Gregory the Great in a papal letter (Register 8.23) of 598, to the defensor Fantinus, mentions a monastery dedicated to *Stephen (the First Martyr, S00030) in Agrigento (Sicily). Written in Latin in Rome.
Evidence ID
E06381
Type of Evidence
Literary - Letters
Major author/Major anonymous work
Gregory the Great (pope)
Pope Gregory the Great, Register of Letters 8.23
Extract from the opening of a letter to the defensor of the papal patrimony in Sicily, urging him to help in the conversion of some Jews of Agrigento:
Domina abbatissa monasterii sancti Stephani, quod in Agrigentino est territorio constitutum, indicante comperimus multos Iudaeorum ad christianam fidem diuina gratia inspirante uelle conuerti.
‘From a report by Domina, the abbess of the monastery of Saint Stephen, that is established in the territory of Agrigento, we learn that many Jews want to convert to the Christian faith, inspired by divine grace.’
Text: Norberg 1982, vol. 2, 543.
Translation: Martyn 2004, vol. 2, 518, adapted.
Cult Places
Cult building - monastic
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
30/11/2020
| ID | Name | Name in Source | Identity | S00030 | Stephen, the First Martyr | Stephanus | Certain |
|---|
Please quote this record referring to its author, database name, number, and, if possible, stable URL:
Frances Trzeciak, Cult of Saints, E06381 - http://csla.history.ox.ac.uk/record.php?recid=E06381