Page:The early Christians in Rome (1911).djvu/328

 eighth century, on an altar of a church in Bourges dedicated to the Blessed Virgin and other saints, there is an inscription attributed to Alcuin the scholar minister of Charlemagne. In this inscription occurs the following line:

"Et Petronilla patris præclari filia Petri."

Now, towards the close of the fourth century, Pope Siricius, between 391 and  395, constructed the important basilica lately discovered in the Domitilla Cemetery on the Via Ardeatina; but although the basilica in question contained the historic tombs of the famous martyrs SS. Nereus and Achilles, confessors of the first century, as well as the body of S. Petronilla, he dedicated the basilica in question in her honour. Pope Siricius would surely have never named this important and very early church after a comparatively unknown member of the Flavian house; still less would he have called it by the name of a simple convert of the great apostle.

In Siricius' eyes there was evidently no shadow of doubt but that the Petronilla for whom he had so deep a veneration was the daughter of S. Peter, and nothing but such an illustrious lineage can possibly account for the persistent devotion paid to her remains, a devotion which, as we have seen, endured for many centuries; the ancient tradition that she was the daughter of the apostle was evidently unvarying and undisputed.

It was left to the modern scholar in his zeal for the purity of the language he admired, and for the modem devout Romanist in his anxiety to show that S. Peter was free from all home and family ties, to throw doubts on the identity of one whom an unbroken tradition and an unswerving reverence from time immemorial regarded as the daughter of the great apostle so loved and revered in Rome.

In other places besides in Gaul and Rome we find traces of this very early cult of S. Petronilla. In the neighbourhood of Bury St. Edmunds her memory was anciently reverenced; under the curious abbreviation of "S. Parnel," still in that locality, there is a church named after her—at Whepstead, Bury St. Edmunds. A yet more remarkable historical reference appears in "Leland's Itinerary," an official writing,