ABSTRACT
The community which is the subject of this chapter is a celestial one. Moreover, it is one which chronological coordinates place over a thousand years before the events I am shortly to describe. At. the same time, however, it is a community whose hagiographical coordinates - as defined by the material vestigia of its members (from their relics and reliquary chapels to printed vitae and liturgical offices) and, above all, by their original places of burial - grounded it firmly in - or rather underneath - Tridentine Rome. So that an English Catholic visitor to the city from 1576 to 1578 could write:
The fact that these words are not those of their sixteenth-century writer but consciously and reverently taken by him from the homily of a contemporary of St Ambrose, the fourth-century, sometime Archbishop of Constantinople, St John Chrysostom (347407) merely reinforces my point. For Gregory Martin, devoutly criss-crossing Tridentine Rome, just as for Parsifal uncertainly approaching the Castle of the Grail in Wagner’s eponymous music drama, ‘time here becomes space’.
