Martin of Tours

Ko je včeraj k meni prišlo več menihov, je med številnimi zgodbami in dolgim pogovorom nekdo omenil tudi knjižico, ki sem jo napisal o življenju blaženega moža Martina. Z zadovoljstvom sem slišal, da jo mnogi pozorno prebirajo. Nato pa sem izvedel, da je nekdo na pobudo hudega duha vprašal, zakaj je bil Martin, ki je obudil mrtve in odgnal plamene od bivališč, v požaru pred kratkim sam opečen in podvržen nevarnemu trpljenju.

Nesrečnik, kdorkoli že je! V njegovih besedah lahko prepoznamo zahrbtnost velikih duhovnikov,2 ki so takole zmerjali križanega Gospoda: »Druge je rešil, sebe pa ne more rešiti.« Resnično, ko bi bil ta človek, kdorkoli že je, rojen v tistih časih, bi proti Gospodu bržkone govoril z enakim glasom, s kakršnim zdaj izreka bogokletje proti Gospodovemu svetniku.

P-Ln Alcobaça 334/CCCII (c. 1175) is an outstanding example of a Portuguese manuscript from the Middle Ages. This is principally because it contains a formidable bibliographical corpus associated with the cults of Martin of Tours (ff. 1r-103v) and St James the Greater (ff. 103v-215v). Contrary to what might be expected, Alc. 334 has been little studied, and therefore still raises many questions: Where was it copied? In what circumstances did it arrive in Alcobaça? When did this happen? Focusing on its Jacobean content, what degree of affinity does it show with the Codex Calixtinus? And what distinguishes it from the Compostellanus? From a musicological perspective, Alc. 334 transmits the texts of two chants in honour of St James: the processional hymn Salve festa dies Iacobi and the conductus Ad honorem regis summi. Since the Codex Calixtinus incorporates a significantly higher number of musical pieces, what reasons could have lain behind such a restricted selection? What was its intention? This article aims to respond to these questions from a multidisciplinary approach encompassing fields of study such as historiography, liturgy, philology and palaeography, in addition to musicology, with the purpose of contributing to a better knowledge of the manuscript. Amongst its main conclusions, it will show the close link that joins Alc. 334 with the Legendarium de Sanctis per circulum anni (Alc. 418 to 422).

Against the backdrop of 13th century cultural history, the study examines the function of legendary narrative in Christian identity formation. Martyrdom, war, and conversion are the basic narratives in negotiating religious opposition to heathendom. These stories were handed down from the early beginnings of Christianity and specifically updated in the context of crusades and missions.

Formen und Funktionen des legendarischen Erzählens rücken in den letzten Jahren verstärkt in den Fokus der mediävistischen Forschung, wobei zumeist die Figur des oder der Heiligen im Zentrum steht. Nicht systematisch untersucht worden ist hingegen der Umstand, dass das Erzählen von Heiligen sich häufig mit dem Heidentum auseinandersetzt und viele Heilige gerade durch diese Auseinandersetzung ihr charakteristisches Profil gewinnen. Diese Lücke füllt die vorliegende Arbeit, wenn sie anhand eines breiten Korpus von lateinischen und volkssprachigen Legenden des 13. Jahrhunderts (vor allem aus ›Legenda aurea‹ und ›Passional‹, dazu etliche Einzellegenden auch aus dem höfischen Kontext) nach dem Zusammenhang von christlichen Heiligkeitsmodellen und der Aushandlung des religiösen Gegensatzes zum Heidentum fragt. Martyrium, Krieg und Konversion erweisen sich dabei als grundlegende Formen narrativer wie diskursiver Selbstvergewisserung des Christentums, die im kulturgeschichtlichen Zusammenhang der Kreuzzüge sowie der Neubegründung der Mission eine spezifische Aktualisierung erfahren – ein wichtiger Beitrag zur Bedeutung legendarischer Texte für die christliche Identitätsbildung und die religiöse Kultur des Mittelalters.

The Vita Martini by Sulpicius Severus (363 – 425 AD) was a major model for all later Latin hagiographical works. This converted aristocrat created an oeuvre that could live up to the high standards of classical prose. The Vita is a highly intertextual work with countless references to the Greek and the Latin Classics, to earlier hagiographical works and to the Bible. Sulpicius constructed Martin’s “imitatio Christi” in such a way that he almost presented him as a second Christ. The Life was also clearly apologetic: Martin was highly controversial in his own time, amongst other things because he was baptized as a soldier and should therefore not have been ordained as a cleric. This chapter focusses on the Biblical stylization of the iconic scene of the division of the cloak (capa / capella) including the scorn Martin suffered for wearing half a cloak, and the ensuing apparition of Christ in the beggar’s half. It connects Martin’s charity to both the “imitatio Christi” and the “Apologia Martini”. Sulpicius constructed the whole scene as an inversion of what the Roman soldiers in the passion narrative had done unto Jesus. Martin’s “redemptio militiae” was earned by doing unto one of the least the opposite of what the Romans had done unto Christ. As such he had always been the perfect “miles Christi”.

The present article discusses how, in the legend of Martin of Tours, one of the most popular and significant saints in the history of the latin Church, two different forms of figthing are contrasted: profane military warfare in the service of the Emperor, on the one hand, and spiritual struggle for God, on the other. Both of these concepts are presented in a shared „language of violence“. The legend thus can be seen as an example of the specific narrative constellation of soldier saints, that is to say martyrs who were soldiers, as well as a realization of the early Christian metaphor of the „militia Christi“. The article examines how the semantic potentials of a language of violence are realized in the Late Antique ‚Vita sancti Martini’ and how they were continued in the medieval versions in the ‚Legenda aurea’ and the Middle High German ‚Passional’, in defense of the imperial claims to military service on the one hand, and in the life of Martin as a saint on the other. As the article shows that while the metaphorical meaning of the phrase, „fighting for God“, is always preserved, this metaphor has often also been used as as starting point for attempts at legitimizing actual, physical violence in the name of God. The paper concludes with a set of systematic reflections on, first, the structural connections between religion and a language of violence, and the contextual conditions for their metaphorical or concrete use

The Late Antiquity was the time of transition of the Roman Empire. After the Edict of Milan  proclaimed by Constantine the Great, Christians didn't have to practice their religion secretly anymore, yet a strange phenomenon arose not much earlier before. This phenomenon called anachoresis lasts till today and fascinates people, despite their religious beliefs. The aim of this article is to observe how current is the ancient understanding of anachoresis today and explain if reasons pushing people into have been similar or not. I shall take my readers for a journey through the life of first eremites, the archaeological data from the late antique/ early medieval hermitage in Egypt and modern eremites, and like with the thread of Ariadne, to find an answer to given question in the end of labyrinth of doubts.

Cet article se propose de démontrer que le texte connu depuis le Moyen Âge sous le titre de « Confession de saint Martin » a été rédigé à la fin du VIIIe siècle. C’est ce que semble prouver la comparaison entre le texte et son hypertexte, à savoir des écrits de Benoît d’Aniane d’une part et du pseudo-Alcuin/Jean de Fécamp d’autre part. Cette concordance permet certainement de rapporter une partie du texte de Jean de Fécamp, que l’on date du XIe siècle, à la fin du VIIIe siècle. La Vita Reverentii, hagiographie normande de date incertaine, aurait alors à son tour emprunté au pseudo-Martin un long passage. Le contenu, les sources et l’origine géographique du texte du pseudo-Martin peuvent indiquer qu’il a été produit dans le contexte de la controverse adoptianiste, dans laquelle l’autorité de saint Martin, patron des Francs par excellence, connu pour avoir été persécuté par les Ariens, pouvait être mobilisée à grand profit.

This article aims to show that the so-called "Confession of saint Martin" was written at the end of the 8th c. It is the result of a comparison of the Confession with its supposed hypertext (Benedict of Aniane and parts of pseudo-Alcuin/Jean of Fécamp's Confessio fidei, which needs a proper edition). A hagiography from Normandy of uncertain datation, the "Vita Reverentii",  has borrowed a piece of the Confession of saint Martin at some point (probably the 11th c.). According to its content, sources and origins, it is likely that the Confessio was written in the context of the Adoptianist quarrel, in which the Franks may have found that the authority of their patron, Martin, who had written nothing but had been persecuted by Arians, was unfortunately missing.

Christianity is a religion that preached non-violence throughout its history.  Did Christianity affect Roman society, which had strong violent traditions? In a time period that involved as much violence and war as the apocalyptic years of later Roman history, how did Christianity cope.

This research aims to reconstruct the stages and the reasons by which the members of a late-antique group of social protest, the Bagaudae, became the subject of a martyrdom cult, developed between the Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. During the last decades of the third century, in the Gaul countryside between the Seine and the Loire, a series of uprisings came to life to overthrow the Roman social–economic organization. Literary sources, which are supported by some archaeological and numismatic evidences, describe the rising of a movement of latrones mainly formed by peasants, who rebelled against the large landowners in an organized regular army. The Bagaudae, only temporarily disappeared after the military campaign launched by Maximian, appear again both in Gaul and in Spain (especially in Tarraconense) during the first decades of the fifth century, before being finally defeated. The interpretation of the history of Bagaudae, however, has undergone a radical transformation starting in the centuries immediately after the insurrections. If contemporary sources represent an array of peasants dedicated to subversive activities and unrelated to any religious purpose, this scene, following the path traced by some hagiographies written between Late Antiquity and Early Middle Ages, appears radically changed: the rebels, in fact, are gradually assimilated to a group of Christian martyrs. The main episode illustrating the beginning of this rethinking is kept in the Vita sancti Martini of Sulpicius Severus and repeated, not without significant changes, in subsequent versions of Paulinus of Périgueux and Venantius Fortunatus. During the campaign undertaken by Martin of Tours against the pagan cults recurs the narration of the meeting between the future bishop and a ghost, evoked by the monk, which the rural population of the Loire worshipped with a cult considered suspicious. The ghost, questioned by Martin, claims to be a latro, wrongly venerated as a martyr. Jacques Fontaine was the first one who identified in this figure a possible member of the Bagaudae of the third century. Although in later centuries not so few sources recreate a substantially negative memory of the movement, some early medieval hagiographies – especially two reworkings of Passio Acaunensium martyrum by Eucherius of Lyon, recorded as “X2” and “X1” – suggest, instead, the consolidation of this new model. The idea of “Christian Bagaudae”, perhaps partly anticipated by Salvian’s De gubernatione Dei and by Constantius’ Vita Germani, emerges explicitly only in the eleventh century – in the anonymous Vita sancti Baboleni, where late acient Bagaudae are assimilated to martyrs while their commanders, Amandus and Aelianus, are defined as «christianae cultores fidei» –, before desappearing from subsequent literary production. The origin of this path, which seems to be traceable within the oldest western monastic experiences (like those of Primuliacum and Lerins), began from the reflection about the value of martyrdom “cum et sine cruore” and the cult of the saints, and then getting further gain by the intense activity of monastic scriptoria. The outcome of this unique mix between a profound theological rethinking about the figure of the martyr and a persistent literary reworking fostered the birth of the idea of “Christian Bagaudae”. Furthermore, the concept of “martyrium cum cruore” probably kept on playing a central role in some West Christian communities even after the religious policy of Constantine. This element, useful to understand better the primitive definition of the relationships between the Empire and the so-called “Great Church”, finds a corresponding manifesto in the contemporary story of Roman North Africa Circumcelliones, whose “martyrdom theology” seems extremely similar to that one of the Gallic Christians who gave life to the worship of the “martyr–latro”.

This article examines the development of the anonymous Old English
homily for Martinmas throughout the ninth and tenth centuries. In
particular, the work focuses on how the homily was reshaped during
its transmission to conform to the differing thematic approaches
that individual Anglo-Saxon scribes took while “copying” the text.
After situating the context of the Sulpician Martiniana in early
England, the author explores the thematic patterns evident in the
anonymous Old English homily’s selective translation of Sulpicius’s
Vita S. Martini and Epistulae. It is demonstrated that the later Anglo-
Saxon copier’s removal of the diving waterfowl episode is explicable
as consistent with his thematic retelling of Martin’s life, which
excludes the saint’s exorcist activities. In addition to offering an
explanation for the episode’s omission, the article argues that
modern editors should treat the extant versions of the Martinmashomily
as two distinct textual traditions.

"Some Observations on the Iconography of the Ambrosian Saint Bishops in the 14th-Century Berlin-Milan Martyrologium"

The Ambrosian Berlin-Milan Psalter, Hymnarium and Martyrologium (Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett – Staatliche Museen, 78 C 16 and Milano, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, P 165 sup., ff. 1r-21v) is a quite unknown and abundantly illuminated 14th-century Milan manuscript. It encloses 15 illuminations in the Psalter and in the Hymnarium, along with 123 historiated pages in the Martyrologium. The miniatures are to be considered the work of the illuminator named the Pantheon Master and of his workshop. Among the numerous saints recorded, the Martyrologium displays also 19 former bishops of Milan and for eight of them – Dionigi, Materno, Calimero, Simpliciano, Mona, Magno, Castriziano e Ambrogio – there is also a brief hagiographic text and a miniature. These types of depictions are quite rare, and seemingly not previously documented. The non-common iconographies, indeed, are related mainly to the Martyrologium text and, sometimes, also to other hagiographical texts. The paper describes also the complex iconography of St. Martin, which was not bishop of Milan but had a huge worship in its diocese. From a stylistic point of view, the Berlin-Milan miniatures are close to the illuminations of other two manuscripts: a Godfrey of Viterbo’s Pantheon (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, lat. 4895), made for Azzone Visconti, and a St. Augustine’s De civitate Dei (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, lat. 2066) realized for Bruzio Visconti. The latter can be dated before 1336, thanks to the absence of a heraldic detail in Bruzio’s coat of arms, which, instead, is present in other two Bruzio’s manuscripts (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, lat. 6467, and Città del Vaticano, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. lat. 2194) decorated by the Master of 1346. As a consequence, the three manuscripts decorated by the Pantheon Master are likely to be dated between 1331 (the year recorded in the Pantheon code) and 1336.

15. Dezember 2017: Vortrag im Rahmen des interdisziplinären Workshops 'Towards a Digital Narratology of Space' des Philologischen Seminar Tübingen und der Digital Humanities an der Universtität Stuttgart (Freitag, 15. Dezember 2017, Tübingen, Keplerstraße 2, Raum 181)

Sever predragemu bratu Dezideriju. Odločil sem se, ljubi brat, da knjižico, ki sem jo napisal o življenju svetega Martina, zaprem v njen papirus in shranim za zidovi svojega doma. Tako sem sklenil, ker sem po naravi zelo negotov in bi se rad izognil človeški sodbi, da ne bi, kot se bo bržkone zgodilo, moj neizbrušeni jezik bralcev zmotil, jaz pa bi nato obveljal za vrednega splošne graje, češ da sem se predrzno lotil snovi, ki bi morala biti prihranjena za izurjene pisce. Toda ti si me znova in znova prosil, jaz pa ti nisem mogel odreči. Je sploh kaj takega, kar bi odrekel tvoji ljubezni, čeprav na račun lastne sramežljivosti?

Zato sem ustvaril to knjižico in se pri tem zanašam nate v prepričanju, da je ne boš pokazal nikomur, saj si tako obljubil. Vseeno pa se bojim, da boš ti zanjo predstavljal nekakšna vrata, in ko bo enkrat zunaj, je ne bo mogoče priklicati nazaj. Če se bo to zgodilo in se ti bo zdelo primerno, da jo prebere še kdo, te prosim, poskrbi, da bodo bralci bolj pozorni na dejanja v njej kot na besede, ki jih posredujejo. Naj potrpijo, če jih bo v ušesih zbodel pomanjkljiv slog, saj božje kraljestvo ne stoji na zgovornosti, temveč na veri. Spomnijo naj se tudi, da odrešenja svetu niso oznanili govorniki (če bi bilo koristno, bi namreč Gospod lahko ubral tudi to pot), temveč ribiči.

Starting from a brief inspection of the Priscillianist controversy, here analyzed for its paradigmatic value, this paper aims to examine the path that characterized, between IV and VI centuries, the gradual consolidation of some episcopal sees in the West (Rome and Milan, partially Tours) to the detriment of others (such as Cordoba, Trier, and Avila). This trajectory has highlighted the ability of the former to get involved with the choices of civil power and to impose on other sees their own doctrinal decisions, crucial situations to further illuminate the journey that began with the emerging of the leading churches and culminated in the configuration of the pentarchy during the Justinian age

ABSTRACT This article examines the development of the anonymous Old English homily for Martinmas throughout the ninth and tenth centuries. In particular, the work focuses on how the homily was reshaped during its transmission to conform to the differing thematic approaches that individual Anglo-Saxon scribes took while “copying” the text. After situating the context of the Sulpician Martiniana in early England, the author explores the thematic patterns evident in the anonymous Old English homily's selective translation of Sulpicius's Vita S. Martini and Epistulae. It is demonstrated that the later Anglo-Saxon copier's removal of the diving waterfowl episode is explicable as consistent with his thematic retelling of Martin's life, which excludes the saint's exorcist activities. In addition to offering an explanation for the episode's omission, the article argues that modern editors should treat the extant versions of the Martinmas-homily as two distinct textual traditions.