Abstract
Pelagius is most famously known as the saint who was martyred by the tenth-century emir of Córdoba for not submitting to his advances. The story has fascinated historians of gender and sexuality for the ways in which it appears to challenge gendered standards of sanctity. But was this how Pelagius was remembered in the sources with which he was first venerated? This article looks beyond the hagiographical narrative that has mostly concerned historians to the existing liturgies for the saint as celebrated according to the Old Hispanic Rite, with a Mass and three distinct offices surviving in multiple manuscripts from early medieval Iberia. Close study of the liturgy reveals how liturgists consciously shaped the identity of Pelagius, borrowing materials and tropes from both male and female saints in order to anchor an unusual contemporary saint in old models.
Allegedly martyred as a boy in 925 or 926 at the hands of the Cordoban emir, then caliph, ʿAbd a-Raḥmān III (r. 929–61), saint Pelagius has captured the modern imagination thanks to his story’s seemingly unprecedented depiction of an attempted same-sex seduction in a hagiographical account.1 The details of his passio are well-known, if not universally interpreted in quite the same way.2 After his uncle, the Galician-Leonese bishop Ermogius, is captured by Muslim forces, Pelagius replaces him as a hostage in the emir’s Cordoban dungeons, remaining imprisoned there for more than three years. News of the youth’s beauty spreads throughout the court, and by then thirteen years old, he is summoned before the emir, who offers him riches beyond his imagining should he recognize the authority of the prophet Mohammed and renounce the Christian faith. When Pelagius refuses, the emir reaches playfully (ioculariter) for the boy, at which Pelagius recoils and calls him a dog, asking “do you think me effeminate, like your people?”3 This single line, the hinge of the story that sets Pelagius’s gory martyrdom in motion, has received considerable attention – coined as “the invention of sodomy” by at least one scholar – not least because it appears to feminize Pelagius by casting him in a role mostly the preserve of female martyr saints.4 Although it was not uncommon for female saints to be masculinized, the reverse was much less frequent, and male saints were not generally praised for maintaining their virginity in the face of sexual threats – especially from men – as Pelagius is in his passio.5 But was this the way Pelagius was remembered by those commemorating him when his cult started to develop?
It is essential to remember that hagiographical narratives were only one way that Christian congregations came to know about saints. When the passio was read out publicly on the saint’s feast, it was as part of a much larger liturgical celebration with many more chants, prayers and readings framing the delivery of the narrative. These additional elements were not incidental, but foundational to establishing the identity of a saint. Through carefully juxtaposed biblical texts and their explicit application to the saint in exegetical prayers, liturgists provided their own gloss on the saint’s story.6 In this way, liturgy provides essential insight into how Pelagius’s unusual story was received and interpreted by contemporary audiences. Because of the liturgy’s formulaic, prescriptive and often biblical nature, it has often been left aside in favor of the more dramatic, quasi-historical narratives.7 In a rare look at the mass texts for Pelagius, Mark Jordan concluded that the sexual content vividly portrayed in the original passio had been muted for a clerical, male, public, who would otherwise have been forced “to recall for worshipful memory the story of a man’s desire for a boy.”8 According to this reading, the liturgy would have purposely sanitized Pelagius’s story, and thus communicated a different picture of the saint to that constructed in his passio.
Examination of not just the mass but of three surviving offices for Pelagius found in unedited manuscripts reveals more ambiguity on these matters than Jordan allowed. Linked to different monastic and diocesan institutions on the Iberian Peninsula, these manuscripts reflect the celebration of Pelagius according to the Old Hispanic rite, the liturgical tradition celebrated in Iberia from approximately the sixth century until its replacement by the Roman rite in the late eleventh century.9 At least one manuscript was likely produced very soon after the mid-tenth-century passio, and the others in the century that followed. They constitute some of the earliest witnesses to the commemoration of Pelagius and are essential sources for grasping how Christians understood the saint. In this study, I propose to let these liturgical sources speak, in order to see how they intersect with the passio with which they were performed as part of Pelagius’s annual celebration, and what further nuance they add to his saintly identity. What emerges is that far from erasing the details of the passio, liturgists employed a variety of strategies to authorize Pelagius’s potentially unusual story, using male saints as well as female ones, as liturgical models. Although the different liturgical components represent separate stages of composition, when performed in combination, they would have transmitted an image of the saint that straddled and, therefore, challenged the gender binary. Liturgists thus updated an age-old story of female heroism for the medieval Iberian context in which it was performed.10
1 The Surviving Liturgical Evidence
Uncertainty surrounding its most widely studied source, the passio, obscures the origins of Pelagius’s cult. The text has often – if not conclusively – been attributed to a Cordoban priest named Raguel.11 Manuel Díaz y Díaz suggested that Raguel wrote the work shortly before the translation of Pelagius’s relics from the Cordoban churches of St. Genesius and St. Cyprian to León in 967. He argued that the move sparked a belated defensive interest on the part of Cordobans in “their” martyr.12 As Ann Christys has warned, however, there is nothing in the text itself to confirm that the author was an eyewitness, that he was from Córdoba, or that he was Raguel, who could have been just a copyist.13 The liturgy does not clarify the question any further. When one of the mass prayers locates Pelagius’s body in Córdoba, this is likely derived from the passio.14 Claims to Pelagius as “our patron” in the same and other liturgical texts do not necessarily link the text to Córdoba, either, as he had become the patron of numerous institutions in the Christian north, especially León and Galicia, already in the tenth century.15 Even the so-called Calendar of Córdoba does not confirm veneration of Pelagius in Córdoba in the late-tenth century, given that Pelagius’s feast only appears in a Latin translation that dates to, probably at the earliest, the late-twelfth century, and was made in Toledo.16 We must therefore allow for the possibility that Pelagius’s cult was first established in the north and that he was venerated only in the Christian kingdoms of the Peninsula.17
Whatever the origins of Pelagius’s cult, the surviving witnesses to its celebration are certainly all from the Christian north. These include the four surviving manuscripts containing his passio from the monasteries of Silos and Cardeña and three further liturgical sources (see Table 1, also for bibliography on each manuscript).18 In the liturgical sources, we find three separate and distinct offices for the saint, meaning material for the public services held at dusk (vespers) and dawn (matutinum; not to be confused with the night office of matins in the Franco-Roman tradition). By public, I mean that these services were, in theory, open to lay congregations and were (unique to the Old Hispanic tradition) celebrated in the same way in monastic and secular churches.19 Although the manuscripts feature different versions of the office for Pelagius, they all share the same mass for the saint, a service that would also have been open to the public (see Appendix 1 for the offices; the mass is edited). There are, in addition, a number of calendar entries that attest to his feast being widely celebrated in the Christian kingdoms on 26 June.20 These manuscripts all bear witness to the Old Hispanic rite, that is, the liturgical use of churches and monastic houses in Iberia practiced before ca. 1080, at which point the Roman rite was increasingly introduced in the peninsula.21
Manuscripts containing the liturgy for Pelagius
Citation: Medieval Encounters 30, 4 (2024) ; 10.1163/15700674-12340192
The first manuscript containing Pelagius’s liturgy is London, British Library, Add. MS 30845 (hereafter BL45), which recent scholars have dated to the mid- to late tenth century and ascribed to the Riojan monastery of San Millán de la Cogolla.22 The manuscript is a liber misticus, meaning that it contains both masses and offices for feast days celebrated between June and November. Among these, we find Pelagius’s office and mass.23 The presence in the same codex of liturgies for a number of other southern saints (Zoylus, Faustus, Januarius and Martialis, and Esperatus) has suggested to some a possible southern model or influence.24 This is by no means certain, however. Even if it were the case, the copyist did not have access to a full range of commemorative materials for Pelagius, since only the mass is proper (that is, unique) to Pelagius, the office materials being borrowed from other saints, as will be discussed below. The manuscript’s date makes it the earliest liturgical witness to Pelagius’s cult, and his inclusion may have been inspired by the recent translation in 967 of his relics from Córdoba to Oviedo, although there is no firm evidence that this was the case.25
Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, nouv. acq. lat. MS 239 (hereafter BnF239) is an early eleventh-century manuscript likely from a female house that scholars have identified as near Burgos.26 It contains the full passio of Pelagius as well as an incomplete mass and office.27 The section dedicated to Pelagius was not copied by the same hand as the rest of the manuscript, and rather seems to have constituted an independent libellus containing all the materials necessary for his liturgical celebration. The libellus was added to a collection of texts connected by the theme of virginity, an important element of Pelagius’s passio and liturgy, as we shall see. Because Pelagius’s liturgy is found in an independent libellus, we can assume it was either a new feast or a new liturgy introduced at the institution that received or copied BnF239, since this is generally the way liturgies for new feasts and/or new liturgies circulated before they were copied into more comprehensive liturgical manuscripts.28 A number of references in the office prayers, hymn, and mass prayers to Pelagius as “our patron” could indicate that the institution owning BnF239 was dedicated to the saint. The frequency with which such claims appear in Old Hispanic manuscripts does not allow us to state this with any certainty, however.29
Another libellus might have been the now-lost manuscript from Tuy (TUY), which also contained the mass, office and passio for Pelagius. These contents were transcribed by Prudencio de Sandoval into his seventeenth-century history of Tuy.30 Sandoval briefly described the manuscript he used as being,
of such great antiquity, that we can hold for certain that it was written in those same times [contemporaneously to his martyrdom], because the script is theirs [i.e. Visigothic], it has the office with its antiphons and unintelligible musical notation [Old Hispanic notation is written in unpitched neumes], hymns, psalms, orations, the martyrdom of the saint, as others have written it, distributed among vespers, matutinum, the mass and other hours [sic: there are no other hours celebrated in a saint’s feast], that the saint, having died, were ordered for him and prayed in the churches of Spain.31
Although Sandoval apparently selectively copied this collection of material into his work for its local value – Pelagius being considered a saint local to Tuy – what he transcribed may have been a self-standing libellus, since it includes the passio; more complete liturgical books never contain the full passio in the liturgical order of service.32 Sandoval’s reference to it as a “booklet and office of Saint Pelagius,” with no mention of other liturgical materials, supports this conclusion.33 If the original were a self-contained libellus, it would have marked either the introduction of the feast of Pelagius at Tuy, or, what appears more likely, the composition of a new liturgy for the saint. The feast was already widespread by the late-eleventh century, the latest possible date for this particular liturgy.34 Díaz y Díaz, mistrustful of Sandoval, actually thought the editor might have been looking at BnF239 yet improperly copied the manuscript – for example, introducing references to Tuy as Pelagius’s hometown.35 There are two arguments against this. First, there are many more differences between the offices in TUY and BnF239 than just the mentions of Tuy, to which I shall return. Secondly, Sandoval’s at times confusing transcription betrays his lack of knowledge of the shapes and order of the Old Hispanic liturgy. This is perhaps the best indication that his was a faithful copy of an early medieval manuscript, something Férotin acknowledged.36 The kinds of mistakes Sandoval made do not suggest he altered what he saw, rather that he did not understand what he was copying. We must therefore consider Sandoval’s transcription an important source for the liturgical celebration of Pelagius according to the Old Hispanic rite.
We have three manuscripts that reflect different stages of development in Pelagius’s liturgy at different institutions. Since they all share the same mass prayers, we might imagine that these would have been the first set of liturgical materials to be composed for the saint, although where this took place is impossible to say; it could have been at an institution dedicated to Pelagius, given the numerous references to Pelagius as “our patron” (nostrum patronum).37 The mass prayers rely on the passio, but not entirely, and contain important variations on the story which are discussed below. The hymn “Immense caeli conditor,” found also in two of the manuscripts (BnF239 and TUY), likewise repeats much of what we find in the passio (see Appendix 2 for transcription and translation).38 The hymn seems to have been based on an original attributed to Gregory the Great with the same first line and last verse, sung on ferial Mondays – when there was no other more important feast – in some manuscripts of the Old Hispanic tradition and in other rites.39 Adapted for Pelagius, the hymn praises the saint for crushing the hostile enemy as a mere child, which he did by resisting the “transient kingdoms” (caduca regna), the “allurements of the world” (seculi blanditie) and the “cruelty of the sword” (gladii ferocitas), casting off the gold given to him by the tyrant and rejecting “banquets and ostentatious luxuries” (fugasque simul epulas pomposasque delicias).40 He bravely met death, glorifying Christ, and therefore serves as intercessor for those seeking to resist vices themselves (Omni ressitat [sic] vitio).41 The hymn concludes by calling directly on Pelagius, a native of Galicia who died in Córdoba, to intercede that “we” may not be lured by the enticements of such a loathsome and perfidious enemy and end up in terrible suffering.42 These are all features that suggest the author of the hymn knew the extant passio, although, as with the mass prayers, we cannot know when or where the hymn was composed.
The same two manuscripts that contain the hymn (BnF239 and TUY) also include full versions of the passio. In both, it is found among other liturgical materials towards the end of the dawn service of matutinum. The inclusion of the passio in these two Pelagius offices gives us a clear indication that the text was read out during the dawn service, apparently in its entirety and as one continuous text, as there are no reading divisions marked out in the margin, at least not in BnF239.43 We can likely assume that the same would have been the case at the institution that produced BL45, although the passio is neither included nor noted by an incipit in the order of service in this manuscript. None of the other offices in the manuscript include or note a matutinum reading, however, so Pelagius is not exceptional in this. Despite these shared materials, the offices in each manuscript are different enough to hint at different strategies or moments of liturgical composition, to which we shall now turn.44
2 The Offices (See Appendix 1 for Full Transcriptions of the Offices)
We begin with BL45, the earliest surviving office for Pelagius and also the shortest of the three. The length of the Old Hispanic dawn service of matutinum was variable and reflected the importance of the feast day. It could include any number of units called missae, composed of two antiphons, an alleluiaticus (an antiphon with added “alleluias”), and a responsory, each with their corresponding verses and orations (prayers). We find up to eight missae for the most important saints.45 By contrast, matutinum for Pelagius in BL45 has one sole missa, the bare minimum. These materials are also not proper to Pelagius, i.e. they are not unique to his feast day, and were not designed specifically for him. They are all found in the commons of saints, generic liturgies that could serve for any saint’s feast.46 The chants for vespers and matutinum in BL45 are taken from the common of a Just Man, a category of Old Hispanic saint that includes most male saints, and all male martyrs.47 There is no hymn specified, so we must imagine that the common hymn for a Just Man would also have been sung at both vespers and matutinum.48
The use of commons material for Pelagius can be explained in a few ways. Given the early date of the manuscript, it is possible Pelagius was a new saint at this point for whom no proper office had been composed or was available to BL45’s copyist. A proper mass was at the copyist’s disposal, since it appears in BL45, but no office. The use of commons material was therefore necessary to fill in the liturgical gaps for Pelagius’s feast day. There may not have been the requisite liturgical expertise at San Millán de la Cogolla to compose missing material, and the copyist therefore used the common.49 Use of the common may not have been a question of necessity, however, but a purposeful choice. Pelagius may simply not have been considered important enough to warrant a proper liturgy.50 Another possibility is that Pelagius’s very newness demanded the legitimization of his cult through use of material associated with more well-established saints.51 The familiarity and antiquity of the common material would have anchored Pelagius in a known tradition and helped to validate his sanctity, a possibility that will be further explored below.
The office for Pelagius in BnF239 reflects another stage of liturgical composition, featuring chants shared with other saints and commons, but also attempts to make them resonate specifically with Pelagius. His greater importance here is reflected in the vespers service, which has been enhanced with the addition of a second antiphon – something done only on more important feast days.52 While BnF239 shares the opening vespers chant (vespertinus) with BL45, it adds several chants from Felix, Cyprian and Augustine found in other manuscripts. We can tell that these chants were borrowed from those saints rather than vice versa because of the relative age of the manuscripts in which they appear, and their appropriateness for the saints in question.53 Cyprian is an interesting choice, because, as stated in his passio, Pelagius’s head ended up at the church of St. Cyprian in Córdoba. Intriguingly, the chants shared with Cyprian refer to the head of the martyr on which a heavenly crown has been placed, but this could just reflect that both saints were killed by decapitation. There is no obvious link with Augustine or Felix, however, and the chants refer generically in both cases to the blessed man who follows the way of the just. As in BL45, we only have one surviving missa in BnF239, although the chaotic state of this manuscript – with many folios out of order – raises the possibility of material from the matutinum service having been lost during rebinding.54 One of two surviving matutinum antiphons in BnF239 (“Statuit illum dominus”) is shared with the common of Confessors, and the other (“Iustus velut palma”) with the common of a Just Man. A third chant (“Sapientia iustum deduxit”), either an alleluiaticus or a responsory, is shared again with Augustine.55 These chants do not appear connected thematically, referring to the head of the saint as the firm rock crowned and decorated, the just man flowering like the cedar of Libanus, and the just man following the right path. Here, like in BL45, borrowed material served to fill in Pelagius’s office, although taken from different saints and commons.
If the chants found in the Pelagius office of BnF239 are all fairly universal in their saintly themes, the orations that follow each chant nevertheless explain why the chant text is relevant to this particular saint by relating it to his passio. The structure of the Old Hispanic office allows for significant exegetical reflection on the relevance of each chant text to the occasion being celebrated. After each antiphon and almost every responsory, a prayer or oration provides an explicit interpretation of the chant text’s meaning for that day.56 In the case of Pelagius, the oration that accompanies the chant “Statuit illum dominum” (Eccli. 45:8–9) glosses the very firm rock described in the chant as the strength and solidity of God, who did not allow Pelagius “either [to] be turned from the truth or submit to the tyrant’s enticements” (nec a veritate amobi nec tiranni inlecebris subcumbere).57 These might seem universal attributes of any martyr, but the use of the phrase tiranni inlecebris subcumbere adds a potential sexual dimension to what Pelagius was resisting. Succumbere has the meaning “to submit” but also in a sexual sense, to mean literally as a woman lies under a man. Pelagius also rebuffed the “licentiousness of the lustful prince” (lascivientis principis procasia [MS procassa] penitus refutaretur), again highlighting the sexual nature of the threat.58 The prayer then asks for Pelagius’s help in protecting the congregation from hell, by allowing them, like him, to “turn from every vice of dishonour and shame” (declinare mereamur turpis dedecoris vitium). In the oration that follows the next matutinum antiphon, “Iustus ut palma,” the cedar of Libanus from Psalm 91:13 is applied to Pelagius by describing the undefeated strength with which he suffered torments and resisted enticements – again referred to as “inlecebris” – finally to have his blood spilled by the sword.59 These prayers creatively interpret chants borrowed from other saints in light of Pelagius’s story, picking up on rather than ignoring the sexual content of his passio.
A series of prayers that close vespers and matutinum (completuriae and benedictiones) likewise repeat key scenes and themes of Pelagius’s passio, at times appearing to cite it directly. The completuria and benedictio prayers at the end of the matutinum office praise Pelagius’s victory over the devil by withstanding the squalor of prison through meditating day and night on the law, and also praise him for not giving in to the blandishments of a tempter (suadentis … blandiciis) as opposed to the passio’s “tempting enticements” (suasoribus … lenociniis), although blanditiae can also mean “caresses.”60 In the vespers completuria, Pelagius’s crown in heaven is said to shine with the twin virtues of virginity and martyrdom (gemino claritatis fulgore … virginitate ac sanguine), and he is described as endowed with great beauty (tanti decoris divinitus).61 The passio similarly describes the boy as “outwardly beautiful,” and “enriched with the double crown of virginity and martyrdom.”62 The same vespers prayer runs through the torments Pelagius suffered in prison, the weight of his chains and the jeers of his fellow prisoners, before praising him for choosing death in Christ over all the gold and silver offered to him, since those things are of the transitory earthly realm – a clear reference to his passio.63 In the vespers benedictio prayer that follows, Pelagius is said to resist apostasy (sevienter instans ut apostataret inclinare), a term also used in the passio to describe what was required of Pelagius in exchange for the king’s riches.64 The office prayers in BnF239 communicate a saintly identity based on virginity, beauty and resistance to financial and sexual temptations, all elements found in the passio.
The office in TUY takes properization (the production of a liturgy specific to a saint) a step further in seeking to retell Pelagius’s life story through a juxtaposition of chants. Apart from vespers (again borrowed mostly from the common of a Just Man and shared with BL45), here we do find chant material that is proper to Pelagius. The fragmentary office of matutinum, for which only one missa survives but which may have contained more, is entirely proper to Pelagius. This is why Díaz y Díaz was unfair to accuse Sandoval of potentially misrepresenting the manuscript from which he was copying. We really are faced with an alternative office, something Sandoval is unlikely to have completely invented, given how little he seems to have understood the structure of the Old Hispanic liturgy.
The TUY matutinum shows all the signs of having been conceived of as a historia, a retelling in song of the story of Pelagius’s passio. Historiae were liturgical vitae, a series of chants that retold the story of the saint’s life over the course of the liturgical day, generally progressing chronologically through their youth, deeds, death and miracles.65 Historiae most frequently drew their chant texts from the saint’s literary biographies juxtaposed with the biblical psalms.66 The TUY Pelagius office does something similar, interspersing chants describing Pelagius’s story with biblical verses, especially from the Book of Psalms. In this, it is distinct from the majority of Old Hispanic saints’s liturgies, which tend to be constructed entirely out of biblical citations. In the case of TUY’s Pelagius office, many of the chants are non-biblical and inspired by, if not drawn directly from, the passio.67 Also, most Old Hispanic saints’s offices are not historiae in the traditional sense, and privilege one or two main themes and images to which they return over the course of the office rather than telling the saint’s story in any chronological sense: what we refer to as “liturgical iconography.”68 Although there was a lacuna of indeterminate length in the middle of Sandoval’s manuscript model, meaning we are potentially missing a lengthy portion of Pelagius’s matutinum liturgy, what does survive points to a liturgical tradition of crafting the saint’s passio out of a combination of biblical and hagiographical texts that was common throughout early medieval Western Europe if less usual in Iberia.69
Let us see the creative manipulation of different texts the TUY liturgist produced for the matutinum office for Pelagius. The first antiphon, “Circumdederunt me,” is roughly adapted from Ps. 21:17: “And all the unjust surrounded me and they did not trouble me. Because God is with me, for many dogs have encompassed me.”70 The circling dogs here could be a reference to the scene in Pelagius’s passio where he calls the emir a dog and demands that he back off.71 The oration that follows this arrangement takes the interpretation of the psalm’s text into a tropological realm. It asks God, through Pelagius’s intercession, to protect the penitent from his/her enemies, and to reveal liars. This last section could pick up on a reference in the passio to the devil as “a liar and the father thereof (John 8:44).”72 In the second antiphon (“Pelagius in carcere”), Pelagius is said to sit in prison and cry out to the Lord, which the verse echoes by citing Ps. 36:30, “the mouth of the just shall meditate wisdom.”73 Pelagius’s beauty comes to the fore in the alleluiaticus (“Aspectus erat candidus”), where he is described as bright or white and angelic, having died in the faith.74 This juxtaposition between faith and beauty is raised also in the passio, where Pelagius is said to be beautiful on the outside because he was beloved more beautifully on the inside by Christ.75 We might expect the rest of Pelagius’s life recounted in song in the missing portion of the matutinum office, perhaps in several more missae. We only have the final chant of matutinum, the responsory (“Iam quem percusserunt”), which creatively weaves together psalm verses in ways that echo Pelagius’s watery end: “For they struck the child, and ‘they numbered his bones’ (Ps. 21:17) and scattered them ‘in the tempest of water’ (Ps. 68:16) because the God of Israel has risen.”76 The dumping of the body in the river, as described in the passio, is further alluded to in the responsory verse, based on Ps. 68:3 (“I stick fast in the mire of the deep: and there is no sure standing. I am come into the depth of the sea: and a tempest hath overwhelmed me”).77 We therefore find a progression through the chants of matutinum that appear to follow the narrative arc of Pelagius’s passio, from his being besieged by hostile forces, imprisoned, recognized for his beauty, and finally executed and thrown in the river, no doubt with other events from his life described in the lacuna. TUY’s arrangement of chants, so different from the generic materials used in the other surviving offices for Pelagius, reveals how liturgists used biblical verses and hagiographical texts to construct a parallel passio in song.
The efforts to which those who produced the TUY office went to create a liturgical reflection of the passio may indicate Pelagius’s special importance at their institution. Although we cannot know for certain whether the manuscript was indeed copied at Tuy cathedral, or whether the office within it was composed there, there are certain indications that point in this direction. The hymn, for example, has been adapted to lay special claim to Pelagius at Tuy. In the TUY version, he is treated as a “special patron” (patronum praecipuum) who is praised by the congregation as “the faithful of Tuy” (Tudentium fidelium). In the BnF239 version, although the claim to patronage is also present, we find instead “the faithful who sing” (canentium fidelium). The ad pacem mass prayer in TUY is also voiced by the “church of Tuy” (Ecclesiae Tudae), urging “its martyr Pelagius” (martyris sui Pelagii) to hear its prayers. In BL45 and BnF239, it is “your church” (ecclesiae tuae) that prays to the saint.78 TUY’s illatio prayer further adds that “Tuy received this, our patron, your martyr who suffered in body in Córdoba,” a claim absent from the same prayer in the other manuscripts.79 These mentions of Tuy could very well have been added in the original TUY manuscript, and not by Sandoval.80 The appearance of an Ermogius as bishop of Tuy in charters and chronicles would explain why Tuy asserted a privileged connection to his nephew Pelagius, even if this connection could have been more legendary than historical.81 The liturgy was thus made even more proper and specific to the place where Pelagius was claimed as a special son.
3 The Mass
The TUY office is not the only piece of liturgical material that was tailor-made for Pelagius; much of the mass was likewise proper to the saint. The mass does feature some Commons material. The praelegendum chant (“Beatus vir alleluia”) is from the common of a Just Man, the psalmus chant (“Salvum me fac Domine”) and its corresponding clamores (“Exaudi me Domine”) are shared with Vincent of Zaragoza, and the sacrificium chant (“Ego Dominus creavi”) with Clement and Martin.82 The readings from scripture are all taken from the common of a Just Man: prophets (Ecclesiasticus 32:27–28; 33:1), epistle (2 Timothy 4:17) and gospel (Luke 12:42–43). It should be noted that the mass units mentioned so far are only found in TUY and do not appear in the other two manuscripts, although here too, commons material could have been used.83 The ten variable mass prayers (missa, alia, post nomina, ad pacem, illatio, post sanctus, post pridie, ad orationem dominicam, completuria and benedictio) are proper to the saint and are shared by all three manuscripts.84 They again seem to be based on his passio. In this case, however, there are some intriguing variants to the hagiographical narrative that suggest creative efforts on the part of the liturgists to highlight particular themes by connecting them to earlier saintly models.
In the first mass prayer, the missa or diptico, it is said that Pelagius, when imprisoned, died to the world by rejecting all temporal things and earthly comforts. Once there, “while his fellows were living in pleasure, he maintained his body intact in every possible way,”85 a theme extensively developed in the passio, where Pelagius’s preservation of his virginity in prison is treated as a major victory and testament to his commitment to Christ.86 The prayer ends by pleading for Pelagius’s help in putting aside those things accumulated through the incitement of the devil,87 which again echoes a passage in the passio where Pelagius is said to be victorious over the devil.88 The alia prayer that follows mostly asks for Pelagius’s intercession against the temptations of the world, but does add to his accomplishments that he “alone gloried in the name of your only son … to the perfidious.”89 While this could be taken in a general sense to mean that Pelagius’s life and actions set a Christian example to unbelievers, his passio nevertheless mentions that Pelagius engaged his fellow prisoners in religious debate.90 The mass texts may therefore highlight Pelagius’s polemical evangelizing alongside the example of his virginity, both important features in his passio.
The mass text with the most explicit biographical content is the illatio (see Appendix 3 for the text and translation).91 It relates Pelagius’s life story, starting with his Galician origins, and names Ermogius as the uncle for whom the boy was exchanged as a hostage. Unlike the passio, however, the illatio implies that Pelagius may have foreseen or even sought out this turn of events, having already premeditated his own martyrdom.92 The passio rather makes his entry into prison the turning point in Pelagius’s life, converting him to matters of God whereas before he had been “unable to lead his life in the world without giving in to temptations.”93 The illatio thus seems to perfect Pelagius further, making his life exemplary both before and after his imprisonment. Both texts nevertheless emphasize Pelagius’s resolve to treat prison as an earthly penitence. How he spends his time there also differs in each account. In the passio, he dedicates himself to study, inspired by the example of his master, the apostle Paul, on the model of the saints Julian and Basilissa, a theme brought out equally in BnF239’s matutinum completuria, where he is said to meditate continuously on the law.94 In the illatio, on the other hand, Pelagius is said to sing. His singing is said to have been inspired by Christ, who illuminated the future martyr from within – a further reference shared with the passio – such that Christ made Pelagius’s very diaphragm resonate.95 The illatio is specific about what Pelagius sings, namely psalms, and in particular Psalm 44:11: “listen daughter and see that the king desires your beauty.”96 Interestingly, the text of the psalm verse has been slightly changed to read “listen son” (Audi filii), instead of “listen daughter” (Audi filia). The alteration is crucial. In what follows, the tyrant is said to have been standing outside Pelagius’s cell at the moment when Pelagius reaches this psalm verse, and, not knowing what he is hearing, interprets it as an invitation: “thinking that Pelagius was ready for his [the tyrant’s] vices outside” (putans eum suis aptum vitiis fore), the tyrant approaches the young boy. Once taken from his cell, Pelagius remains unmoved in his commitment to virginity, and rejects the king’s offers of riches, accusing him of not knowing God. The scene of alleged seduction through playful touch does not appear in this shortened exchange between Pelagius and his executioner. Can we assume, therefore, that the illatio treats the scene of misunderstood singing as one of sexual advance? Clues to interpreting this curious liturgical retelling of Pelagius’s passio can be found when examining the possible models for this liturgical version of his story.
4 Models for Pelagius
When Jordan discussed the illatio above as the third “literary” source for Pelagius’s story, he argued “this is a brief mention [of attempted seduction] indeed. The liturgical texts are clearly turning attention away from the particular cause of martyrdom.”97 Jordan did not recognize, however, the model which likely provided the inspiration for the mass’s alternative version of the passio. We find this model in the story of another Hispanic saint, Eulalia of Mérida.98 The text that describes Eulalia’s life and death has been dated early, potentially even before Prudentius wrote an extensive hymn in her honor in the early fifth century.99 Her cult was also early and extremely widespread and she became one of the best-known Hispanic saints.100 Her passio describes how during the persecutions of the local governor Calpurnianus in the third-century, Eulalia, then thirteen, follows her teacher to Mérida, where he has been taken prisoner for being a Christian. When she publicly insults the governor, he asks why she should risk sacrificing her youth and urges her instead to worship the gods. Eulalia responds that despite her young age, she is not afraid of him, nor can he threaten her chastity nor seduce her with the pleasures of this world, because she is looking to a future life. A rich husband is no match for her heavenly one, Christ, who will defeat Calpurnianus and his father, the devil. At this point, the tortures begin, but Eulalia, who has been untroubled throughout, begins to sing. Significantly, she sings a particular psalm verse when thrown in a furnace: “After her shall virgins be brought to the king; her neighbours shall be brought to thee. They shall be brought with gladness and rejoicing” (Ps. 44:15–16).101 Hearing her as he passes by, Calpurnianus is incensed and orders her to be paraded to the rack, shaven and disrobed. Eulalia beats him to it, and sheds her own clothes, only to be tortured further until she finally gives up her spirit in the form of a dove flying out of her mouth.
Eulalia’s singing from Psalm 44 brings to mind the long liturgy with which she was celebrated in the Old Hispanic tradition.102 Her office (both vespers and matutinum), as well as the mass, feature numerous chants based on Psalm 44 and especially Psalm 44:5: “With thy comeliness and thy beauty set out, proceed prosperously, and reign.”103 This verse, taken literally, highlights Eulalia’s beauty, which is, as described in the passio, spiritual as well as physical. Her appearance is additionally the source of the Roman governor’s desire for her, which is underplayed in the passio but forms the basis for the entire alia prayer in Eulalia’s mass. He looks at her with lustful gazes, and the prayer has to assure the hearers that Eulalia remained a virgin throughout her ordeal.104 The use of this psalm in her liturgy also has a deeper significance. Psalm 44 is an epithalamium, a wedding hymn, that in the Christian tradition was interpreted as a call to virginity by patristic authors such as Ambrose and Jerome, and in an Iberian context by the sixth-century Leander of Seville.105 For these authors, the text presented women with a model for spiritual marriage with Christ, taking up a life of chastity as consecrated virgins. Psalm 44: 11–12 (“Listen, daughter, and see … that the king desires your beauty”) was a key phrase for these authors in calling women to commit to Christ as his brides. From here, Psalm 44 found its way into the liturgy for the consecration of virgins and into the common of virgins in the Old Hispanic rite, which shares many of its chants with Eulalia’s liturgy.106 That Eulalia would sing Psalm 44:15–16, declaring herself to be an example to virgins based on the models set by Ambrose and Jerome, is therefore no coincidence. We cannot know if this detail was added to the passio before or after her liturgy was composed, but both nevertheless reflect the importance of the biblical epithalamia in constructing an image of virgin saints as brides of Christ, united with him at the moment of their martyrdom, and of which Eulalia was presented as a prime example.107
We return to Pelagius’s liturgy. The fact that Pelagius is caught singing Psalm 44:11 in prison takes on new meaning given the liturgical history of the text. The widespread use of Psalm 44:11 in the liturgies of virgin saints suggests that not only was it used as a clever plot device on the liturgist’s part, it was intended to bring to mind these female saints. We might consider it intertextual liturgical play, deliberately creating a resonance with the liturgies for virgin martyrs. It also echoes a particularly evocative phrase in the passio in which Pelagius is described, unusually for a male saint, as a vessel of Christ (vas suum), whom Christ as bridegroom will embrace (sponsus … iungeretur).108 As other scholars have pointed out, this suggests that the passio cast Pelagius as a kind of bride, just as the virgin martyrs like Eulalia were depicted liturgically.109 We can further identify the use of similar language and themes to describe their situations in the liturgies for both Eulalia and Pelagius. Eulalia, for example, is said to have been overcome “neither by the enticements (inlecebris) of the world, nor the torments of her persecutor,”110 terms that resonate with Pelagius’s refusal “to submit to the enticements (inlecebris) of the tyrant.”111 In her mass prayers, Eulalia is said to be subjected to glances of her tormentor’s “fornicating eyes,” which she resists, similar to Pelagius’s rebuffing of the lascivious princes’ advances.112 More importantly, Eulalia is lauded throughout her liturgy for earning the double crown of virginity and martyrdom, precisely the “twin blaze of glory” with which Pelagius shines, as per the vespers completuria prayer.113
Nor are these the only echoes of female virgins in Pelagius’s story. As other scholars have pointed out, the set-up of Pelagius refusing the advances of the man who ultimately has him executed is one of the standard narratives of late antique female martyrdoms.114 Further similarities between the passiones of Pelagius and Eulalia, specifically, are numerous. Both are described as thirteen years old at the time of their martyrdoms, a key moment on the brink of adulthood and sexuality. Pelagius goes to Córdoba to replace his uncle, something the mass prayers ambiguously present as potentially voluntary, like Eulalia chasing after her master Liberius in Mérida. Both are described as (book) learned in Christianity: Eulalia before her martyrdom, and Pelagius in prison. After the episode in the furnace, Eulalia strips her own clothing as a sign of her readiness for martyrdom.115 Pelagius, too, voluntarily disrobes, if in his case as a sign of rejection of the worldly goods he has been offered. This particular parallel is especially instructive. Some scholars have read Pelagius’s stripping as a deliberate contrast to the generally involuntary nakedness imposed on female saints by their captors. Pelagius would thus be masculinized, his maleness made clear through his proactive gesture of revealing his body.116 Given that Eulalia takes charge of her body in a similar way, the difference between them is blurred. Certainly, some of these elements are common to other female passiones, such as Agatha and Agnes, the latter of which likely influenced the Eulalia legend.117 Because Eulalia was such a prominent Hispanic saint, and several of the elements shared with Pelagius are peculiar to her, it seems reasonable to assume that both her passio and liturgy helped to shape Pelagius’s own cult.
If liturgists and hagiographers modeled Pelagius on a female example, it may have been because his cult was designed to appeal especially to women, as Lucy Pick has argued.118 There were numerous religious institutions dedicated to Pelagius that housed women, not least the new foundation dedicated to Pelagius in León where his relics were transferred.119 The king’s own sister, Elvira (d. ca. 986), may have encouraged her brother to send the emissary Velasco to Cordoba with the request for Pelagius’s relics, thus sealing the peace treaty that Sancho I (r. 956–58, 960–66) negotiated with al-Hakam II (r. 961–976) in 962.120 She would also become the de facto owner (domina) of the church, a role later taken up by Sancho’s widow, Teresa, when the relics were moved to the church of John the Baptist in Oviedo following attacks by Al-Manṣūr (r. 976–1002) in the late 980’s. This latter church was then dedicated to both saints.121 Pick argues that these women would have been interested in Pelagius because he embodied the two connected forms of the ideal female Christian identity: virginity and martyrdom.122 Such qualities were linked as far back as Ambrose, whose work on virgins is found in BnF239 alongside the Pelagius liturgy, where the twin virtues of virginity and martyrdom have a prominent place.123 It could be that the institution that kept BnF239 was one of these female houses dedicated to Pelagius, and recognized the links between the saint and female religious ideals by collecting his liturgy together with literature that promoted a life of enclosed virginity.124
Similarly, a new liturgical composition for Tuy cathedral, in the form of the office described above, may also have had links to royal women. Fifty years after the cathedral had ceased to be a diocese and was placed under the control of Santiago de Compostela following Norman raids, Urraca (d. 1101/3), the daughter of Fernando I of León (r. 1037–65), had an active hand in returning it to diocesan status in 1071.125 There is no mention of Pelagius in the charter of restoration, and the church appears to have formally been dedicated to the Virgin Mary, but the prominence of Pelagius as patron of monasteries in the area, including the monastery of San Pelayo of Paderni donated to the cathedral by the same Urraca, could have prompted Tuy to adopt him as a special saint for which a new liturgy was composed.126 It may have been Urraca herself who had some role to play in soliciting this new composition, given the ecclesiastical authority she exercised in the area and her interest in Pelagius, reflected in her patronage of the portal at the church of San Isidoro in León that bears Pelagius’s image in stone.127 As Pick has argued, the echoes between Pelagius’s passio and the legendary lives of late antique female martyrs would have made his story familiar for these royal women. They would have heard Pelagius’s story as an inspiration for preserving virginity in the face of sexual threats, particularly in a context of ongoing Muslim-Christian conflict. It was not uncommon for especially high-class women in Iberia to find themselves as pawns in strategic marital alliances or as victims of cross-confessional sexual violence.128
As relatable as Pelagius might have been specifically to women, the fact is he remained a male saint crafted narratively and liturgically according to a female model in ways that appear to challenge medieval paradigms of sanctity. After all, virginity and triumph over sexual threat are qualities rare in male saints.129 In seeking an explanation for Pelagius’s feminization, we might turn, as Jeffrey Bowman has done, to the rich tradition of Andalusi Arabic poetry that speaks of same-sex love.130 It could be significant that Abū ʿUmar Aḥmad b. Muḥammad Ibn ʿAbd Rabbih (d. 940), a poet at the court of ʿAbd a-Raḥmān III – the villain of the Pelagius story – is known to have composed such homoerotic works.131 One of the most prominent tropes of this poetic tradition is love for a beautiful young boy, who frequently rejects the advances of his would-be lover. Often, the seducer is an older man, of high social status, and the boy is of a much lower class, for example a slave or prisoner, and at times a Christian.132 Intriguingly, a motif in this poetry is the stuttering boy, whose rejections are misunderstood as invitations to seduction because his lisp gives rise to double entendres.133 The resonances of this trope with the emir’s misunderstanding of Pelagius’s psalm-singing in the illatio prayer – even if the language being confused is Latin, rather than Arabic – is very suggestive. Was not just the author of the passio but the composer of the liturgy potentially familiar with this poetic genre? Without entering into the debate as to whether such poems reflect social behaviour and not just literary sensibilities, Christians with even a passing knowledge of the tradition may have found it useful in adding historical credibility to the Pelagius narrative, while simultaneously further demonizing the Muslim persecutor through appeal to sexual deviance.134 Considering Pelagius the product of a religious diatribe that twisted Arabic poetic tropes to showcase Christian triumph over Muslim values could help make sense of his apparent defiance of saintly gender norms.
It is worth noting, however, that the liturgy has less overtly anti-Muslim content than the passio. Unlike the passio, neither the hymn, mass nor office prayers make explicit reference to the villain as a Muslim emir, calling him always a tyrant, enemy, or infidel prince, and never referring explicitly to Islam, just to perfidy and unbelief. Thus, they effectively recast the narrative in language rooted in the late antique hagiographical tradition.135 Although the passio also contains little explicit anti-Muslim rhetoric, it nevertheless mentions ʿAbd a-Raḥmān III by name in both the title and closing line.136 When recited together with the historical facts contained in the passio, as the chants and prayers were over the course of Pelagius’s feast day, the ideas in each section would have blended into a whole, creating little distinction between the literary hagiography and the rest of the liturgy. The very antiquarian aspect of Pelagius’s liturgy, with its texts and themes borrowed from other, potentially much older liturgies, would also have sonically authorized the contemporary content of the passio.137 Calling on the tropes of spiritual beauty, resistance to vice and steadfastness in virginity from the liturgies of Eulalia, especially, Pelagius’s liturgy made his story familiar and therefore perhaps more acceptable, anchored as it was in a long tradition of venerating virgin martyrs.
5 Conclusions
Analysis of Pelagius’s liturgy has not only added to, but provided an essential framework for understanding the meaning of his story, and how it was received and memorialized in early medieval Iberia. The details of his passio were unusual in so far as it was rare for a male saint to be praised for the qualities of virginity and resistance to male sexual advances, even if Pelagius also refuses the offers of worldly riches and stands up to the threat of apostasy, characteristics more typical of male saints. We might imagine that the lack of precedent for his tale would have prompted liturgists to focus on these latter aspects, privileging the universal value of martyrdom. Indeed, such an impulse may lie behind the choice of generic male martyr chants for at least two of the offices discussed here. The mass in all three manuscripts, the office prayers in BnF239 and the entire office in TUY tell a different story of how Pelagius was interpreted, however. In these compositions – effectively glosses on Pelagius’s story – the potential strangeness of the narrative, and in particular its sexual nature, was not erased. Rather, the liturgy further feminizes Pelagius by casting him in the mode of a virgin martyr through appeal to liturgical tropes connected with female saints. We may not see this modeling directly in the reuse of chants for office and mass, none of which are shared with female saints, nor in the direct borrowing of prayers and readings. Nevertheless, the thematic and textual echoes between the proper elements of Pelagius’s liturgy and that of female saints such as Eulalia establish the parallel. Christians in attendance at the public offices and mass would have heard these echoes throughout his feast day, leaving them in little doubt of Pelagius’s saintly identity. The irony of legitimizing the male Pelagius through the atypical use of female liturgical tropes should not be lost on us. Tasked with mediating a contemporary tale to Christian congregations, liturgists succeeded in making a new story sound old and paradoxically contributed to creating something unprecedented in the process.
Acknowledgements
This research was made possible by an NWO grant for the project “Making a Martyr in medieval Iberia, 589–1080” (VI.Vidi.195.091). I must thank the research seminar at the Department of History at the Radboud University Nijmegen and the Old Hispanic reading group at the University of Bristol for their thoughtful comments. Special thanks go to Emma Hornby, Rebecca Maloy, Santiago Ruiz Torres, Juan Pablo Rubio Sadía, Melanie Shaffer, Cathrien Hoijinck, Marcus Jones, and to the very astute external reviewers for their comments.
Appendix 1: Offices for Feast of Pelagius (in the Old Hispanic Rite)138
Citation: Medieval Encounters 30, 4 (2024) ; 10.1163/15700674-12340192
Appendix 2: Immense Caeli Conditor Hymn (from BnF239, fols. 68v–69v, with Differences in TUY Marked in Footnotes)
Citation: Medieval Encounters 30, 4 (2024) ; 10.1163/15700674-12340192
Appendix 3: Illatio for Pelagius Mass from BL45 with Differences from TUY Marked in Footnotes139
Gratias tibi, omnipotens Deus, agere dignum est pulchrumque satis ac sanctum est, valde congruum ac nobis semperque commodum esse convenit,140 per Iesum Christum filium tuum dominum nostrum, per quem utique hic martyr Pelagius nec vitiorum inhesit gurgitibus nec delitiarum cessit flagitiis, sed tibi141 intrepidus, cui ante passionem fortiter famulabatur inluminatus. Hic enim occidentali plaga oriundus, Galletiam patrum habuit fundum, sed Cordoba dante Christo perspicuum142 suscepit martyrium. Et quia variis, occulto arcanoque dei consilio, electi occassionibus143 ad celum rapiuntur, patula extitit procul dubio actionis causa, qua hunc nostrum patronum martyrem tuum corpore passum Cordoba144 suscepit letabunda. Erat quidem huius Pelagii patruus145 Ermogius, episcopus Cordobe carcere tentus qui ut evaderet ergastuli periculum per146 se hunc dedit puerum testem alumnum. Unde illo evadente, Pelagius iste susceptus est in carcere, qui futurus147 erat testis pro veritate, ubi vero ferri onere prepeditus, futurum quodammodo premeditabatur martyrium, cuius sepe animus intente penetrabat celum. Et licet ad patriam adhuc humanitus redire disponeret, a proposito sibi tamen rigore haudquaquam mollescebat, quia carcerem ardua pro penitentia148 cogitabat. Nam psallendi quotidie modum adhibuerat, cui tua149 Christe, gratia intus inluminatrix aderat. Verum cuius precordiis abdito ipso nature sonueras: “Audi filii et vide, quia concupivit rex speciem tuam” hunc inpudice tyrannus foris auderat redamare, putans eum150 suis aptum vitiis fore. Sed151 utique intrepidus, cui tu non deeras omnino intus. Qui namque advocatus veniens ac persuasus ut Christum negare mallet, audiens illico cuncta sprevit regna inlata, eundem Christum dominum nostrum voce predicans libera. “Habe tu,”152 inquit o rex, “tuisque cum perditis solus munera, nam me tibi adquiescere153 non posse intus manet qui docet.154 Nam ego Deum habeo quem tu miser ignoras, cui omnia genuflectant, qui sanctis regnum, ac perditis eternum promisit supplicium. Verum, quia per multas nos tribulationes pervenire oportet ad regnum ideo paratus sum, qualem155 vis pande interitum.”156 Cui rex: “O,” inquit “puer, aut Christum nega, aut per157 membra gladium suscipies158 ac duriter animam inter penas exhalabis.” Unde Pelagius sanctus: “Christianus sum,” ait, “fui et ero; idcirco mori non timeo.” Quem fortiter stantem, post multas penas, illico membratim gladius dissecuit159 atque in160 celum spiritus petiit qui inter supplicia Christum confiteri non destitit. O vere martyr in celis, qui testis fuisti in terris, clementissimus fautor precibus161 occurre nostris. Per te lapsus veniat ad penitentiam ignarus ad doctrinam eger ad salutem, defunctus ad requiem. Quare adclines petimus, eterne deus, per hunc martyrem tuum nobis fave propitius clemens, occurre interpellatus, et his162 tibi oblatis muneribus semper adesto pius. Cui merito.
Translation
It is right and good and holy to give thanks to you, almighty God, and it behooves us to be most amenable and always compliant, through Jesus Christ, your son and our lord, through whom this martyr Pelagius was neither sucked into the whirlpools of vice, nor yielded to the evils of [earthly] delights, but was loyal to you, whom he bravely served before his death. For he came from the west coast, and had his father’s estate in Galicia, but he received martyrdom in Córdoba, clearly giving himself to Christ. And while the chosen are taken up to heaven for a variety of reasons according to the secret and hidden judgment of God, the cause of this act is without doubt clear, by which happy Córdoba received this patron of ours, your martyr, because he suffered in body. The uncle of this Pelagius was a certain Ermogius, a bishop held in a Cordoban prison who, in order to escape the danger of his captivity, gave in exchange for himself the boy, his ward, as witness. After the uncle had escaped, this Pelagius (who was to be a future witness to the truth) was taken into prison, where he was indeed shackled with an iron yoke, he who had somehow foreseen his future martyrdom, and whose soul had often eagerly betaken itself to heaven. And although he had up to then understandably planned to return to his homeland, he nevertheless hardly softened from his proposed resolution, because he considered that prison would be a demanding penitence. And so he applied himself to a daily habit of singing [psalms], he whom your grace, Christ, lit up internally. Truly, you reverberated in his diaphragm, in his hidden depths: “Listen son [sic] and see, because the king desires your beauty” (Ps. 44:11). The shameless tyrant outside dared to return his love, thinking him ready for his vices. But the boy remained steadfast, from whose interior you were never absent. For when he was summoned and coaxed to choose to deny Christ, hearing this he immediately rejected all the princely riches brought in, preaching that same Christ, our lord, with a loud voice: “O king,” he said, “keep your things for yourself and for your corrupt men. For I could not assent to you, when he who teaches remains in me. For I have a God to whom all kneel; whom you, wretch, do not know; and who promised his kingdom to those who are holy, and eternal suffering to those who are lost. Because it is surely fitting for us to reach his kingdom through many tribulations, I am therefore ready. What terrible death do you wish for me?” To whom the king said, “O boy, either you deny Christ, or you will feel the sword on your limbs and you will painfully release your soul through such tortures.” At which saint Pelagius said, “I am a Christian, I was and will be, so I do not fear death.” As he stood there firmly and after many torments, the sword cut through his limbs, and his spirit went up to heaven, he who had never stopped confessing to Christ among his tortures. O true martyr in heaven, you who were a witness on earth, most compassionate patron, answer our prayers. Through you, may the lapsed come to penance, the unlearned to doctrine, the sick to healing, and the dead to rest. Wherefore, we beseech you, eternal God, to bend to us and be favourable to us, well-disposed and merciful, and through this, your martyr, attend to us when called, and be always pious with respect to the offerings we make to you.
On the passio, see Juan Gil, “La Pasión de San Pelayo,” Habis 3 (1972): 161–200; Manuel Díaz y Díaz, “La Pasión de San Pelayo y su difusión,” Anuario de Estudios Medievales 6 (1969): 97–116, and Ann Christys, Christians in Al-Andalus, 711–1000 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2002), 89–93. For the text itself, see Passionarium Hispanicum Saeculum XI, ed. Valeriano Yarza Urquiola, CCSL 171A (Turnhout: Brepols, 2020), 1171–1177, (hereafter CCSL 171A), trans. Pilar Riesco Chueca, Pasionario Hispánico (Seville: Universidad de Sevilla, 1995), 309–21 and Jeffrey A. Bowman as “Raguel: The Martyrdom of St Pelagius,” in Medieval Hagiography: An Anthology, ed. Thomas F. Head (New York: Routledge, 2000), 227–235, and a new discovered version described, ed. and trans. Celso Rodríguez Fernández, La Pasión de S. Pelayo: Edición crítica, con traducción y comentario (Santiago de Compostela: Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, Universidad de Vigo, 1991).
For differing interpretations of the sexual content, see for example Mark D. Jordan, The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Jeffrey A. Bowman, “Beauty and Passion in Tenth-century Córdoba,” in The Boswell Thesis: Essays on Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality, ed. Mathew Kuefler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 236–53; Christys, Christians, 95; Lucy Pick, Her Father’s Daughter: Gender, Power and Religion in the Early Spanish Kingdoms (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2017), 93, and Maribel Fierro, “Hostages and the Dangers of Cultural Contact: Two Cases from Umayyad Cordoba,” in Acteurs des transferts culturels en Méditerranée médiévale, ed. Rania Abdellatif, Yassir Benhima, Daniel König and Elisabeth Ruchaud, Ateliers des Deutschen Historischen Instituts Paris 9 (Oldenbourg: Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, 2013), 73–83 at 79–83.
“Interea quumque eum ioculariter rex tangere vellet, ‘Tolle canis’ inquit sanctus Pelagius ‘numquid ergo me similem tuis effeminatum existimas?’” CCSL 171A, 1175, emphasis mine. Trans. adapted from Bowman, “The Martyrdom of St. Pelagius,” 231–235.
Jordan, Invention of Sodomy, 25. The modeling on female virgin martyrs was noted by Christys, Christians, 216–217 and Pick, Her Father’s Daughter, 91–94.
The masculinization of female saints was recognized by Pick (Her Father’s Daughter, 93), although she questions whether Pelagius’s story would have been unusual by medieval standards. Kathleen Coyne Kelly, however, sees Pelagius as “the only hagiographical legend from the Middle Ages, if not the entire extant corpus to the present day that I know of, that includes a male virgin martyr and a villain ‘corruptum virtiis cognoscebant Sodomitis’ [cf. Hrotswitha of Gandersheim].” Kathleen Coyne Kelly, Performing Virginity and Testing Chastity in the Middle Ages (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 103. It is not that male saints were never depicted as virgins, as pointed out by Cassandra Rhodes, “‘What, After All, is a Male Virgin?’ Multiple Performances of Male Virginity in Anglo-Saxon Saints’ Lives,” in Representing Medieval Genders and Sexualities in Europe: Construction, Transformation and Subversion, 600–1530, ed. Elizabeth L’Estrange and Alison More (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 15–32, John H. Arnold, “The Labour of Continence: Masculinity and Clerical Virginity,” in Medieval Virginities, ed. Sarah Salih, Anke Bernau, and Rachel Evans (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 102–18, and Robert Mills, “‘Whatever You Do is a Delight to Me!’ Masculinity, Masochism and Queer Play in Representations of Male Martyrdom,” Exemplaria 13 (2001): 1–37. What is unusual with Pelagius is that he is subject to a sexual threat from another man, something that feminizes him according to medieval sexual norms. See Ruth Karras, Sexuality in Medieval Europe: Doing unto Others (London: Routledge, 2017), articulated clearly at 33.
For examples of how liturgy shapes the understanding of saints, see Margot Fassler, The Virgin of Chartres: Making History through Liturgy and the Arts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010); Henry Parkes, “Saint Edmund between Liturgy and Hagiography,” in Bury St Edmunds and the Norman Conquest, ed. Tom Licence (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2014), 131–59; Catherine Saucier, “Singing the Lives of the Saints: Hagiographical-Historical Intersections in Music and Worship,” in Hagiography and the History of Latin Christendom, 500–1500, ed. Samantha Kahn Herric (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 161–191; Catherine Saucier, A Paradise of Priests: Singing the Civic and Episcopal Hagiography in Medieval Liege Eastman Studies in Music (Rochester, NY: Rochester University Press,2014); Gunilla Iversen, “Transforming a Viking into a Saint: The Divine Office of St. Olav,” in The Divine Office in the Latin Middle Ages, ed. Rebecca Baltzer and Margot Fassler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 401–429.
Despite scholars recognizing the existence of a more complete liturgy (not least Díaz y Díaz, “Pasión,” 107–108; Bowman, “Beauty and Passion,” 237), none have incorporated it into their study, apart from Jordan’s brief treatment of the mass, on which more will be said below. Jordan mistakenly assumed the passio was never a part of the regular celebration of the feast. Jordan, Invention of Sodomy, 11, n. 6.
Jordan, Invention of Sodomy, 25.
For an introduction to the Old Hispanic Office, see Emma Hornby, Kati Ihnat, Rebecca Maloy and Raquel Rojo Carrillo, Understanding the Old Hispanic Office: Texts, Melodies and Devotion in Early Medieval Iberia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022); Emma Hornby and Rebecca Maloy, Music and Meaning in the Old Hispanic Lenten Chants (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2013) and Rebecca Maloy, Songs of Sacrifice: Chant, Identity and Christian Formation in Early Medieval Iberia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).
In this way, we may understand Pelagius’s story as queer, in so far as it “is by definition at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant … ‘queer’ then, demarcates not a positivity but a positionality vis-à-vis the normative.” David Halperin, Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 62. See also Felipe E. Rojas and Peter E. Thompson, “Introduction: The Transcultural Medieval Mediterranean,” in Queering the Medieval Mediterranean, ed. Felipe E. Rojas and Peter E. Thompson (Leiden: Brill, 2021), 1–12. Other scholars might term this transgender when taking “transgender” to mean “not just an identity, or a form of embodiment, but a way of disrupting normative and essentializing frameworks,” that “may catalyse the interrogation of previously unquestioned socio-cultural norms,” as articulated by Blake Gutt and Alice Spencer-Hall, “Introduction,” in Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography, ed. Blake Gutt and Alice Spencer-Hall (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2021), 11–40 at 13.
An epigraph in the second half of the so-called Passionary of Cardeña (El Escorial, Real Biblioteca de el Monasterio de San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Cod. b.I.4, fol.127) reveals him to be the “teacher” (doctor) of this passion: “Raguel presbiter doctor fuit huius passionis cordobensis.” Raguel’s authorship was put forward by the passio’s first editor, Ambrosio de Morales, and has since been claimed in most studies of the passio, including those by Díaz y Díaz, “Pasión,” at 106–110, Gil, “Pasión,” 177–78, Bowman, “Raguel,” and Patrick Henriet, “Raguel,” in Christian-Muslim Relations. A Bibliographical History, Vol. 2 (900–1050), ed. David Thomas and Alex Mallett (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 377–80.
Díaz y Díaz, “Pasión,” 110, reiterated by Altés i Aguiló with further evidence (“‘Galletiam patruum,’” 37).
Christys, Christians, 89–90.
“Inpertire adclines itaque petimus, eterne deus, huius martyris tui plebi catholice patrocinium, cuius sancti Cipriani cemeterium caput, ac ruricula beatissimi Genesii corpus servat honorandum.” London, British Library Add. MS 30845, fol. 26v (hereafter BL45); this line is interestingly missing from Prudencio de Sandoval, Antigüedad de la Ciudad y Iglesia Cathedral de Tuy y de los obispos que se save aya avido en ella (Braga: Casa de Fructuoso Lourenço de Basto, 1610) (hereafter TUY). This is pace Altés i Aguiló, “‘Galletiam patruum,’” 38–40, who thinks this prayer (together with the rest of the mass and office) can only have been composed in Córdoba and most likely by Raguel.
Full sentence in the Illatio of the mass (see Appendix 3): “Et quia variis, occulto arcanoque dei consilio, electi occassionibus ad celum rapiuntur, patula extitit procul dubio actionis causa, qua hunc nostrum patronum martyrem tuum corpore passum Cordoba suscepit letabunda.” José Janini, ed., Liber missarum de Toledo y libros místicos (Toledo: Instituto de Estudios Visigóticos-Mozárabes, 1982), 465.
The Calendar mentions Pelagius’s tomb in “the church of Tarsil,” a neighborhood of Córdoba in which the church of Saint Genesius was located. Reinhart Dozy, ed. Le calendrier de Cordoue de l’Année 961. Texte arabe et ancienne traduction latine (Brill: Leiden, 1873), 66. The Arabic version (dated to 961) omits this entry. The Latin translation in which Pelagius’s feast is found may have been translated by Gerard of Cremona (d. 1187), but certainly by a person unfamiliar with Córdoba, according to Christys, Christians, 125–26. I thank Cathrien Hoijinck for sharing her unpublished doctoral work on the “Calendar of Córdoba.”
The fact that Hrotswitha of Gandersheim claims that the informant for her own version of Pelagius’s passio was from the saint’s native city does not confirm he was venerated there. Hrotswitha of Gandersheim, Passio Sancti Pelagii pretiosissimi martiris qui nostris temporibus in Corduba martirio est coronatus, 34: 52–62, ed. Paul von Winterfeld, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores Rerum Germanicarum in usum scholarum separatism editi (Berlin: Weidmann, 1902), and on her informant, Christys, Christians, 96–97.
Madrid, Biblioteca nacional, Cod. 822, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, nouv. acq. lat. 2179, El Escorial, Real Biblioteca de el Monasterio de San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Cod. b.I.4, and Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, nouv. acq. lat. 239.
On this distinction, see Kati Ihnat, “The Old Hispanic Office: Evidence and Silence,” in Understanding, ed. Hornby, 7–29 at 14–18. For a more detailed description of each service, see Emma Hornby and Raquel Rojo Carrillo, “The Old Hispanic Liturgical Day,” in Understanding, ed. Hornby, 134–177 at 136–45 for vespers, and 145–58 for matutinum.
Old Hispanic calendars featuring Pelagius’s feast are found in Silos, Biblioteca de la Abadía, Cod. 3, fols. 1–3; Silos, Biblioteca de la Abadía, Cod. 4 fols. 1–6; Santiago de Compostela, Biblioteca Universitaria, Reservado I, fols. 1–4; León, Biblioteca de la Catedral, Cod. 8, fols. 6–9, and Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, nouv. acq. lat. MS 2171, fols. 28–33 and edited together in José Vives and Ángel Fabrega Grau, “Calendarios hispánicos anteriores al siglo XIII,” Hispania sacra 2, no. 4 (1949): 339–80. Additionally, El Escorial, Real Biblioteca de el Monasterio de San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Cod. d.I.2, and El Escorial, Real Biblioteca de el Monasterio de San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Cod. d.I.1, contain the feast. For the complete list, see Ismael Fernandez de la Cuesta, “Brief Note on the Calendars of the Old Hispanic Liturgy,” in Calculemus et Cantemus: Towards a Reconstruction of Mozarabic Chant, ed. Geert Maessen (Amsterdam: Gregoriana Amsterdam, 2015), 15–28 at 24.
See n. 9 above.
Marcus Jones, “Old Hispanic Notation.”
BL45, fols. 24r–27r. The text is partly transcribed in Marius Férotin, Le liber mozarabicus sacramentorum et les manuscrits mozarabes (Paris: Librairie de Firmin-Didot, 1912), cols. 567–73. The Pelagius materials are only partially notated, and so the music will not be the subject of study here because 1) it corresponds to the Common of Saints (is not proper to Pelagius), and 2) there is no opportunity for comparison because neither of the other manuscripts contain notation.
Manuel Díaz y Díaz, Manuscritos visigóticos del sur de la Península (Seville: Universidad de Sevilla, 1995), 143–44.
Pick, Her Father’s Daughter, 123, 134–35.
The text is transcribed by Férotin, Liber mozarabicus, cols. 888–890 and Altés i Aguiló, “‘Galletiam patruum,’” 41–46, with variants between this text and BL45 noted in Férotin, Liber mozarabicus. cols. 567–73.
BnF239, fols. 68r–83v.
Éric Palazzo, “Le rôle des libelli dans la pratique liturgique du haut moyen âge: Histoire et typologie,” Revue Mabillon 62 (1990): 9–36.
We find numerous other examples, as detailed in work by Kati Ihnat and Melanie Shaffer, “Saint Vincent is Here: Universally Local Cults in Early Medieval Iberia” (in-progress).
TUY, fols. 63r–84r. Sandoval’s version of the office was reproduced by Férotin, Liber mozarabicus, cols. 961–962, with variants between this mass text and that in BL45 noted in Férotin, Liber mozarabicus, cols. 567–73. Férotin claims to have searched for the original manuscript in vain.
“[un libro] de tan grande antiguedad, que se puede tener por cierto, averse escrito en aquellos mesmos tiempos, porque la letra es dellos, tiene el oficio con sus Antifonas, y canto no inteligible, Hymnos, Psalmos, Oraciones, el martyrio del Santo, como lo escriben los demas, distribuydo en las Visperas, Maytines, Missa y otras horas, que luego, que el Santo padecio se le ordenaron, y reçaron en las Iglesias de España,” Sandoval, Antigüedad, fol. 62v.
Rather, readings were contained in separate lectionaries, as is assumed for the four manuscript witnesses to the so-called Passionarium Hispanicum, collections of passiones for saints in order of their celebration in the calendar year. See n. 1 for the reference to this volume.
“cuaderno y oficio de San Pelayo …” Sandoval, Antigüedad, fol. 84r.
The replacement of the Old Hispanic rite with the Franco-Roman throughout Castile- León after the Council of Burgos in 1080 makes it unlikely this Old Hispanic liturgy for Pelagius was composed much after this date.
Díaz y Díaz, “Pasión,” 104 and 108.
Férotin, Liber mozarabicus, col. 961.
The alia prayer: “hunc testem tuum beatissimum Pelagium proroga patronum.” (Janini, Liber missarum, 464); the Ad pacem prayer: “ut in omnibus in commune adsit patronus.” (Janini, Liber missarum, 465); the post sanctus prayer: “Inpertire adclines itaque petimus, eterne deus, huius martyris tui plebi catholice patrocinium.” (Janini, Liber missarum, 466–67); the inlatio prayer: “nostrum patronum martir tuum.” (Janini, Liber missarum, 465–66). The idea that the more shared materials there are, the earlier they were likely composed is based on the principle that fixity implies antiquity, which dates back to Walter H. Frere, The Sarum Gradual and the Gregorian Antiphonale Missarum (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1895), 111; repeated by James McKinnon, The Advent Project: The Later Seventh-century Creation of the Roman Mass (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 154–7; and with specific reference to the Old Hispanic liturgy by Rebecca Maloy, “Old Hispanic Chant and the Early History of Plainsong,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 67 (2014): 1–76 at 53.
The hymn in the BL45 office is unspecified. The Pelagius hymn has not been edited by José Castro Sánchez, ed., Hymnodia Hispánica, CCSL 167 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010). On the use of hymns in the Old Hispanic office, see Emma Hornby and Raquel Rojo Carrillo, “Old Hispanic Genres: Chants, Prayers and Readings,” in Understanding, ed. Hornby, 77–133 at 90–93.
Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional, Cod. 10 001, and Silos, Biblioteca de la Abadía, Cod. 3, as noted in Randel, Index, 385 and included by Justo Pérez de Urbel, “Origen de los himnos mozárabes,” Bulletin Hispanique 28 (1926): 5–21 at 19. For additional non – Hispanic manuscripts, see the CANTUS database entry: https://cantus.uwaterloo.ca/search?op=starts&t=Immense+caeli+conditor&genre=All&field_position_value=&cid=&mode=&feast=&volpiano=All&field_differentia_new_value_op=contains&field_differentia_new_value=.
Appendix 2, l. 11, l. 12, l. 13, l. 19–20.
Appendix 2, l. 32.
Appendix 2, l. 41–48.
On office readings in the Old Hispanic rite, see Hornby and Rojo Carrillo, “Old Hispanic Liturgical Day,” 130–132.
Altés I Aguiló (“‘Galletiam patruum,’” 36–37) assumed the three offices shared a basis, although there are only minor overlaps.
On the missa as a liturgical unit, see Hornby and Rojo Carrillo, “Old Hispanic Genres,” 125.
On the Commons, see Emma Hornby and Raquel Rojo Carrillo, “The Liturgical Year in the Old Hispanic Rite,” in Understanding, ed. Hornby, 30–42 at 38–39, and Emma Hornby, Marcus Jones and Melanie Shaffer, “Creating and Using Liturgies for the Commune sanctorum in Medieval Iberia,” Royal Musicological Society Research Chronicle (2024): 1–25.
BL45, f.24r. A marginal note sends the reader to find the matutinum materials in Cucufas, but these are the same as the common of a Just Man. For further concordances see Randel, Index, 349. The only other category of male saint was “confessors” or the general “sanctis” (saints). The remaining category of saint in the Old Hispanic tradition was “virgins,” which applied only to women.
There is no hymn included in BL45 for Cucuphas. Other manuscripts have Deus immensa for the common of a Just Man.
Jones, “Old Hispanic Notation,” 61–62, 69.
Note that the references in the mass prayers to Pelagius as “our patron” are shared with the other manuscripts (see n. 35 above) which says nothing about his patronage at San Millán de la Cogolla. There are three other saints whose liturgies in BL45 contain reference to the saint as patron: Aemilian, Cucuphas and Michael, of which Aemilian has the only known connection to the monastery through the presence of his body.
Jones, “Old Hispanic Notation,” 92.
Hornby and Rojo Carrillo, “Old Hispanic Liturgical Day,” 137.
“Alleluia Beatus vir” is shared with Felix (Randel, Index, 308), “Posuit dominus coronam and Coronam glorie ponam” are shared with Cyprian (Randel, Index, 131 and 31), and “Vie iusti vie bone” is shared with Augustine (Randel, Index, 235). The orations that follow these chants in the liturgies for Felix, Cyprian and Augustine make clear that they were originally intended for these saints and not for Pelagius, for whom they were later adapted.
The reordered manuscript should be: fols. 68–69, fol. 73, fol. 72, fol. 74, fols. 70–71, fols. 75–83v. The text runs through the folios except between fol. 72 and 74, leaving open the question if there was more material on folios that are now lost.
Randel, Index, 159 and 100, respectively. Although Randel lists Sapientia iustum as an “alleluiaticus” in his Index (229), there is nothing in the manuscript to indicate what genre of chant it is. Because it directly precedes the passio, it would more likely be a responsory.
On this see Manuel Díaz y Díaz, “Literary aspects of the Visigothic Liturgy,” in Visigothic Spain: New Approaches, ed. Edward James (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 61–76.
BnF239, fol. 72r.
BnF239, fol. 72r.
BnF239, fol. 72v.
BnF239, fol. 79v–80v; CCSL 171A, 1176.
BnF239, fol. 69v.
“foris inluminator … ut bina nicilominus tam virginitatis quam passionis uberius corona ditatus …” CCSL 171A, 1173, 1174.
BnF239, fol. 73r; “hec omnia hostis antiqui sunt regna transitoria immo que pro nicilo abentur que a celesti vita reparent …” compared to “‘Haec,’ ait, ‘que demonstras, o rex, nicil sunt. … Nam hec omnia fine habent, et cum suis spatiis transeunt …’” CCSL 171A, 1175.
BnF239, fol. 73v; “… si forte apostatando tantis adquiesceret regalibus pompis.” CCSL 171A, 1176.
For a useful definition, see David Hiley, Western Plainchant. A Handbook (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 273–79, and Henry Parkes, “Theology and Teleology in the Festal Night Office: What Performance Directions Reveal about the Design and Experience of Historiae,” in Historiae: Liturgical Chant for Offices of the Saints in the Middle Ages, ed. David Hiley (Venice: Edizione Fondazione Levi, 2021), 33–55; Catherine Saucier, “Singing the Lives of the Saints: Hagiographical-Historical Intersections in Music and Worship,” in Hagiography and the History of Latin Christendom, 500–1500, ed. Samantha Kahn Herrick (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 161–191; Roman Hankeln, “Intertextual Strategies in the Chants of Medieval Saints’ Offices (Historiae),” in La typologie biblique comme forme de pensée dans l’historiographie médiévale, ed. Marek Thue Kretschmer (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014), 197–217, and more generally, The Divine Office in the Latin Middle Ages: Methodology and Source Studies, Regional Developments, Hagiography. Written in honor of Professor Ruth Steiner, ed. Margot Fassler and Rebecca Baltzer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
On these features, see the summary article by Harald Buchinger, “On the Hermeneutics and Function of Saints’ Offices: Observations and Questions,” Historiae, ed. Hiley, 73–90.
An exception to this is Andrew, whose liturgy quotes frequently from his passio. On this, see Barbara Haggh-Huglo, “The Chant for St. Andrew in the León Antiphoner: A Crux of Early Medieval Chant Transmission?” in El canto mozárabe y su entorno. Estudios sobre la música de la liturgia viejo hispánica, ed. Ismael Fernández de la Cuesta (Madrid: Sociedad Española de Musicología, 2013), 413–54.
This was also true for saints celebrated in other traditions, as described by Saucier, “Singing the Lives,” 177.
Below, I argue the office may have been composed in the late eleventh century, allowing for wider European influence that may have shaped the TUY office.
TUY, fol. 65v.
CCSL 171A, 1175.
“… quia mendax est et pater eius …” CCSL 171A, 1174.
TUY, fol. 65v.
TUY, fol. 66r.
“Ac per hoc non inmerito pulcer foris intuebatur qui in domino Iesu Christo intus pulcrior diligebatur.” CCSL 171A, 1174.
TUY, fol. 66r–66v.
TUY, fol. 66v.
TUY, fol. 79v.
“hunc nostrum patronum martyrem tuum corpore passum Cordoba Tuda suscepit letabunda.” TUY fol. 80v. The other manuscripts simply omit “Tuda.”
A claim for Tuy as the origin of the passio has been made by Rafael Mérida Jiménez, “Pasiones fundacionales e inefables: en torno a san Pelagio,” in Actas del XVII Simposio de la Sociedad Española de Literatura General y Comparada, ed. Montserrat Cots and Antonio Monegal (Barcelona: Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 2010), 212.
Gil, “Pasión,” 163–64 for evidence of Ermogius as connected to Tuy, and a more critical evaluation by Christys, Christians, 225–28, who raises the possibility that “the diocese of Tuy based their claim to the cult of Pelagius on their reading of the passion,” 228.
Pelagius’s connection with Vincent and Clement could be based on the fact that all three of their bodies ended up in the water, something highlighted in the psalmus chant, based on Ps. 68:2 (“Save me, o God, for the waters are come in even unto my soul.”).
TUY, fols. 75r–77r. Also recorded in Férotin, Liber mozarabicus, col. 962.
These are edited on the basis of BL45, but with reference to the other two manuscripts, in Janini, Liber missarum, 463–468.
“Nam ergastulis conclusus, quam eius consodales voluptuose viverent, iste uno eodemque modo corpus servavit intactum.” Janini, Liber missarum, 463.
CCSL 171A, 1173–74.
“quod ipsi male ingessimus vivendo diaboli suadetis …” Janini, Liber missarum, 463.
“a Domino coronaretur, in quibus assidue diabolus letaretur …” CCSL 171A, 1174.
“perfido, qui veritatem non tacuit regi, nomine solummodo glorians unigeniti tui.” Janini, Liber missarum, 464.
“Eadem quippe illius extabat conversatio de illa nicilominus responsio, qua eo reluctante, quando forte quisque dissimilis fidei garrulus aderat, refutatus abibat.” CCSL 171A, 1173.
Janini, Liber missarum, 465–66.
“futurum quodammodo premeditabatur martyrium, cuius sepe animus intente penetrabat celum.” Janini, Liber missarum, 465–66.
“absque inlecebris vitam nequibat ducere incentivorum …” CCSL 171A, 1172. Trans., Bowman, “Martyrdom,” 231.
The passio reads: “Legerat enim magistrum sibi Paulum in doctrinis vigilantem, deprecationibus instantem, angustiis communicantem, in pressuris non deficientem. Quapropter sollers erat in lectione ac facilis in doctrina.” CCSL 171A, 1173. Julian is said to read Paul, the master of all Christians: “Et sic denique utebatur mundo, quasi non uteretur: legerat enim magistrum omnium christianorum, Paulum apostolum …” CCSL 171A, 119.
In the illatio: “Nam psallendi quotidie modum adhibuerat, cui tua [TUY: tanta] Christe, gratia intus inluminatrix aderat. Verum cuius precordiis abdito ipso nature sonueras.” Janini, Liber missarum, 466. In the passio: “Cui sane intus manebat instructor Christus ei qui foris erat inluminator.” CCSL 171A, 1173.
“Audi filii et vide quia concupivit rex speciem tuam.” Janini, Liber missarum, 466.
Jordan, Invention, 25.
The influence of late antique female martyrdom narratives has been noted by Pick, Her Father’s Daughter, 92, but not specifically Eulalia. A link between Pelagius’s hagiography and accounts related to the relics of Eulalia in the Vita Patrum Emeritensium is raised in Bowman, “Beauty and Passion,” 239, but not specifically with Eulalia’s passio.
The passio is edited in Passionarium Hispanicum, ed. Yarza Urquiola, 434–444. Prudentius’s hymn is edited in Prudentius, “Peristephanon,” in Aurelii Prudentii Clementis carmina, ed. Maurice P. Cunningham, CCSL 61 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1966) and translated by Henry J. Thomson in Prudentius, “Against Symmachus 2: Crowns of Martyrdom: Scenes from History: Epilogue,” ed. Henry J. Thomson, Loeb Classical Library 398 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953), 142–157.
On her cult between the fourth and ninth centuries, see Serafín Bodelón, “Textos latinos sobre Eulalia (s. IV–IX),” in Santa Eulalia, mito y realidad: Figuración y hermenéutica del texto, ed. José Miguel Lamalfa Díaz (Oviedo: Universidad de Oviedo, 2010), 41–90 and García Rodríguez, Culto, 284–303.
CCSL 171A, 434–44.
See Kati Ihnat, “Mary as Bride in the Old Hispanic Office: Liturgical and Theological Trends,” Mediaeval Studies 78 (2016): 65–123.
Eulalia’s office and mass are found in León, Archivo de la Catedral, Cod. 8, fols. 50r–51v, transcribed in José Vives and Louis Brou, eds., Antifonario visigótico mozárabe de la catedral de León, Monumenta Hispaniae Sacra: serie liturgica I (Barcelona and Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1959), 55–58; Madrid, Real Academia de la Historia, Cod. 30, fols. 65v–76v, transcribed in Miquel Gros i Pujol, “El ‘Liber misticus’ de San Millán de la Cogolla – Madrid, Real Academia de la Historia, Aemil. 30,” Miscellania Liturgica Catalana 2 (1984): 111–224, 146–48, Verona, Biblioteca Capitolare Cod. 80, fols. 18r–21v, transcribed in Vives, Oracional, 50–61, and the mass texts edited in Janini, Liber missarum, 32–35. Prudentius’s hymn, “Germine nobilis Eulaliae,” is additionally found in London, British Library Add. MS 30851, fols. 115v–118r, transcribed in Julius P. Gilson, ed. The Mozarabic Psalter (MS. British Museum Add. 30851), Henry Bradshaw Society (London: Harrison and Sons, 1905), 193–197.
“Nec deest lictor tam impudens quam crudelis, qui sponsam secure ut dixerim Christi fornicantium verberibus oculorum supplicio libidinante torqueret, ut que penas in adulterio non luebat, saltim penas adulteras sustineret. Nudum, quod gravius carnifex putat, expectantium oculis corpus exponit, et per devaricatas viscerum partes ictuum sulcos cursus fusi sanguinis antecedit. Periit tuum, tortor inique, commentum; sola patiuntur tormenta ludibrium. Habet quidem virginem nostram nuditas, sed pudicam.” Janini, Liber missarum, 32.
On this tradition, see especially David G. Hunter, “The Virgin, the Bride and the Church: Reading Psalm 45 in Ambrose, Jerome and Augustine,” Church History 69 (2000): 281–303; Gillian Clark, “Women and Asceticism in Late Antiquity: The Refusal of Status and Gender,” in Asceticism, ed. Vincent L. Wimbush and Richard Valantasis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 33–48.
The office and mass chants of the common of virgins are found in León, Catedral Cod. 8, fol. 252v, and the common of one virgin fols. 252v–255 (Vives and Brou, Antifonario, 421, and 422–425). On the history of the consecration of virgins and the common of virgins, see Nathalie Henry, “The Song of Songs and the Liturgy of the Velatio in the Fourth Century: From Literary Metaphor to Liturgical Reality,” in Continuity and Change in Christian Worship, ed. Robert N. Swanson, Studies in Church History (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1999), 18–28 and Nathalie Henry, “A New Insight into the Growth of Ascetic Society in the Fourth Century: The Public Consecration of Virgins as a Means of Integration and Promotion of the Female Ascetic Movement,” in Studia Patristica XXXV: Ascetica, Gnostica, Liturgica, Orientalia, ed. Maurice F. Wiles, Edward Yarnold, and Paul M. Parvis (Leuven: Peeters, 2001), 102–109.
There is no allusion to this scene in the hymn attributed to Prudentius (“Germine nobilis”), but this does not conclusively show whether it was original to the passio or not.
“Christus … dignus regebat alumnus, purificans quoque vas suum, exercens habitaculum in quo post paululum ut sponsus laetaretur et de quo sacro laureatus cruore sibi amplexibus inter sanctorum curias dignus honore famulus iungeretur …” CCSL 171A, 1174.
Pick, Her Father’s Daughter, 93.
Vives, Oracional, 56–57.
BnF239, fol. 72r. The term inlecebra is not frequently used, to my knowledge, in the Old Hispanic liturgy. The only other use which I have identified is in the mass for the common of virgin martyrs, which is likewise about female saints resisting the enticements of their would-be seducers: “Dum nihil nunc proficiat tormentis, qui prius prevaluerat blandimentis; nihil agat penis, qui deceperat prius inlecebris: dum sexum inbecillem inimicus non superat bellicosus …” Janini, Liber missarum, 396.
“Nec deest lictor tam impudens quam crudelis, qui sponsam secure ut dixerim Christi fornicantium verberibus oculorum supplicio libidinante torqueret …” Janini, Liber missarum, 32. Eulalia’s passio lacks the overt threat to her virginity from her persecutor explicit in the mass prayers.
BnF239, fol. 69v. The references to these themes in Eulalia are plentiful, e.g. Vives, Oracional, 54–59.
Bowman noted several in Bowman, “Beauty and Passion,” 239. Gil noted resonances with Eugenia and Dorothea in Gil, “Pasión,” 177. See also more generally Christys, Christians, 216–220, and Pick, Her Father’s Daughter, 92–94.
Other saints who also do this are Eugenia (CCSL 171A, 494) and Julian and Basilissa (CCSL 171A, 556).
Coyne Kelly, Performing Virginity, 101. This has also been referred to as “demonstrative exhibitionism,” typical of male saints, according to Robert Mills, “‘Whatever you do is a delight to me!’ Masculinity, Maoschism and Queer Play in Representations of Male Martyrdom,” Exemplaria 13 (2001): 1–37 at 9.
Bodelón, “Textos latinos,” 47.
Pick, Her Father’s Daughter, 91–94, remarked already by Díaz y Díaz, “Pasión,” 109, n. 326.
By Juan Gil’s count, at least thirty charters from across the kingdoms contain mention of a church dedicated to Pelagius or owning his relics. Gil, “Pasión,” 172–75. To these we can add the Galician houses, San Payo de Rabal, San Paio de Mosteiro, and San Pelayo de Villar, included in Pick, Her Father’s Daughter, 129.
Pick, Her Father’s Daughter, 70–71; Roger Collins, Caliphs and Kings: Spain, 796–1031 (Chichester: Wiley, 2014), 155.
Thomas Deswarte, De la destruction à la restauration: L’idéologie du royaume d’Oviedo- León (VIIIe–XIe siècles) (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), 122. Pick, Her Father’s Daughter, 71, puts the transfer rather in the late 990’s. For the monastery of San Pelayo in Oviedo, a female monastic house of elite status, housing women from the royal family and aristocracy, see Deswarte, De la destruction, 146–47; Francisco Javier Fernández Conde and Isabel Torrente Fernández, “Los orígenes del monasterio de San Pelayo (Oviedo): aristocracia, poder y monacato,” Territorio, sociedad y poder 2 (2007): 181–202.
Pick, Her Father’s Daughter, 83–92.
Pick, Her Father’s Daughter, 63–64.
Díaz y Díaz, Códices, 448–451.
Her brother García, king of Galicia, had been unsuccessful in doing precisely the same thing six months earlier, pointing to Urraca’s greater legitimacy in controlling ecclesiastical property across her brothers’s domains. On this, see Pick, Her Father’s Daughter, 1–4.
The text is found in Henrique Flórez, España Sagrada: Theatro geographico-historico de la iglesia de España: tomo XXII, De la iglesia de Tuy desde su origen hasta el siglo decimo sexto (Madrid: Antonio Marín, 1767), 247. See also the monsteries dedicated to Pelagius listed in Gil, “Pasión,” 173.
Pick, Her Father’s Daughter, 94. Ann Christys suggests an earlier date of composition than what is suggested here, putting forward the idea that competing claims for Pelagius’s relics between León and Oviedo may have inspired Tuy to lay its own claim to the saint. Christys, Christians, 98–99.
Pick, Her Father’s Daughter, 94, and also Simon Barton, Conquerors, Brides and Concubines: Interfaith Relations and Social Power in Medieval Iberia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 13–42 and 76–109.
See n. 5.
Bowman, “Beauty and Passion,” Jordan, Invention of Sodomy, 10. On the genre more generally, see Norman Roth, “The Care and Feeding of Gazelles: Medieval Arabic and Hebrew Love Poetry,” in Poetics of Love in the Middle Ages, ed. Moshé Lazar and Norris J. Lacy (Fairfax, VA: George Mason University Press, 1989), 95–118; Jerry W. Wright and Everett K. Rowson, eds., Homoeroticism in Classical Arabic Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); Jocelyn Sharlet, “Public Displays of Affection: Male Homoerotic Desire and Sociability in Medieval Arabic Literature,” in Islam and Homosexuality, ed. Samar Habib (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC Clio, 2010), 37–56; Michael Sells, “Love,” in The Literature of Al-Andalus, ed. María Rosa Menocal, Raymond P. Scheindlin, and Michael Sells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 126–58 at 136.
Sharlet, “Public Displays.” On the circulation of rumours about the son of ʿAbd a-Raḥmān III, Al-Ḥakam II (r. 961–976), being sexually interested in men, see Dede Fairchild Ruggles, “Mothers of a Hybrid Dynasty: Race, Genealogy and Acculturation in al-Andalus,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 34 (2004): 65–94 at 73–74; María Viguera, “Aṣluḥu li ’l-ma˓ālī: On the Social Status of Andalusi Women,” in Legacy of Muslim Spain, ed. Salma Khadra Jayyusi (Leiden: Brill, 2021), 708–24, and more generally Rafaela M. Mérida Jiménez, “Pasiones fundacionales e inefables: en torno a san Pelagio,” in Actas del XVII Simposio de la Sociedad Española de Literatura General y Comparada, ed. Montserrat Cots and Antonio Monegal (Barcelona: Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 2010), 205–215 at 212–213. The later ṭāʾifa kings were also criticized by their fellow Muslims of effeminacy, see Hanna E. Kassis, “Muslim Revival in Spain in the Fifth/Eleventh Century,” Der Islam: Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Kultur des Islamischen Orients 67 (1990): 78–110.
Bowman, “Beauty and Passion,” 243–44.
On this trope, see Norman Roth, “‘Deal gently with the young man’: Love of Boys in Medieval Hebrew Poetry of Spain,” Speculum 57 (1982): 20–51 at 36–37.
Those who assume this poetry reflects social practices include, notably, John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 194–98; Wright and Rowson, Homoeroticism, Crompton, Homosexuality and Civilization, 167–68. Exploring the tension between social practice and poetic style, see Louis Crompton, “Male Love and Islamic Law in Arab Spain,” in Islamic Homosexualities: Culture, History and Literature, ed. Stephen O. Murray and Will Roscoe (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 142–57. On Christian polemicising on the basis of Islam’s perceived hypersexuality, see María Jesús Aldana García, “Expresión de los sistemas de antítesis que oponen el Cristianismo al Islam en la obra de S. Eulogio,” Habis 31 (2000): 417–25 at 418–421; Charles L. Tieszen, Christian Identity amid Islam in Medieval Spain (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 135–36, and Alexandra Cuffel, Gendering Disgust in Medieval Religious Polemic (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2007), 118–119.
The same is true of the works of Eulogius of Córdoba, who defended the sanctity of the Cordoban martyrs of the 850’s by linking them to the late antique palaeomartyrs of the fourth century, on which see Jamie Wood, “Persecution Past and Present: Memorializing Martyrdom in Late Antique and Early Medieval Córdoba,” Al-Masaq 27 (2015): 41–60; Kenneth Baxter Wolf, trans., The Eulogius Corpus, Translated Texts for Historians 71 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019).
“Vita vel passio sancti Pelagii martyris qui passus est in Cordoba civitate sub Abdirrahaman rege … hic beatissimus Pelagius aetate circiter tredecim et semis passus est annorum Cordoba, ut dictum est, in civitate, Abderrhaman rege imperante …” CCSL 171A 1171, 1177. Even if the title may not have been read out as part of the public reading, we can assume the closing line was, as it precedes a final prayer.
The same process is found in the surviving liturgy for the Cordoban saints Faustus, Januarius and Martialis, as examined by Melanie Shaffer, “Three Men in the Fire X 3: Biblical Typology and Inter-religious Anxiety in the Liturgy for Saints Faustus, Januarius and Martialis in Medieval Iberia,” Journal of Musicology 41, no. 2 (2024): 221–261.
All texts have been transcribed according to the manuscript content without change to spelling, except to expand abbreviations and to provide possible alternative words where the meaning is unclear (original noted in square brackets). My thanks go to Henry Howard and Graham Barrett for their assistance with the translations.
BL45, fol. 25r–26r; Sandoval, Antigüedad, fols. 80r–82r; Férotin, Liber mozarabicus, cols. 569–571; Janini, Liber Missarum, 465–66.
conveni.
+ semper extitit.
praespicuum.
occisionibus.
+ Tuda.
parvus.
pro.
facturus.
+ esse.
tanta.
cum.
stetit.
habeto.
adquiescerem.
dicet.
quale.
interitu.
per.
suscipiens.
desercuit.
inde.
precibus.
nostris.
