medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
My apologies. I forgot to change the date in the Subject line. Leo Luke of Corleone is a saint of 1. March.
--JD
On 03/03/15, John Dillon wrote:
>
> Leo Luke of Corleone (d. late 9th / very early 10th century?). This monastic saint is a Sicilian Greek with a Latin Vita (BHL 4842; no witnesses earlier than the sixteenth century and no surviving Bios in Greek) and with a cult that seems to have begun in Calabria and to have spread to his homeland perhaps no earlier than the fifteenth century.
>
> According to the Vita, Leo Luke (in Italian, Leone Luca and, far more frequently, Leoluca written as one word) was born to a family that raised cattle and sheep at Corleone in Sicily about the time that the island first became troubled by "Vandal" raids, i.e. by attacks from North African Muslims. His parents dying while he was still young, he entered religion at the famous monastery of St. Philip at Agira. Further Muslim incursions caused him to leave Sicily for Calabria. There he joined a monastic community in the mountains of northern Calabria, was given the name Luke, and travelled with the community's abbot first to the monastically settled wilds of the Merkourion (today usually located along the headwaters of the river Lao) and then to a place called Vena, where in time he succeeded to the abbacy of a re-established community. After a lifetime of signal piety and the performance of various miracles, he died at a great old age at Vena and was buried in the community's church of the Theotokos.
>
> Though it has many points of contact with the Bioi / Vitae of other Italo-Greek monastic saints, this Vita rings true as that of the local saint of a particular monastic community in Calabria. Most of the geographic referents are from northern and central Calabria and no mention is made of any of the other monastic communities that we know from the Bioi of other saints (e.g. Fantinus the Younger, Nilus of Rossano) existed in the Merkourion at about this time. At some point Leo Luke's cult became associated with Monteleone, the town that succeeded early medieval Vibona -- said to have been destroyed in a Muslim raid in 983 -- and that is now Vibo Valentia (VV).
>
> When Leo Luke's Vita came into being is unknown. But it is probable that this occurred in the late eleventh or twelfth century, after the Norman-led conquest of this previously East Roman area and the expansion within it of Latin Christianity. It is unlikely to be later: the Vita does not mention Monteleone by name (that designation is first attested from the year 1239) except for a sentence at the end noting a translation of L.'s remains from Vena to Monteleone and giving every appearance of being a later addition. By the middle of the sixteenth century, when both Calabria and Sicily were under Spanish rule, Leo Luke's cult had spread to Sicily. In 1575, having liberated Corleone from a pestilence, Leo Luke was proclaimed protector and patron of that town. Not surprisingly, he is also the patron saint of Vibo Valentia.
>
> Immediately outside Vibo Valentia, on a hillside in the town of San Gregorio d'Ippona, is the restored church of Santa Ruba. (There is no St. Ruba; the best guess is that 'Ruba' here is the remnant of a localization 'alla Rupa', i.e. 'at the Cliff'.) Originally the church of a small early eleventh-to-thirteenth-century Greek-rite monastery, some of whose remains are to be seen in the surrounding park, it later became a Carmelite convent, was re-worked in the early seventeenth century, and has a baroque interior. Much of the medieval exterior survives, including the cupola, whose construction has parallels with those of other Greek churches of Byzantine Calabria. Some views:
> http://static.panoramio.com/photos/original/15837929.jpg
> http://static.panoramio.com/photos/large/44682863.jpg
> Prior to restoration:
> http://dsmvibo.altervista.org/S.%20Ruba.jpg
>
> In 1999 mineralogical investigation of calcareous grottoes in the vicinity of Santa Ruba led to the discovery of what was once a cave church adjacent to the former monastery. Inside was a tomb with human skeletal remains that when later tested were determined to be those of a very elderly person who lived around the year 1000. That chronological datum notwithstanding (the Leo Luke of the Vita will have been about a century earlier), the general assumption was that the remains are Leo Luke's and that the grotto in question had served as his community's first church at Vena. A public announcement followed in 2006. Here's an Italian-language newspaper account with photographs:
> http://www.italiamedievale.org/sito_acim/contributi/sanleoluca4.pdf
> Another account (lower down on the page), with what is said to be a view of the cave church in question:
> http://www.italiamedievale.org/sito_acim/contributi/san_leoluca_3%282%29.pdf
>
> That first account has a photograph of human skeletal remains, said to be those found in the grotto. In that photograph they are in a building (probably the church of Santa Ruba). Other photographs show them in the grotto:
> http://tinyurl.com/ocjtag8
> http://tinyurl.com/o79g37k
>
> Fame is so fleeting. One Calabrian touristic page for for San Gregorio d'Ippona <http://tinyurl.com/mtqb93z> identifies these relics simply as "resti umani" ("human remains"), while another <http://www.incalabriatiguidoio.it/Itinerari/Pizzo-Vibo-%20Zungri.htm> calls them the "I resti umani di San Pantaleone" ("the human remains of St. Pantaleon").
>
> Best,
> John Dillon
> (matter from older posts revised)
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