Donatian of Reims
French bishop and saint
Donatien of Reims (also known as Donatien or Donat) was a 4th-century French saint and the 8th Bishop of Reims.
He died in AD 389, and in AD 863 the count of Flanders Baldwin I transferred his relics to the Church Saint-Agricol de Reims at Bruges, where his cult is still active. He is venerated as a saint and his feast day is celebrated on 14 October. In Christian iconography, Donatian is pictured holding a water wheel or bearing candles.
Legend
A legend has it that he was thrown as a child into a river, where a holy man took five candles and placed them on a water wheel which showed where the child had gone, and he was able to recover the child.
“Donatian of Reims” enters the record as french bishop and saint. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Donatian, Reims and French can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Donatian of Reims” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.