Virgins Aurelia

The saints known as the holy virgins Aurelia and Neomisia are commemorated in the Roman Martyrology on 25 September with the notice that they are honored at Anagni in Latium. Beyond this liturgical attestation and the presence of their relics in the cathedral of that city, almost nothing about them can be established by contemporary historical evidence. The narrative of their lives that has come down in local tradition and in later medieval texts is typical of many Italian virgin-saint legends: it supplies an eastern origin, a flight from danger, a hidden life of prayer, and a holy death, but it does not rest on documents from the period in which they are supposed to have lived.

According to that tradition, Aurelia and Neomisia belonged to a noble family in the East, frequently identified with Cappadocia or with the vicinity of Constantinople. In order to preserve their consecrated virginity, or to escape persecution or civil disturbance, they left their homeland and eventually reached the Italian peninsula. They withdrew to a solitary place in the territory of Anagni, where they passed the remainder of their days in fasting, prayer, and works of mercy. The same accounts credit them with miracles during their lifetime and at their tomb. They are said to have died on one and the same day and to have been buried near the site of their eremitical dwelling.

At a later, unspecified date their relics were brought into Anagni and enshrined in the cathedral, a Romanesque building whose construction in the eleventh and twelfth centuries provided a lasting setting for their cult. The two virgins have remained figures of essentially local devotion. They do not appear to have been the object of a papal canonization in the sense that became common after the twelfth century; their status as saints rests on ancient popular and episcopal veneration, later registered in the martyrology. Critical hagiographers, including the Bollandists, have long noted that the biographical particulars cannot be verified and that even the century of their death remains uncertain. Proposed dates have ranged from late antiquity to the earlier Middle Ages, without a consensus based on independent evidence.

Consequently, the historian can affirm only that a cult of two virgin saints named Aurelia and Neomisia has existed at Anagni for many centuries, that their feast is kept on 25 September, and that they are honored as women who dedicated their lives to Christ in virginity and asceticism. No reliable record preserves their parentage, the city of their birth, the precise circumstances of their journey to Italy, or the year in which they died. They are not associated with any later religious order, nor is there any indication that they were married or had children. Their memory survives as part of the early medieval heritage of the church of Anagni rather than as a fully documented biography.