medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Further period-pertinent images of St. Alban of England:
a) as portrayed in relief (his scourging) on his reconstructed early fourteenth-century shrine in the Cathedral and Abbey Church of St Alban in St Albans (photograph courtesy of Gordon Plumb):
https://www.flickr.com/photos/22274117@N08/5859979980
Views of the shrine:
http://www.victorianweb.org/art/architecture/churches/12c.html [photograph by Jacqueline Bannerjee]
http://tinyurl.com/7ylwcj2
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a9/Shrine-of-st-alban.jpg
b) as depicted (at left; martyrdom; at right, the soldier martyred with him) by Mahiet and workshop in an earlier fourteenth-century copy of Books 9-16 of Vincent of Beauvais' _Speculum historiale_ in its French-language version by Jean de Vignay (ca. 1335; Paris, BnF, ms. Arsenal 5080, fols. 240r):
http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b7100627v/f485.item.zoom
Best again,
John Dillon
________________________________________
From: medieval-religion - Scholarly discussions of medieval religious culture <[log in to unmask]> on behalf of John Dillon <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, June 22, 2016 1:03:28 AM
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Subject: [M-R] FEAST - A Saint for the Day (June 22): St. Alban of England
medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
First known with certainty from continental references of the fifth century (Prosper of Aquitaine, Constantius of Lyon), Alban is England's protomartyr. The earliest clearly British account of him to survive is that of Gildas in the sixth century; this was shown in 2001 to have been based on a brief, legendary Passio that neither dates Alban's martyrdom nor locates it in any named town. In that Passio, Alban is a pagan who during a persecution takes the place of a hunted Christian and is publicly executed on 21. June at a walled town; accompanying miracles cause the presiding official to halt the persecution and the admiring multitude to become Christians. An interpolation from after 445/46 records a visit by St. Germanus of Auxerre to Alban's martyrial basilica.
Gildas identifies Alban as a man of Verulamium (now St Albans [Herts]); Bede says that Alban was martyred there. The Passio's topography corresponds reasonably well with that of late antique Verulamium and of the abbey dedicated to Alban that arose outside it. Verulamium's Roman wall has now been dated to the later third century. Later versions of the Passio give 22. June as Alban's _dies natalis_; St. Ado of Vienne and Usuard of Saint-Germain entered him in their martyrologies under this date.
With perhaps some interruptions, Alban's putative relics were enshrined at his abbey at St Albans from the late eighth century until its suppression in the sixteenth. Herewith links to two pages (pre-Conquest and post-Conquest to Dissolution) on the abbey's history, from William Page, ed., _A History of the County of Hertford_, vol. 4 (1914; reprinted., 1971):
http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=37956
http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=37957
In the later tenth century relics said to be Alban's were deposited in Köln's church of St. Pantaleon, which still keeps most of them them in the late twelfth-century reliquary shown here:
http://tinyurl.com/nvzet7
Father Réginald Grégoire, _Theofano. Una bizantina sul trono del sacro romano impero_ (Milano: Jaca Book, 2000), p. 133-35, advances the view that these relics at Köln were brought from Mainz (legendarily, they came from Rome), in which case they will have been attributed initially to yesterday's Alban of Mainz. From the relics in St. Pantaleon a thigh bone was transferred to St Michael's Abbey, Farnborough (Hants) in the 1950s and a smaller bone was transferred to St Albans in 2002.
Some period-pertinent images of St. Alban of England:
a) as depicted (scenes) by Matthew Paris, a monk of St Alban's Abbey, in an earlier thirteenth-century copy of his Anglo-Norman _Vie de seint Auban_ (ca. 1230-1240; Dublin, Trinity College, Ms 177 [formerly E. i. 40]):
1) Martyrdom (fol. 38r):
http://tinyurl.com/zkwcsun
2) Alban's head removed from the tree (fol. 38v):
http://tinyurl.com/j2splaq
3) Inventio of the relics under Offa, who presents them to the abbey:
http://tinyurl.com/zzf5fsw
b) as depicted (martyrdom) by Matthew Paris in an early, partly autograph manuscript of his _Chronica maiora_ (ca. 1240-1253; Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, Ms 26, fol. 58v):
http://tinyurl.com/lgzxgj
c) as depicted (martyrdom) in an earlier thirteenth-century psalter from St Alban's Abbey (ca. 1246-1260; London, BM, Ms. Royal 2 B VI, fol. 10v):
http://tinyurl.com/j5mee3m
d) as depicted in a mid-fifteenth-century glass window panel (betw. 1447 and 1463; prob. early 1450s) in the Beauchamp Chapel, Collegiate Church of St Mary, Warwick (photograph courtesy of Gordon Plumb):
https://www.flickr.com/photos/22274117@N08/4889790333/
Best,
John Dillon
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