Analecta Bollandiana

• Summary: This article examines the hagiographic documentation on Sts Justa and Rufina of Seville. An edition of the Visigothic Passion (BHL 4566) reveals an Aquitaine branch that presents an older version of the text. The unpublished version BHL 4567 presents variants that demonstrate its antiquity. Finally, a fragment from Vic bears traces of a version from which BHL 4566 and BHL 4567 derive, and which a supplemented Golden Legend from Barcelona may have partially preserved. Finally, examination of the later abridged versions reveals other traces of this ancient version, which predates the Visigothic rewriting attested from the 7th cent. onwards. It is certain that this primitive text included a mention of the ancient city of Ulia, which disappeared during the Visigothic period.

• Summary: This paper examines the representation of St Teknodotos, an other-wise unknown saint attested only in an 11th-century fresco from a private church in rural Naxos. Likely commissioned by a provincial military official, the image appears linked to the donor’s prayers for a child. The saint’s absence from written hagiography suggests a cult sustained through oral tradition. As attested by textual sources relating to other saints, this case shows that male saints could be invoked for fertility. More broadly, it underscores how private and rural contexts fostered the veneration of saints whose evocative names addressed local and familial concerns, particularly infertility.

• Summary: After an adventurous life, Bernardino Faino (known as Faynus, 1597-1673) was ordained a priest in 1627, settled in Brescia, and devoted himself to research on religious history, particularly hagiography, publishing, among other works, a Martyrologium Brixianum (1665). He provided the Bollandists with a wealth of information on Italian saints, as evidenced by the letters published here.

Bulletin hagiographique