Four Saints

Mid-20th century
Stained glass
Frauenkirche, Munich, Germany

According to their legend Saints Ammianus and Marinus were hermits who lived in Noricum (present-day Austria) but were called to evangelize in Bavaria, where the priest Marinus was burned at the stake by pagan Vandals. His deacon, Ammianus, then died of an illness on the same day, November 15. Their story is in Monumenta Boica, I, 343-51. In the image above Annianus wears the dalmatic that identifies him as a deacon, but the martyr's palm branch is not consistent with the legend. Nor are the mitre and crozier in the portrait of Marinus, who was not a bishop but a priest.

The two female saints are also closely associated with Bavaria. Blessed Ermengard was Abbess of Chiemsee, Bavaria, in the 9th century. Upon her death she was venerated as a saint by the nuns of the abbey and the local community, but she was beatified only in 1928 (Butler, III, 119). Her feast day is July 16. In the window, her only identifiers are the crozier and her black Benedictine habit. Saint Edigna was the daughter of Henry I of France, hence her crown and the fleur-de-lis on the sceptre she is holding. Inspired by a vision, she left France and made a hermitage for herself in the hollow of a great lime tree in Bavaria (Acta Sanctorum, February vol. 3, 669-70). She died on February 26, 1109.

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Photographed at the Frauenkirche by Richard Stracke, shared under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.