medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
The very poorly documented Aurelia of Regensburg (Bl.; d. 1027, supposedly) has an elevated tomb from 1330 in Regensburg's ex-abbey church of St. Emmeram; its inscription calls her a princess. According to a local legend printed in 1581, she was a daughter of Hugh Capet who to avoid an arranged marriage fled to Regensburg and who with the permission of the abbot of St. Emmeram was allowed to live out her life as a recluse in that city's monastery of St. Andrew. Aurelia is said to have had Regensburg's bishop St. Wolfgang (d. 994) as her confessor and spiritual guide. German churches commemorate her on 15. October. Aurelia of Regensburg has yet to grace the pages of the Roman Martyrology.
An ancient Roman sarcophagus lid bearing the funerary inscription of an Aurelia who was the wife of one P. Aelius Silvanus (_CIL_, 3. 5960) used to be on display in the cloister of St. Emmeram. The humanistically educated historian Johann Aventin (d. 1534) relates in his _Bayrische Chronik_ how an uneducated canon interpreted this object to him as the gravestone of the virgin St. Aurelia. Whether, as some have surmised, the sarcophagus lid with its inscription was the source of Aurelia's late medieval and sixteenth-century cult is unknown (for a more certain instance of such an origin, cf. 17. October's St. Catervus of Tolentino).
Bl. Aurelia of Regensburg as portrayed in relief on her earlier fourteenth-century tomb:
http://tinyurl.com/qaqxyuc
http://tinyurl.com/ps9v2es
Detail views:
http://tinyurl.com/2b7yzhh
http://tinyurl.com/jdj48l7
Best,
John Dillon
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