Bartholomew of Trent (c. 1200 – 1251) was a Dominicanhagiographer and papal diplomat. His Epilogum in gesta sanctorum (Afterword on the Deeds of the Saints), which set a new style in hagiography designed for practical use by preachers, specifically to inspire a lay audience with marvels and moral admonitions, was one of two main sources for Jacobus de Voragine's compendium, Golden Legend.[1]
The Epilogum in gesta sanctorum was completed in the Monastery of San Lorenzo, at Trent, in 1245.[4] The modern edition is that of Emore Paoli (Sismel, Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2001),[5] superseding that of D. Gobbi (1990), transcribing a manuscript from Klosterneuburg.
At one point "in the first half of the thirteenth century, Bartholomew of Trent recounted a number of apparitions of the archangel Michael"[6] that embellished the story of Pope Gregory's famous letania septiformis created to quell the plague of 590 caused by the overflowing of the river Tiber in Rome. The final account was published in 1270 when "Jacobus de Voragine put all the pieces together in his wildly popular Legenda aurea."[7] The text concludes, "Then Gregory saw an angel of the lord standing atop the castle of Crescentius, wiping a bloody sword and sheathing it. Gregory understood that the plague had ceased, as indeed, happened. Following from which the castle was called the Castle of the Angel."[8] The statue of an angel atop Rome's Castel Sant'Angelo overlooking the city remains to this day.
Notes
^Irena Dorota Backus, The Reception of the Church Fathers in the West, "The Patristic sources of the Legenda Aurea", 1997:II:240.
^Regis J. Armstrong, J. A. Wayne Hellmann, William J. Short, eds. Francis of Assisi: early documents, vol. 2 "Dominican hagiography and sermons", p. 782.
^Jacob A. Latham, “Inventing Gregory ‘the Great’: Memory Authority and the Afterlives of the ‘Letania Septiformis’, Church History, Cambridge University Press, Vol. 84, No. 1 (March 2015), pp. 1-31.