity as depicted in the earlier eleventh-century mosaics (restored betw. 1953 and 1962) of the katholikon of the monastery of Hosios Loukas near Distomo in Phokis:
http://tinyurl.com/cpgzyyq
http://tinyurl.com/y98hprk
d) The Nativity as depicted in the later eleventh-century mosaics of the katholikon of the Daphni monastery in Chaidari (Athens prefecture):
http://tinyurl.com/c9ft3gf
e) The Nativity as depicted in the mid-twelfth-century frescoes of the basilica di Santa Maria dell'Ammiraglio (a.k.a. chiesa della Martorana) in Palermo:
http://tinyurl.com/7g7s7d4
f) The Nativity as depicted in the earlier fourteenth-century frescoes (1312) of the katholikon (dedicated to the Annunciation to the Theotokos) of the Vatopedi monastery on Mt. Athos:
http://tinyurl.com/chf4mdg
g) The Nativity as depicted in the earlier fourteenth-century frescoes (1330s) of the church of the Hodegetria in the Patriarchate of Peć at Peć in, depending upon one's view of the matter, either the Republic of Kosovo or Serbia's province of Kosovo and Metohija:
http://tinyurl.com/2fbgewt
Expandable detail views are here:
http://tinyurl.com/y94vpvl
h) The Nativity as depicted in an earlier fifteenth-century icon (betw. 1401 and 1425) in the Rena Andreadis Collection, Athens:
http://www.icon-art.info/hires.php?lng=en&type=1&id=2431
In 2010 Gordon Plumb posted a few links to depictions of the Nativity in glass:
http://tinyurl.com/c76x4kz
Perhaps others have Nativity images that they would wish to share with the list.
2) Eugenia of Rome (?). Also known as Eugenia of Alexandria, this saint is the heroine of a popular and highly legendary Vita (BHL 2666-2668) that associates her with Sts. Protus and Hyacinth, who in this confection are said to have been eunuchs of her household, and that has her maintain her virginity against the wishes of her father, the Roman governor Alexandria. To do this she puts on men's clothing, assumes a male identity, and, taking the name Eugenius, enters a monastery in Alexandria. There she proves herself a paragon of virtue and is elected abbot. When she has to refuse the attentions of a woman named Melanthia who had fallen in love with her the latter denounces the supposed Eugenius to the authorities; tried before her father, who had supposed her dead, Eugenia reveals her true identity and is acquitted. Her entire family converts to Christianity. Eugenia's father is assassinated in a local persecution and her mother moves the family to Rome. There Eugenia refuses another suitor (this time male), is denounced as a Christian, undergoes numerous tortures, and finally is slain by the sword on 25. December of some very indeterminate year.
Eugenia as depicted among the female saints of the carefully restored earlier sixth-century mosaics on the triumphal arch in the Basilica Eufrasiana in Poreč:
http://nickerson.icomos.org/porec/u/ud.jpg
Eugenia as depicted in the heavily restored later sixth-century procession of female saints (ca. 561) in the basilica di Sant'Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna (photo courtesy of Genevra Kornbluth):
http://www.kornbluthphoto.com/images/ApNNorth2.jpg
Eugenia as depicted in the earlier eleventh-century mosaics (restored between 1953 and 1962) in the katholikon of the monastery of Hosios Loukas near Distomo in Phokis:
http://tinyurl.com/bnxqdm9
Eugenia between her accuser and her father as portrayed on a twelfth-century capital in the basilique Marie-Madeleine at Vézelay:
http://tinyurl.com/7lmp4ru
http://tinyurl.com/culx6vv
Two scenes of Eugenia as depicted in an earlier fourteenth-century copy (ca. 1335) of Vincent of Beauvais' _Speculum historiale_ in its French-language version by Jean de Vignay (Paris, BnF, ms. Arsenal 5080, fols. 152r, 152v):
a) Eugenia instructed by her father:
http://tinyurl.com/7adawck
b) Eugenia baptized together with Sts. Protus and Hyacinth:
http://tinyurl.com/7r7g7fp
Eugenia's sufferings (at lower left, the martyrdom of Sts. Protus and Hyacinth) as depicted in a later fifteenth-century copy (1463) of Vincent of Beauvais' _Speculum historiale_ in its French-language version by Jean de Vignay (Paris, BnF, ms. Français 51, fol. 26r):
http://tinyurl.com/7ssjvlz
3) Anastasia of Sirmium (d. ca. 304, supposedly). Anastasia is a martyr of Sirmium in Pannonia, today's Sremska Mitrovica in Serbia. Her cult is thought to have been brought to Rome before the development of her romance-like, late antique Passio (BHL 401). The latter is a lengthy and complicated attempt to provide a narrative for the dedicatee of Rome's titular and stational church of Sant'Anastasia, where in the sixth century, when it was still just the _titulus Anastasiae_, Anastasia was already celebrated, as she still is, at the second Mass on Christmas (the Mass at dawn). A noteworthy recent contribution to the study of Anastasia's cult is Paola Francesca Moretti's _La Passio Anastasiae. Introduzione, testo critico, traduzione_ (Roma: Herder, 2006). An English-language review of that is here:
http://tinyurl.com/y9pjwmu
For those who wish to practice their Latin, herewith an unsourced text of Anastasia's legend as presented in the _Legenda aurea_ of Bl. Jacopo da Varazze:
http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/voragine/anast.shtml
Anastasia has a richly complicated hagiographical construction in medieval Greek and medieval Slavic texts. For that, a rewarding place to begin is Jane Baun, _Tales from Another Byzantium: Celestial Journey and Local Community in the Medieval Greek Apocrypha_ (Cambridge Univ. Pr., 2007). In a brief overview at pp. 117-120 (for those with access to Google Books, this will be found at <http://tinyurl.com/24zpb7k>) Baun distinguishes among three Anastasias: Anastasia the Roman, Anastasia the Virgin, and Anastasia _pharmakolytria_ ('poison-curer'), martyred at Sirmium. But these have partly overlapping feasts on 12. October and 22. or 25. December and their hagiographies are interpenetrating. For the purposes of this notice they are treated as differing manifestations of the same saint.
The abbey church of Santa Maria in Sylvis, an eighth-century foundation (762) at today's Sesto al Règhena (PN) in Friuli-Venezia Giulia, shelters in its crypt a sarcophagus of St. Anastasia. Herewith a distance view, followed by a close-up:
http://tinyurl.com/9mwaz5
http://www.flickr.com/photos/renzodionigi/2930600389/sizes/l/
Considered a masterpiece of Lombard sculpture, it may be a reworked abbatial throne.
Relics believed to be those of Anastasia (most notably, part of a skull) are kept in the seemingly originally earlier sixteenth-century Patriarchal Monastery of Saint Anastasia the Healer at Vassilika (Thessaloniki prefecture) in northern Greece:
http://tinyurl.com/73lxjh5
Another view of the skull relic, this time on a visit to Kyiv / Kiev in May 2011:
http://www.mospat.ru/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/IMG_0464_36.jpg
Some portrayals:
a) Anastasia (at far left) as depicted in the heavily restored later sixth-century mosaics of Ravenna's basilica di Sant'Apollinare Nuovo (photograph courtesy of Genevra Kornbluth):
http://www.kornbluthphoto.com/images/ApNNorth5.jpg
b) Anastasia (at right, after St. Chrysogonus and St. Rufinus of Rome) as depicted in a degraded earlier eighth-century fresco in the lower church of Rome's basilica di San Crisogono:
http://tinyurl.com/72f68zg
c) Anastasia's martyrdom (and that of a companion) as depicted in the late tenth- or very early eleventh-century so-called Menologion of Basil II (Città del Vaticano, BAV, cod. Vat. gr. 1613):
http://tinyurl.com/colzquw
d) Anastasia as depicted in the earlier eleventh-century mosaics (restored between 1953 and 1962) in the katholikon of the monastery of Hosios Loukas near Distomo in Phokis:
http://tinyurl.com/ckgboyf
e) Anastasia (or a figure so identified) as depicted in the twelfth-century frescoes of the Cripta degli Affreschi in the patriarchal basilica in Aquileia:
http://s.anastasia.wedge.ru/Pix/Photo/image_large_184.jpg
f) Anastasia as portrayed in a twelfth-century relief now in the Museum of Religious Art in Zara:
http://s.anastasia.wedge.ru/Pix/Photo/image_large_115.jpg
g) Anastasia as depicted in the recently cleaned later twelfth-century mosaics of the Cappella Palatina in Palermo:
http://s.anastasia.wedge.ru/Pix/Photo/image_large_177.jpg
h) Anastasia as depicted in a later thirteenth-century Book of Hours from Liège (Den Haag, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, ms. 76 G 17):
http://tinyurl.com/38fs4tw
Anastasia has been venerated since the early Middle Ages as a healer of the effects of poison. In that role, for which she has a separate Passio (BHG 81; earliest witness is of the ninth century), she is widely depicted holding a medicine bottle, as
i) here (at right; at left, a donor) in a thirteenth- or fourteenth-century fresco in the narthex of the originally twelfth-century church of the Panagia Phorbiotissa at Asinou near Nikitari (Nicosia prefecture) in the Republic of Cyprus:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/de/1/15/Asinou_Anastasia.jpg
or
j) here (at center, between St. Cataldus and St. Zosimus / Zosimas giving communion to St. Mary of Egypt) in a later medieval fresco in the crypt of Taranto's cattedrale di San Cataldo:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryanaudino/4903624211/lightbox/
or
k) here in the earlier fourteenth-century frescoes (1330s) of the church of the Hodegetria in the Patriarchate of Peć at Peć in, depending upon one's view of the matter, either the Republic of Kosovo or Serbia's province of Kosovo and Metohija:
http://tinyurl.com/2ccv8bb
or
l) here in a later fourteenth- or earlier fifteenth-century icon from Thessaloniki, now in the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg:
http://tinyurl.com/2cz9zws
m) Anastasia (at far right, after Sts. Florus, Nicholas of Myra, and Blasius / Blaise of Sebaste) as depicted on a wing of a late fourteenth- or early fifteenth-century Novgorod School wooden triptych now in the State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow:
http://www.icon-art.info/masterpiece.php?lng=en&mst_id=513
n) Anastasia (at far right, after the prophet Elijah and St. Nicholas of Myra) as depicted on an early fifteenth-century Novgorod School icon now in the State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow:
http://www.icon-art.info/hires.php?lng=en&type=1&id=565
o) Anastasia in prison (at left) as depicted in a later fifteenth-century copy (1463) of Vincent of Beauvais' _Speculum historiale_ in its French-language version by Jean de Vignay (Paris, BnF, ms. Français 51, fol. 95v):
http://tinyurl.com/2e6oqa5
Some dedications:
a) A small Greek monastery dedicated to Anastasia near Matino (LE) on the Salentine peninsula in southern Apulia is first attested from 1099; in the later Middle Ages it was a dependency of the larger Greek house of San Mauro near Gallipoli. The monastery was dissolved in the fifteenth century but its chapel survived until the seventeenth century when it was replaced by a fairly standard rural church. A fairly recent study is Aldo De Bernart, _Una fondazione bizantina nel basso Salento. Santa Anastasia a Matino_ (Galatina: Congedo, 1990).
b) A more substantial deep southern dedication to Anastasia is the cathedral of Santa Severina (KR) in Calabria, built from 1274 to 1295 over an early eleventh-century predecessor and repeatedly rebuilt from the seventeenth century to the early twentieth:
http://tinyurl.com/24pfuzp
http://tinyurl.com/236w9r8
http://tinyurl.com/copaor9
The adjacent eighth- or ninth-century baptistery (not its original function) preserves an early medieval baptismal font. Herewith three exterior views of this recently restored structure, considered the oldest surviving building from Byzantine Calabria (the entrance shown is a late medieval addition):
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryanaudino/3901001782/lightbox/
http://static.panoramio.com/photos/original/3135015.jpg
http://www.tg0.it/articoli/2009/severina12.jpg
Interior views (the first two are older):
http://www.ilpetilino.it/paesi/img/ss2.jpg
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/155/battisterosantaseverina.jpg/
http://images.placesonline.com/travel_journals/1869_2.jpg
http://tinyurl.com/7hqa74b
http://tinyurl.com/7xt5gaf
Further exterior and interior views of this monument will be found in the last four rows here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/pigsty/sets/72157627424194229/?page=3
An Italian-language account with several greatly expandable views at the foot of the page:
http://www.calabriatours.org/chiese/battistero_santa_severina.htm
A brief video with views from before and after the baptistery's recent interior renovation:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8hecvvZKio
c) The chiesa di Sant'Anastasia in Tissi (SS) in northwestern Sardinia is originally of the twelfth or early thirteenth century; it was expanded in the seventeenth. Herewith a brief, Italian-language account and some exterior views (most are slightly expandable):
http://tinyurl.com/a79x42
http://www.arketipoweb.com/Il_territorio_di_Tissi/10_01.htm
http://www.flickr.com/photos/sandropatrizia/779807290/
d) At Zadar (Italian: Zara) in Croatia, Anastasia is the principal patron saint (feast day: 15. January). The city's italianate cathedral of Sv. Stosija (St. Anastasia), housing a sarcophagus containing her supposed remains (translated from Constantinople), was built in two phases, one in the twelfth century and one in the thirteenth. The facade, incorporating an earlier rose window under the smaller upper one, dates from 1324; the belltower is chiefly modern. The church was leveled by bombing in World War II; most of what one sees today is therefore reconstruction. Herewith a few exterior views:
http://tinyurl.com/yatcsus
http://static.panoramio.com/photos/original/25971630.jpg
http://static.panoramio.com/photos/original/24440374.jpg
http://tinyurl.com/y899lh9
Apse view (the polygonal church on the left is Sv. Donat):
http://sinjal.hr/wp-content/gallery/izleti/zadar_donat.jpg
Interior view:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/paco_calvino/455584823/sizes/l/
e) One of Anastasia's Passiones has her martyred on the island of Palmaria. This is probably the island anciently so called in the Pontine Islands off the coast of southern Lazio; its name today is Palmarola. But there are other candidates: the Palmaria off Portovenere (SP) in southern Liguria and Palmaia off Piombino (LV) in Tuscany. An Anastasia has been venerated in coastal Tuscany since at least 1085, when the bishop of Populonia translated to Pisa the remains of a saint of this name. At Piombino, where today's Anastasia is the patron saint, her cult is apparently at least as old as the thirteenth century. The cappella di Sant'Anastasia in the castle of Lerici (SP) near Portovenere was begun in the later twelfth century and completed in the thirteenth. A brief account of it, with two views, will be found in this illustrated, English-language page on the castle:
http://www.liguriaguide.com/lerici-castle.html
f) Verona's largest 'gothic' church is the formerly Dominican pile popularly known as Santa Anastasia after its original dedication as well as that of a predecessor church on the same site. Begun in the late thirteenth century, since 1307 it has honored St. Peter Martyr as well and the official name of its parish is San Pietro da Verona in Sant'Anastasia. Completed (except for the facade) in the fifteenth century, it was restored in 1878-1881. A detailed, Italian-language account of it and of the adjacent San Giorgetto is here:
http://tinyurl.com/cwbvzo3
An English-language account with several views following:
http://www.verona.com/en/guide/verona/chiesa-di-santa-anastasia/
Some distance views (incl. the fifteenth-century belltower):
http://tinyurl.com/b6fxt
http://www.froehlich.priv.at/galerie/verona04/original/stf316.html
Front views, with San Pietro Martire (until 1424, San Giorgio; popularly, still San Giorgetto) at left:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/it/2/2b/Santanastasiaverona.jpg
http://static.panoramio.com/photos/original/17154035.jpg
Some interior views (expandable):
http://tinyurl.com/m9q8b
http://tinyurl.com/8ahky8
http://tinyurl.com/nd8s4
http://tinyurl.com/rfa2m
http://tinyurl.com/mjr8x
The Italia nell'Arte Medievale page on this church:
http://tinyurl.com/ya4odtp
g) A view of the originally fourteenth-century church of Agia Anastasia in Kato Polemidia (Limassol prefecture) in the Republic of Cyprus, in its present form two churches joined to make one:
http://www.reocities.com/Athens/Agora/1940/ag_anastasia.jpg
4) Peter the Venerable (Bl.; d. 1156). Abbot of Cluny from 1152, he befriended Peter Abelard and through his writings fought heresy, Judaism, and Islam. In the latter context, he commissioned a Latin translation of the Qur'an.
5) Peter Nolasco (d. 1249/56 or 1258). A Spanish layman who had been born near Carcassonne in France, Peter was the earthly founder of the Order of Our Lady of Ransom (the Mercedarians). Its celestial founder, Peter maintained, was the BVM. Peter was canonized in 1628.
6) Jacopone of Todi (Bl.; d. ca. 1306). Jacopo dei Benedetti (_Jacopone_ is a nickname; an English-language equivalent would be 'Big Jim') was a lawyer who after the sudden death of his wife gave away his wealth and became a penitent, first on his own and later as a Franciscan tertiary. An adherent of the Spiritual party, he declared Boniface VIII's election to have been invalid. For that he was not only excommunicated but also imprisoned for the remainder of Boniface's pontificate. Jacopone is best known for his numerous _laude_ (hymns of praise) written in Umbrian vernacular for the use of his order. The evidence for the frequently encountered assertion that Jacopone was the author or probable author of the _Stabat mater dolorosa_ is late and unconvincing.
Jacopone died on this day at the Poor Clares' convent of San Lorenzo at the Umbrian town of Collazzone, not far from Todi. He was buried at the Franciscan convent of Monstesanto (or Montecristo) in Todi. In 1596 Jacopone's remains were reburied beneath the main altar of Todi's Franciscan church of San Fortunato. Here's a view of his memorial there (with what is now viewed as an error in the month of his death):
http://tinyurl.com/279vxy5
Jacopone has yet to achieve either formal beatification or an entry in the RM. The Franciscan Martyrology commemorates him under today.
Jacopone as depicted by Paolo Uccello (d. 1475) in the cathedral of Prato (PO) in Tuscany:
http://tinyurl.com/2jpzr2
Best,
John Dillon
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