Gregory the Great in a papal letter (Register 10.18) of 600, to Adeodatus, an abbot of Naples, deals with the union of two monasteries, one of them dedicated to *Sebastianus (martyr of Rome, S00400) in Naples (southern Italy). Written in Latin in Rome.
E06413
Literary - Letters
Gregory the Great (pope)
Pope Gregory the Great, Register of Letters 10.18
Extract from the opening of the letter:
Quorundam monachorum eiusdem monasterii ad nos relatione peruenit monachos monasterii Graterensis, quod situm in Plaia est, monasterio sancti Sebastiani, quod Neapolim in domo quondam Romani constructum est, ubi Deo miserante, sicut dictum est, abbatis geris officium, se monasteriumque suum uniri magnopere poposcisse, adeo ut cartas omnes eiusdem monasterii tuo monasterio, ut dicitur, tradidissent.
‘It has come to our attention through a report of certain monks of the same monastery, that monks of the monastery of Crateras, situated in Chiaia, have strongly demanded that they and their monastery should be united with the monastery of Saint Sebastianus. It has been said that it was constructed in the house of the late Romanus in Naples, and by God’s compassion you hold the office of abbot there. They want this so much that they have apparently handed over all that monastery's documents to your monastery.’
Text: Norberg 1982, vol. 2, 846.
Translation: Martyn 2004, vol. 3, 728.
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).
Frances Trzeciak
20/12/2020
| ID | Name | Name in Source | Identity | S00400 | Sebastianus, martyr of Rome | Sebastianus | Certain |
|---|
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