medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
According to most early sources for him (these are not especially early) Linus was the first bishop of Rome after Peter. (Since the earliest testimony to Christian church organization, e.g. Acts, doesn't present the apostles as bishops of particular places, Linus may have been the first bishop of Rome _tout court_.) Irenaeus (_Adv. haer._ 3. 3. 13) identifies him with the Linus of 2 Tim 4:21. The Liberian Catalogue dates his pontificate to the years 56-67; Jerome places it in the years 67-78. Linus is named in the Roman and the Ambrosian Canons of the Mass. He was venerated medievally as a martyr. Traditional Catholics still think of him as one. In the legendary Passio of Sts. Nazarius and Celsus (BHL 6039-6050; BHG 1323-1324) and in its offshoot in the _Legenda aurea_, Nazarius was baptized by Linus.
Linus' Vita in the Liber Pontificalis says that he was Tuscan. The late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century papal official and polymath Raffaele Maffei asserted in his _Commentariorum rerum urbanarum_ (finished, 1506) that Linus came from Volterra (Maffei's native city). In 1519 Leo X granted Volterra an Office of Linus accepting as traditional his Volterran origin. Volterra's church of San Lino, endowed by Maffei (d. 1522), was built on a site purported to have been where Linus' family once dwelt.
Linus is the principal patron of the diocese of Volterra. Today (23. September) is Linus' feast day there and his day of commemoration in the Roman Martyrology. Byzantine-Rite churches number him among the Seventy Apostles and celebrate him on 5. November together with Sts. Patrobulus / Patrobas, Hermas, Gaius, and Philologus (medievally also observed on 4. November, as in the Synaxary of Constantinople).
Some period-pertinent images of St. Linus:
a) as depicted (at center; at left, Sts. Patrobulus and Hermas; at right, Sts. Gaius and Philologus) in the late tenth- or very early eleventh-century so-called Menologion of Basil II (Città del Vaticano, BAV, cod. Vat. gr. 1613, p. 160):
http://digi.vatlib.it/view/MSS_Vat.gr.1613/0182
http://tinyurl.com/htbvb26
b) as depicted (baptizing St. Nazarius) in a mid-fourteenth-century copy, from the workshop of Richard and Jeanne de Montbaston, of the _Legenda aurea_ in its French-language version by Jean de Vignay (1348; Paris, BnF, ms. Français 241, fol. 177r):
http://tinyurl.com/mpav34
c) as twice depicted in panels of an early fourteenth-century fresco (betw. 1300 and 1312; restored, 1885-1888) in the basilica of San Piero a Grado (San Petro ad Gradus Arnenses) in the Pisan _frazione_ of that name:
1) Officiating at St. Peter's funeral:
http://tinyurl.com/3qmw4z
2) Officiating at St. Paul's funeral:
http://tinyurl.com/4emvhh
d) as depicted (at left; at right, pope St. Cletus) in the Litanies section of a later fourteenth-century miscellany of mostly French-language devotional texts (betw. 1351 and 1400; Paris, BnF, Français 400 [Colbert 1432], fol. 28v):
http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b105258207/f58.item.r=.zoom
e) as depicted (right margin at top) in a hand-colored woodcut in the Beloit College copy of Hartmann Schedel's late fifteenth-century _Weltchronik_ (_Nuremberg Chronicle_; 1493) at fol. CVv:
https://www.beloit.edu/nuremberg/book/6th_age/left_page/9%20(Folio%20CVv).pdf
f) as portrayed in an earlier sixteenth-century glazed terracotta bust, probably by Benedetto di Buglione (d. 1521) and workshop, in Volterra's Museo diocesano d'arte sacra:
http://tinyurl.com/hkosnbg
Best,
John Dillon
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