Paolo Tomea

SUMMARY: In 1179, when the King of France’s daughter, Agnes, promised bride to Alexios II Komnenos, arrived in Constantinople, the Archbishop Eustathios of Thessalonike composed an oration, in which he underlined that, in spite of her young age, the princess already showed a ‘‘white-haired wisdom’’. Certainly, the recourse to the topos of the puella senex might be grounded on facts; but in this paper another hypothesis is suggested: the praise could be part of a more sophisticated rhetoric game in which the prelate aimed at associating, in an allusive way, the little princess with her patron saint, Agnes. In fact the text of Passio Agnetis BHL 156, which was immensely popular in the West and enjoyed a Greek translation (BHG 46), presented the twelve year old martyr corpore iuvencula sed animo cana (young in body, but white-haired in spirit) and gifted with a senectus mentis immensa (very old for her wisdom).

In medieval collections of miracula many stories are about sick persons who are healed by a particular saint after fruitless pilgrimages to other saints’ tombs. Similar miracles are included in Vita Ansuini BHL 555, Miracula Audoeni BHL 760 and Vita Geraldi BHL 3417. The exceptional feature here lies in the fact that Ansuinus, Audoenus and Adalardus of Corbie perform the miracle after a sort of failure of the archangel Michael. Some points in the Vita Ansuini, concerning the Saint honoured by angels, suggest a theological background based on New Testament passages; but most interestingly these Vitae are a sign of the changing devotion and of the acknowledged pre-eminence of saints over angels.