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Biography

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Honoratus of Amiens, known in French as Honoré d'Amiens, was a bishop of Amiens in northern Gaul in the later sixth century. Tradition places his birth at Port-le-Grand in Ponthieu, in what is now the Somme department of France, and describes him as coming from a family of local nobility. Almost nothing about his childhood or formation can be established from contemporary documents; the surviving picture of his life is drawn from medieval hagiography and later episcopal lists rather than from sixth-century charters or chronicles. He is commonly numbered among the early bishops of Amiens, often as the seventh occupant of that see, and is associated with the pastoral government of a Merovingian diocese rather than with membership in any later religious order.

The episode most often attached to his episcopate is the discovery, or solemn recognition, of the relics of the third-century missionary martyrs Victoricus, Fuscian, and Gentian, whose cult was already rooted in the countryside around Amiens. According to the later legend, Honoratus was guided to their burial place and translated the remains, thereby strengthening the local calendar of saints. Beyond this, the historical outline of his government of the diocese remains obscure. No conciliar subscriptions or royal diplomas securely dated to his name have become standard points of reference in modern scholarship, and the length of his tenure is inferred from later catalogues of bishops rather than from a contemporary narrative source.

He is traditionally said to have died on 16 May, around the year 600, and to have been buried at Amiens. His tomb became a focus of local veneration, and in the High Middle Ages his relics were kept in the cathedral of Notre-Dame d'Amiens, where they were the object of translations and processions. A well-known later legend, which explains his patronage of bakers, relates that when news of his election as bishop reached an elderly woman who had cared for him in youth and who was then baking bread, she declared that she would believe the report only if her baker's peel took root. The peel was planted and, in the story, grew into a tree. This tale, together with the dedication of a Parisian chapel and later parish church of Saint-Honoré, around which the Rue Saint-Honoré developed, carried his cult well beyond Picardy. In the later Middle Ages the bakers of Paris formally took him as their patron. Processions of his relics were also remembered as having obtained rain in time of drought.

He is not to be confused with Honoratus of Arles, the fifth-century founder of the monastery of Lérins and later archbishop of Arles, nor with other early saints of the same name. Honoratus of Amiens was never the subject of a papal canonization in the later juridical sense; his cult is of the pre-congregation type, rooted in episcopal and popular veneration in northern France. His feast is kept on 16 May. He is invoked as patron of bakers, pastry cooks, confectioners, millers, and flour merchants, as a patron of the city of Amiens, and in some traditions as a saint whose relics were carried in procession to obtain rain. The pâtisserie known as the Saint-Honoré takes its name from the bakers' devotion that attached to his memory in Paris.

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