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Biography

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Agostino Novello, born Matteo da Termini (also called Matteo di Termini), was a Sicilian jurist and Augustinian friar of the later thirteenth century, venerated as a blessed in the Catholic Church. He came from Termini Imerese on the northern coast of Sicily, then in the Kingdom of Sicily. No contemporary record fixes the year of his birth; later tradition commonly places it around 1240. He was trained in civil and canon law. Later biographers associate him with the University of Bologna as a student and teacher, though that academic career is known from hagiographic tradition rather than from a full archival dossier. He entered the service of King Manfred of Sicily and is described as a royal counselor or court jurist. Manfred’s rule ended with his defeat and death at the Battle of Benevento in 1266, when Charles of Anjou overthrew Hohenstaufen power in southern Italy. According to the traditional life, Matteo was involved in these events, was badly wounded, and was left among the dead; after his recovery he abandoned public office.

He then entered the Order of Hermits of Saint Augustine, a mendicant order formed from several hermit congregations in the thirteenth century. He took the religious name Agostino. The epithet Novello, meaning the new or the younger, distinguished him from Augustine of Hippo, whose Rule and theology shaped the order. As a friar he joined legal learning to a reputation for austerity, prayer, and preaching. Augustinian chronicles record that he was elected prior general, the highest superior of the order, and that he held the office at the end of the thirteenth century, dates usually given as 1298 to 1300. At Rome he was valued as a canonist and is said to have advised the papal court in the troubled years around the pontificate of Boniface VIII. After a short generalate he asked to be released from office and withdrew from the central government of the order.

His last years were spent at the small Augustinian hermitage of San Leonardo al Lago, among woods and a lake in the Sienese countryside, in the orbit of the Republic of Siena. There he followed a more eremitical observance until his death on 19 May 1309. Veneration began soon afterward, especially in Siena, where the Augustinians and the civic community promoted his memory. In the 1320s Simone Martini painted a well-known altarpiece of Blessed Agostino Novello for the church of Sant'Agostino in Siena, showing the blessed in the Augustinian habit and, in flanking scenes, four miracles credited to his intercession, chiefly the rescue of children and others from fatal accidents. Those images are among the principal medieval witnesses to his cult. He was also remembered in Sicily as a son of Termini Imerese.

The Holy See confirmed his public cult in 1759 under Pope Clement XIII, a confirmation that in the older procedure for long-standing local veneration constitutes beatification. His feast is kept on 19 May. Devotion links him with Termini Imerese and with the Augustinian houses of Tuscany. He was not later canonized for the universal Church. He was never Bishop of Rome and never held a patriarchal see. Surviving accounts do not record a wife or children from his years in the world; after he entered the Augustinian order he lived under religious vows as a priest and friar.

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