medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Basinus (d. ca. 705) is traditionally the thirtieth bishop of Trier. Because his name appears together with that of his immediate successor bishop St. Liutwinus (d. ca. 713) in diocesan documents dated 698, 699, and 704, it is supposed that by the first of these years Basinus had associated Liutwinus in his rule. Later tradition at Trier, not attested prior to the eleventh century, held that Basinus had been a monk of that city's monastery of St. Maximinus, rising to abbot there before being elected bishop. Also in the eleventh century, Thiofrid of Echternach in his Vita of St. Liutwinus (BHL 4956) called the latter Basinus' _nepos_, a word that may mean no more than younger male relative other than brother or son. Some think that Basinus was the person of this name for whom was written at Corbie the copy of Justus of Urgell's commentary on the Song of Songs that is now Rome, Biblioteca Vallicelliana, cod. B 62.
Basinus' cult seems to have been immediate, as he is entered under 4. March in the early eighth-century so-called Calendar of St. Willibrord, written at Echternach in the diocese of Trier and containing entries for several of Trier's sainted bishops. His celebration today is also recorded in a ninth-century copy, from the imperial abbey of Prüm, of the (pseudo-)Hieronymian Martyrology (now Trier, Stadtbibliothek, ms. 1245) and in later calendars from the diocese of Trier. Basinus has a Vita (BHL 1028) that in the _Acta Sanctorum_ is ascribed to Nizo, abbot of Mettlach (i.e. that house's eleventh-century abbot Nithard III) and that continues so to be ascribed at the Bollandist website _Bibliotheca Hagiographica Latina Manuscripta_ <http://tinyurl.com/27ah7s> despite the demonstration by the Bollandist Albert Poncelet early in the last century that this Vita, which is written in Humanist Latin, is really the work of St. Maximinus' early sixteenth-century librarian, Johannes Scheckmann (see Poncelet's posthumously published "L'auteur de la vie de S. Basin, évêque de Trèves", _Analecta Bollandiana_ 31 [1912], 142-47).
Best,
John Dillon
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