Gregory the Great in a papal letter (Register 9.45) of 598, to Bishops Iohannes of Sorrento, Agnellus of Terracina, Felix of Portus, Fortunatus of Naples, Primenius of Nocera, Gloriosus of Ostia and Albinus of Formia (all near Rome or in Campania, southern Italy), requests contact relics (sanctuaria) of martyrs buried in their dioceses, for a church to be built by Gregorius, former praefectus praetorio. Written in Latin in Rome.
Evidence ID
E06387
Type of Evidence
Literary - Letters
Major author/Major anonymous work
Gregory the Great (pope)
Pope Gregory the Great, Register of Letters 9.45
Full text of the letter (omitting only the long list of addressees):
Gloriosus filius noster Gregorius expraefectus sanctuaria beatorum martyrum in diocesis uestrae locis quiescentium sibi postulat debere concedi, in quorum honorem basilicam propriis sumptibus aedificari desiderat. Et ideo, fratres carissimi, praefati desideriis ex nostra uos praeceptione conuenit oboedire, ut deuotionis suae in consecratione quam postulat potiatur effectum.
'Our glorious son, Gregory, the ex-prefect, asks that relics (sanctuaria) should be granted him of blessed martyrs who rest in places within your dioceses, in whose honour he wishes to built a basilica at his own expense. And so, my very dear brothers, at our command, you should meet the wishes of this man, so that in the consecration which he requests he should obtain the achievement of his devotion.'
Text: Norberg 1982, vol. 2, 604.
Translation: Bryan Ward-Perkins.
Cult PlacesCult building - unspecified
Non Liturgical ActivityContact relic - cloth
Protagonists in Cult and NarrativesEcclesiastics - bishops
Cult building - unspecified
Cult building - independent (church)
Non Liturgical ActivityConstruction of cult buildings
RelicsContact relic - cloth
Collections of multiple relics
Transfer, translation and deposition of relics
Protagonists in Cult and NarrativesEcclesiastics - bishops
Officials
Other lay individuals/ people
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.
Discussion
Gregory, a former praefectus praetorio, had been a major figure in the Byzantine administration of Italy. Unfortunately we do not know where he planned to build this basilica, nor which the saints were, of whom he sought relics. Given the dioceses from which the relics were sought, the church was presumably to be built in the area of Campania or southern Latium.The use of the term sanctuaria strongly suggests that the relics mentioned here were contact relics, made by placing a piece of cloth in close contact with the grave of the saint. For more detail about the process, see E00615 and E00617, and on the word, McCulloh 1976, 158-165.
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). [Martyn's translation of this particular letter, Register 9.45, is erroneous.]
Further Reading:
Dal Santo, M., Debating the Saints' Cult in the Age of Gregory the Great (Oxford: OUP, 2012).
McCulloh, J., "The Cult of Relics in the Letters and Dialogues of Gregory the Great," Traditio 32 (1976), 145-184.
Neil, B., and Dal Santo, M. (eds.), A Companion to Gregory the Great (Leiden: Brill, 2013).
Pietri, C. and Pietri, L., Prosopographie chrétienne du Bas-Empire, 2 Prosopographie de l’Italie chrétienne (313-604), 2 vols. (École française de Rome, 1999 and 2000), vol. 1, 951-952, 'Gregorius 12'.
Record Created By
Frances Trzeciak
Date of Entry
30/11/2020
| ID | Name | Name in Source | Identity | S00060 | Martyrs, unnamed or name lost | Certain |
|---|
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