Talk:Collegiate church of Saint Ursus

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This page should be renamed into "Collegiate church of Saint Peter and Ursus". "Sant'Orso" is only the name in Italian of Saint Ursus, and not the official name of this church. Plus, the actual name does not respect the bilingual situation of Aosta valley, because the name is in Italian. --Simoncik84 (talk) 15:44, 23 February 2010 (UTC)

Evidence, please, for this usage being the commonest in reliable English-language sources. (The Blue Guide to Northern Italy uses the Italian name for this church, with a French translation (p. 230), but the French name for St Etienne, with an Italian translation (p. 234).) —Ian Spackman (talk) 08:42, 24 February 2010 (UTC)

I think it would be much better and more clear to rename the article into "Collegiate church of Saint Peter and Ursus", and then indicate in the article the two versions of its name in Italian ("Collegiata dei Santi Pietro e Orso") e in French ("Collégiale des saints Pierre et Ours"). This is an encyclopedia, not a tourist guide, in which often the names are not correct. Please, compare this article in wiki:it and wiki:fr. --Simoncik84 (talk) 20:25, 27 February 2010 (UTC)

I chose the Blue Guide because I had a copy on the shelf behind my computer: but their Italian volumes do have have a good reputation in this sort of area. (Better than Wikipedia’s, of course, though naturally we would like to change that.) Anyway, you have failed to come up with any counter-examples.

Essentially this is a question of English usage. Notice that while the French Wikipedia has an article called ‘Cathédrale Saint-Paul de Londres’, the English Wikipedia has an article called Notre Dame de Paris. In fact educated writers in English generally follow the convention of not translating the names of churches, even when the name of the saint involved has a different name in English. Here are some examples:

• ‘St Ursus, supposed Irish, settled at Aosta about the year 500. The church of Sant’Orso commemorates him….’
  George B. Parks, The English traveller to Italy: The Middle Ages (to 1525) (1954), p. 11.
• ‘Its hospice and church, Sant’Orso, were founded in the seventh or eighth century by the Irish bishop St Ursus.’
  Veronica Ortenberg, ‘Archbishop Sigeric’s journey to Rome in 990’, in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. by Michael Lapidge, Malcolm Godden and Simon Keynes, Anglo-Saxon England 19 (Cambridge University Press, 1990), p.238.
• ‘…one of the jewels of Aosta: the Romanesque-Gothic Collegiata di SS. Pietro e Orso…, founded in the late tenth century outside the town walls, over the tomb of Aosta’s patron saint, Orso or Ursus….’
  Dana Facaros and Michael Pauls, Italian Riviera and Piedmont, Cadogan Guides (New Holland Publishers, 2006), p. 311.

Further references to the church complex in English as Sant’Orso:

• ‘The design, execution, and material of these capitals show them to be of the same date as some in the collegiate church of Sant’ Orso at Aosta….’
  Giovanni Teresio Rivoira, Lombardic architecture: its origin, development and derivatives, tr. by G. McN. Rushforth, 2 vols (London: W. Heinemann, 1910), I, p. 189.
• ‘So, too, the carved capitals of the cloister of Sant’ Orso, at Aosta, in Piedmont,…show that French sculpture was not unknown to the stone-cutters of northern Italy.’
  Harold North Fowler, A History of Sculpture (Macmillan: 1916), p.183.
• ‘Medieval Aosta is recalled in the collegiate Church of Sant’Orso.’
  Roy Palmer Domenico, The regions of Italy: a reference guide to history and culture (Greenwood Publishing Group, 2002), p.364.
• ‘…the priory and collegiate church of Sant’Orso, or St-Ours, founded by St Anselm….’
  Alta Macadam, Northern Italy, The Blue Guides, (London:A & C Black, 1997,p 231. [As mentioned previously.]

The French form seems less common in English than I would have expected, but here are two examples:

• ‘The church of St Ours, founded in 425 and rebuilt in the 12th century, has good cloisters (1133).’
  The Encyclopædia Britannica, 29 vols (1910–1011), (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910–1911) II (1910), p. 158.
• ‘The collegiate canons of Saint-Ours at Aosta were the true spiritual centre of that region.’
  Henri Daniel-Rops, Cathedral and crusade, studies of the medieval church, 1050-1350, tr. by John Warrington (London: Dent, 1957), p. 233 [Snippet view only.]

Finally an example where English is used, although the French ‘Ours’ is preferred to the Latin ‘Ursus’ as the saint’s most natural name in English:

• ‘In the collegiate church of St. Peter and St. Ours at Aosta [the same motif] is both painted on the vaulted ceiling and sculpted on the choir stalls.’
  Henri de Lubac, The Christian faith : an essay on the structure of the Apostles’ Creed, translated by Brother Richard Arnandez (London : Chapman, 1986), p. 43.

All in all it seems that the commonest name in English usage is Sant’Orso. If you still feel that the article should be moved, please would you provide examples of ‘Collegiate church of Saint Peter and Ursus’ (or something similar) being employed in serious and reliable texts written in English. —Ian Spackman (talk) 19:12, 28 February 2010 (UTC)

By the way, the page in French on the official website of the Aosta Valley region uses ‘la Collégiale Santi Pietro e Orso’, and ‘le cloître de Sant’Orso’, and even ‘épisodes de la vie de Sant’Orso’! —Ian Spackman (talk) 19:26, 28 February 2010 (UTC)

The name "Sant'Orso" has already its place in this article, together with its translation in French. --Simoncik84 (talk) 20:33, 27 February 2010 (UTC)

I don’t understand what point you are making. Of course the article on the saint uses all three forms and so—in order to avoid confusing readers—should this article. —Ian Spackman (talk) 19:12, 28 February 2010 (UTC)

Ok, if this is the usage of wiki:en, then respect it. I answer for the page you mentioned on the Aosta Valley internet website, please check the "real" page on the collegiate church, the one you mentioned is from the touristic site of Aosta valley, which is much less precise (unfortunately, the page I mentioned, which has been written by the "Archives historiques régionales") is not in English. In fact, if I could decide to name the article on Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris, I would have chosen an "english version", after all I'm a french-speaking wikipedist, and my point of view is different from yours ;) It's interesting to know the approach of wiki:en, which is widely different from wiki:fr (and also from wiki:it). --Simoncik84 (talk) 08:28, 1 March 2010 (UTC)