Gregory the Great in a papal letter (Register 3.56) of 593, to Secundinus, bishop of Taormina (Sicily), orders that a baptistry in a monastery dedicated to *Andrew (the Apostle, S00288) in his diocese be closed and the font be replaced by an altar. Written in Latin in Rome.
Evidence ID
E06346
Type of Evidence
Literary - Letters
Major author/Major anonymous work
Gregory the Great (pope)
Pope Gregory the Great, Register of Letters 3.56
Extract from the opening of the letter:
Pridem praecepimus ut de monasterio sancti Andreae quod est super Mascalas baptisterium propter monachorum insolentias debuisset auferri, atque in eodem loco quo fontes sunt altare fundari.
‘Long ago we gave orders that the baptistry should be removed from the monastery of Saint Andrew above Mascalae, because of the insolence of the monks, and that an altar should be built in the same place where the fonts are.’
Text: Norberg 1982, vol. 1, 204-5.
Translation: Martyn 2004, vol. 1 277.
Cult PlacesCult building - dependent (chapel, baptistery, etc.)
Protagonists in Cult and NarrativesEcclesiastics - bishops
Cult building - dependent (chapel, baptistery, etc.)
Altar
Cult building - monastic
Protagonists in Cult and NarrativesEcclesiastics - bishops
Ecclesiastics - monks/nuns/hermits
Source
Gregory's Register is a collection of some 854 of his letters as pope, collected into 14 books (each book representing an indictional year of his pontificate, from 1 September to 31 August) of varied length and deriving from the file-copies that were made in Rome and kept in the papal archive. The original copies survived into the ninth century, but were subsequently lost; from the late eighth century onwards, however, because of the exceptional stature that Gregory had by then attained, various collections of his letters were assembled from the original copies (the largest under Pope Hadrian I at the end of the eighth century), and these constitute the Register as we have it today.The Register does not contain all the letters that Gregory despatched as pope, since in some of those whose text survives there are references to other letters, wholly lost; but the collection we have is unique from the late antique period, and only matched in quantity and range of subjects by the registers of high-medieval popes. Recipients range from papal administrators, through prominent churchmen and aristocrats, to kings and the imperial family, and treat a wide variety of topics, from mundane administrative affairs of the papal patrimony to deep theological and moral considerations.
For the cult of saints, there is much that is of interest in the letters, but two particular concentrations of evidence stand out. The first is a clutch of around a dozen letters that mention requests for relics from Rome, or that accompanied small personal relics as gifts to influential correspondents. The second concentration of evidence relates to the dedications of churches and other ecclesiastical institutions in southern Italy, Sicily and Sardinia. Because the papacy owned extensive estates in these regions, and exercised particular authority there, many of Gregory's letters mention churches and other ecclesiastical institutions, by the name of the saint to whom they were dedicated, thereby providing us with a rich panorama of the spread of both local and imported saintly cults.
Gregory's Register has been the subject of two substantial critical editions: the first by Ewald and Hartmann for the Monumenta Germaniae Historica; the second by Dag Norberg for Corpus Christianorum. The numbering of the letters is often the same in both editions, but it can differ, because Norberg removed letters (and other passages) that appear to have been added at a later date to the original Register, assigning them instead to Appendices. We have used Norberg's numbering, which is that now generally used.
Bibliography
Edition:Ewald, P. and L.M. Hartmann (eds), Gregorii I papae Registrum epistolarum, 2 vols. (Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Epistolae I and II, Berlin 1891 and 1899).
Norberg, D., S. Gregorii Magni, Registrum epistularum. 2 vols. (Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 140-140A; Turnhout: Brepols, 1982).
English translation:
Martyn, J.R.C., The Letters of Gregory the Great, 3 vols. (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2004).
Further Reading:
Neil, B., and Dal Santo, M. (eds.), A Companion to Gregory the Great (Leiden: Brill, 2013).
Record Created By
Frances Trzeciak
Date of Entry
20/10/2018
| ID | Name | Name in Source | Identity | S00288 | Andrew, the Apostle | Andreas | Certain |
|---|
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