Virgin Aemiliana

Saint Aemiliana (also spelled Emiliana) was a sixth-century Roman consecrated virgin and the paternal aunt of Pope Saint Gregory the Great. She was one of three sisters of Gordianus, a Roman church official of senatorial rank; the family traced its ancestry to Pope Felix III. Aemiliana and her sister Tarsilla (Tharsilla) remained in the family residence in Rome, where they lived a life of prayer, fasting, and ascetic discipline as dedicated virgins. Their third sister, Gordiana, at first joined them but later left the consecrated life, married, and returned to worldly affairs, an outcome Gregory later cited with sorrow.

Gregory, who had known his aunts during his youth, described their household as resembling a small monastery. Tarsilla in particular was renowned for the intensity of her prayer; Gregory recorded that her elbows and knees had become hardened by long hours of kneeling. The two sisters persevered in this domestic form of consecration at a time when Italy was experiencing the political turmoil of the Gothic Wars and the gradual establishment of Byzantine rule.

Tarsilla died first, on Christmas Eve. According to Gregory’s Homily 38 on the Gospels, she was granted a vision of their ancestor Pope Felix, who showed her a place of heavenly glory prepared for her. A few days afterward Tarsilla appeared to Aemiliana in a vision, inviting her sister to share the same reward and indicating that Aemiliana would celebrate the feast of the Epiphany in heaven. Aemiliana was immediately seized with fever and died shortly thereafter. These events are traditionally associated with early January, and Aemiliana’s memory is kept on 5 January.

No writings by Aemiliana herself survive, and the only substantial ancient testimony is that of her nephew Gregory, composed decades later when he was pope. Precise years of birth and death are not recorded in contemporary sources; she is customarily placed in the middle of the sixth century. She was never the subject of a formal papal canonization process, being venerated from an early period as one of the holy virgins of Rome. The Roman Martyrology commemorates her simply as a virgin at Rome. She is not known to have founded a community, belonged to a later religious order, or acquired specific patronages. Her cult remains modest, preserved chiefly through Gregory’s homiletic account of familial holiness amid the uncertainties of sixth-century Italy.