EULÀLIA DE BARCELONA: THE MYTH BECOMES A LEGEND

Santa Eulàlia, Cathedral of Barcelona

Today, The Grandma is celebrating Santa Eulalia, the co-patron saint of Barcelona. Because she is still suffering flu, she can not go out to celebrate this day participating in all the events that the city offers to homage its patron. The Grandma must stay at home and she has read some interesting information about Santa Eulàlia, her life and The Sequence of Saint Eulalia, an amazing text from the 9th-century which talks about this religious heroin.

After reading about Santa Eulàlia, The Grandma has studied a new lesson of her Intermediate Language Practice (Grammar 2).

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Saint Eulalia or Aulaire, Aulazia, Olalla, Eulària (c. 290–12 February 303), co-patron saint of Barcelona, was a 13-year-old Roman Christian virgin who suffered martyrdom in Barcelona during the persecution of Christians in the reign of emperor Diocletian, although the Sequence of Saint Eulalia mentions the pagan king Maximian. There is some dispute as to whether she is the same person as Saint Eulalia of Mérida, whose story is similar.

For refusing to recant her Christianity, the Romans subjected her to thirteen tortures; including:

-Putting her into a barrel with knives or shards of glass and rolling it down a street , according to tradition, the one now called Baixada de Santa Eulàlia, Saint Eulalia's descent.

-Cutting off her breasts.

-Crucifixion on an X-shaped cross. She is depicted with this cross, the instrument of her martyrdom.

-Finally, decapitation.

Santa Eulàlia

A dove is supposed to have flown forth from her neck following her decapitation. This is one point of similarity with the story of Eulalia of Mérida, in which a dove flew from the girl's mouth at the moment of her death.

Eulalia is commemorated with statues and street names throughout Barcelona. Her body was originally interred in the church of Santa Maria de les Arenes, now Santa Maria del Mar. It was hidden in 713 during the Moorish invasion, and only recovered in 878. In 1339, it was relocated to an alabaster sarcophagus in the crypt of the newly built Cathedral of Santa Eulàlia.

The festival of Saint Eulalia is held in Barcelona for a week around her feast day on February 12.

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The Sequence of Saint Eulalia, also known as the Canticle of Saint Eulalia is the earliest surviving piece of French hagiography and one of the earliest extant texts in the vernacular langues d'oïl. It dates from around 880.

Saint Eulalia's legend is recounted in the 29 verses of the Sequence, in which she resists pagan threats, bribery and torture from the pagan emperor Maximian. She miraculously survives being burned at the stake, but is finally decapitated. She then ascends to heaven in the form of a dove.

The Sequence was composed in verse around 880, soon after the rediscovery of the relics of a saint of the same name, Eulalia of Barcelona, in 878.

The manuscript containing the Sequence is a collection of sermons by Gregory of Nazianzus. It is first mentioned in a 12th-century catalog of the library of Saint-Amand Abbey, although the production of the manuscript has been dated to the early 9th century.

It is not known with certainty where it was produced. B. Bischoff suggests that it came from a scriptorium in Lower Lotharingia, but not from Saint-Amand itself, given its style of construction and the handwriting, which cannot be matched to other manuscripts produced there during the same period. 

Santa Eulàlia's giant, Baixada de Santa Eulàlia, Barcelona

The manuscript is less significant for its original content, however, than for the empty pages at the end that later scribes filled in with additional texts. These include:

-The top half of f141: a 14-line Latin poem about Saint Eulalia (Cantica uirginis Eulalie).

-The top half of f141v: the Sequence of Saint Eulalia in vernacular Romance.

-From the bottom of f141v to the top of f143: the Ludwigslied (Rithmus teutonicus), written in a variety of Old High German.

The Sequence and the Ludwigslied are written in the same hand, and since the preamble of the Ludwigslied mentions the death of Louis III, both additions to the manuscript are dated to 882 or soon thereafter. Again, it cannot be established with certainty where these additions were made, whether at Saint-Amand or elsewhere.

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When Jean Mabillon visited Saint-Amand Abbey in 1672, he made a hasty copy of the Ludwigslied, but neither he nor his hosts seem to have recognized the significance of the Sequence immediately preceding it. When Mabillon and the historian Johannes Schilter attempted to obtain a better transcription of the Ludwigslied in 1693, the monks of the abbey were unable to locate the manuscript.

It remained lost throughout the 18th century, until the entire contents of the abbey library were confiscated and transferred to Valenciennes in 1792, by order of the revolutionary government. In September 1837, Hoffmann von Fallersleben visited the library of Valenciennes with the intention of unearthing the lost text of the Ludwigslied. According to his account, it only took him one afternoon to find the manuscript and to realize that it contained another important text, the Sequence of Saint Eulalia.

The Eulalia text is a sequence or prose consisting of 14 assonant couplets, each written on one line and separated by a punctus, followed by a final unpaired coda verse. 

The Sequence follows no strict meter. Most of the couplets consist of two ten-syllable verses, although some have 11, 12, or 13 syllables.

Both the vernacular Sequence and the Latin poem that precedes it show similarities with the hymn to Eulalia in the Peristephanon, by the 4th-century Christian poet Prudentius.

More information: Project Gutenberg

Buona pulcella fut Eulalia,
Bel auret corps bellezour anima.
Voldrent la veintre li deo Inimi,
Voldrent la faire diaule seruir.

Eulalia was a good girl,
She had a beautiful body, a soul more beautiful still.
The enemies of God wanted to overcome her,
they wanted to make her serve the devil.

 The Sequence of Saint Eulalia