Per una “Basilicata sacra”. La santità patronale latina nel pieno Medioevo acheruntino: quattro casi di studio

Organized into five chapters, the thesis essentially focuses on the study of four figures of patron saints whose cults had vast fortune in the high and late medieval age within the context of the metropolis of Acerenza, that was the beating heart of the region and the embryonic nucleus of what would later become the identity of Basilicata: Gerardo bishop and confessor (in Potenza), Canio bishop and martyr and Laverio martyr (in Acerenza) and Eustachio martyr (in Matera). In this work, other saints not strictly linked to cultic phenomena rooted in the metropolitan area have been deliberately neglected, such as Guglielmo da Vercelli, whose cult is linked to the abbey of Montevergine and its dependencies and Giovanni da Matera, whose fortune follows that of the monasteries headed by Pulsano. We have decided to exclude all the saints from our analysis, albeit with latin hagiographies belonging to the Italo-Greek cultural milieu, such as Vitale da Castronuovo, as well as the complex Micaelic phenomenon, which responds to cultural logics of wider geographical scope and older genesis. In order to remedy the meager documentary consistency, the characters considered were, in the conclusions, subjected to comparison with other "exceptional dead" whose hagiographic characteristics present traits useful for better delineating the Lucanian sanctorale, and whose dossiers have interesting affinities with the four patrons chosen as case studies: we refer to saints such as Albert of Montecorvino, Secondino and Eleuterio of Troia, Cataldo of Taranto, Nicola Pellegrino of Trani, Riccardo of Andria, Roger of Canne, and others. After an introductory chapter useful for quickly contextualizing the discussion from a geo-political point of view and laying down the methodological premises at the basis of the choices made, the attention of the discussion first focuses on the inventio of the relics of Canio in Acerenza, in 1080 (as attested Lupo Protospata), with the related reconstruction of the cathedral, an event that should be read from the point of view of the "ecclesiastical conquest" carried out by the Normans from the 11th century onwards, supported by the archbishop Arnaldo, a Norman character closely linked to the reformed Roman circles, whose primary objective was to bring back to the pontifical bed a diocese which for a long time had been in the sights, albeit almost purely unrealistic, of the greek metropolitans of Otranto. Also interesting is the story, most likely written in Acerenza during the eleventh century, of the translatio of the relics, which would have taken place, according to the antiquing and therefore ennobling perspective of the text, in 799 by the hand of Bishop Leo who, eager to go on pilgrimage in Jerusalem, he would have left the diocese in the care of the new patron Canio, whose remains lay abandoned in Atella: the whole story can be read through the hagiographic categories of the furtum sacrum (as the story of the theft of Laverio's mortal remains also reveals) , or, more likely, it would be the result of a well-concerted cult re-functionalization operation between the Benedictine monastery of San Lorenzo di Aversa (which found fertile ground for expansion in the territory of the Lucanian metropolis) and the count of Acerenza Asclettino of the Drengot family (notoriously linked to Aversa), obviously directed by the well-known Arnaldo. About saint Laverio of Grumento we have a passio enriched by a whole series of information on the relics and on the laverian cult: we decided to include him in our study as his cult also had important ramifications in the metropolitan caput (of which he is a patron together with the martyr Mariano) where, according to the traditional story, his relics were transferred from Grumento, destroyed by the Saracen invasions: they would have been transported to Acerenza (in the church of San Giovanni Battista) in two phases, by the bishops Rodolfo and Leo III , in the second half of the ninth century, while another part, i.e. the sacred head, would have been taken by the bishop of Satrianum (a diocese that survived until the modern age), from where it was then transported to nearby Tito town, after the Muslim destruction. Apart from the questions relating to the reconstruction of the small church of Grumento dedicated to the martyr by Luca di Armento after the devastation of Agarene, and putting aside the problems linked to the persistence of the cult even in areas well outside the confines of the metropolis of Acerenza (such as in Teggiano, Ripacandida, Laurignano and San Marco Argentano), from the point of view of our study we have tried to focus on the problem of the gradual transfer of the see of Grumento to the city of Marsico (from the twelfth century onwards) to the detriment of the nearby Saponara town (today Grumento Nova): the story is a harbinger of interesting clues on the instrumental revitalization of the cult of Laverio in Satrianum and Acerenza, from the late Middle Ages onwards. About Gerardo we have an hagiographical biography (the Vita Gerardi) composed, according to tradition, by bishop Manfredi, direct disciple of the patron saint of Potenza, but, as already argued by Racioppi and the bollandists, in all probability it is a text composed or at least interpolated long after the traditional date of death of the saint (according to Giuseppe Rendina in 1119), presumably in conjunction with the translation of his relics in 1250 by the will of bishop Oberto, or later still, following the Angevin revenge subsequent the battle of Tagliacozzo or the earthquake of 1273. The debate on his canonization is still open, but in fact a solemn sanction which took place however only verbally thanks to the concession of pope Callistus II in 1123 or 1124 seems suspicious, considering the contemporary ecclesiological context; the nearby case of Nicola Pellegrino in Trani, however, of which we possess a perhaps authentic excerpt from the canonization bull of 1097, keeps the debate alive. Finally, with regard to Matera, we cannot avoid considering the figure of its secondary patron Eustachio, a martyr of the second century, whose hagiography (the Acta Eustachii), originally in greek, dates back to the eighth century at least, being cited by Giovanni Damasceno in the third Oratio de imaginibus. According to the reconstructions of various scholars of the modern age, his cult would have been born in Matera either in conjunction with the Muslim siege of 984 (according to Volpe who refers to the archpriest of the cathedral Giovan Francesco De Blasiis, who died in 1658) or more probably 994 (as Protospata attests) or during the epidemic of 1656 (according to a document in the private archive of the Gattini family, kept in the State Archives of Matera), but scientifically the key to interpreting the rise and institutionalization of the cult of Eustachio must be sought from the point of view of the diffusion of latin monasticism in the late Lombard and Norman age: the Benedictines in fact dedicated the abbey church to him, which served as the mother church until the construction of the new cathedral, in the XIII century, when the city was raised to the rank of diocese. However, the considerable difficulties relating to the "de-symbolization" of a conspicuously legendary hagiography remain; another problem is then linked to the fact that the cult of this martyr was widespread throughout Christianity, which makes difficult to contextualize it and grasp its specifically local characteristics, except in the modern age, when it became secondary to the competitive one of the Madonna della Bruna. In the conclusions we come to see how the interpretative prism used in the work effectively showed how even within the territories of present-day Basilicata the balance of religious power was substantially dependent on hierarchical decisions (and it is no wonder given the chronological context), and also depended on inventiones (Canio at Acerenza) or translationes (Gerard and Canio) of holy bodies, often carried out within the same church in which they had already been deposited, and sometimes turning into actual more or less forced thefts, or even from dedications/rededications of churches (Eustachio in Matera and Gerardo in Potenza, while the cathedral of Acerenza was dedicated to the co-titular Canio only in the modern age). It is no coincidence that the by far more fortunate model is that of the holy bishop, dedicated to asceticism according to the catalog of virtues already well established in the sixth century (chaste, humble, patient, etc.) and fervent in prayer, especially in night vigils. If therefore in the cura animarum conforming to models of the 11th-12th century the saints of Basilicata did not excel, accusing their hagiographies of a debt to older, "eternalized" and therefore substantially inactive models (which could in any case be considered as a peculiar datum), as far as the miraculous aspect is concerned, however, they seem to keep up with the times, or rather they seem to refer to the literary-theological orientations quite widespread in the contemporary southern milieu. A holiness still underdeveloped in its evangelical-pastoral component, or at least reformed (as in the case of the founders Giovanni da Matera and Guglielmo da Vercelli, to remain in the South), therefore, is that of the patrons analyzed, tendentially clerical and traditional, in a word conservative. Furthermore, Arnaldo's project concerned Canio and Eustachio, while the cults for Gerardo and Laverio developed later, and are therefore totally late medieval, grown from more ancient latent roots in orality, but flourished and arrived late at liturgical officiality. However, our study cases are not alone, as demonstrated by the various Apulian and Campanian saints, and this reinforces the perception of a cultural exchange with different but similar areas, in a state and ecclesial structure tending, albeit extremely slowly, to homogeneity. Ultimately, the cultural models of the high Middle Ages in Acerenza and therefore in Basilicata developed extending well beyond the limits of the Norman-Swabian era. By this we mean that the full characterization, the ultimate fulfillment of the designs implemented by the clerical hierarchies who commissioned the hagiographical texts or who sponsored the translations analyzed, went well beyond the period we are examining: it is natural and desirable that a cult remains alive by surpassing the period in which he was born, but in our case it was a birth spread over the course of a few centuries, from the 11th to the 14th, or even, if we consider Laverio’s case, up to the 17th! Some of the cases of comparison examined in the final chapter could constitute a reinforcement of this thesis, as they were the subject of late and radical revitalizations too, if not of constructions made from scratch during the final part of the Middle Ages and the first portion of the modern age. Unfortunately we still don't know many of the faces who carried on, through ups and downs, these new or recovered cults, and in this regard the edition of the parchments still kept in the archives of Acerenza (by now scanned and currently available online), Potenza (today partially viewable on the monasterium.net site) and Matera (in which case the numerous chronicles still unpublished must also be considered), or in the State Archives of Naples and in the library of the Neapolitan Society of Storia Patria, relating especially to cathedral chapters, where those ecclesial decisions were actually made whose results are partly recognizable, even after centuries, in the fortune or otherwise of certain holy figures. Finally, although we have not found significant concordances at a strictly textual and ecdotic level with the hagiographical compilations of neighboring saints, specific philological insights dedicated to each individual text could give interesting and useful results for establishing relationships of genetic dependence with the literary sources of the patron saints of Basilicata.