Today, May 4, is the feast of Saint Florian. According to legend, he was killed during the Diocletian persecution, and his main cult centre was at Linz in Austria. His relics, however, were said to be kept at Rome, and from there they were allegedly translated to Krakow in 1183/84. In the later Middle Ages, Florian was predominantly venerated in Austria and Poland, due to the centres of Linz and Krakow.
It was believed that his wonderworking speciality - or his patronage par excellence, as it were - was protection against fire. The belief in Florian's firefighting abilities is clearly demonstrated by this late-fifteenth-century statue from Vienna, where the saint is pouring water onto a towered building which seems to be on fire. As this statue was originally placed on the facade of a house nearby the Church of Saint Stephen, Vienna's cathedral, it is likely that several onlookers would interpret the building at Florian's feet as the cathedral which he was facing.
Florian's armour marks him as a soldier saint, which was quite common for male saints of the Diocletian persecutions. Tales of Christian soldiers in the imperial army who were martyred for their faith were popular, and the sheer size of the Roman army - at least as that size was imagined in later centuries - provided a near-endless possibility for new stories to be told. Just as the Diocletian persecutions became a time in which it was logical to place unknown saints or saints of an uncertain date, so the occupation of a Roman soldier became a logical marker of male saints killed in this period.
My Albion
A chronicle of sundry adventures in England.
On Englands pleasant pastures seen!
- And did those feet, William Blake
lørdag 4. mai 2024
Saint Florian and the fire
fredag 3. mai 2024
Synchronicity in Madrid - encountering Equatorial Guinea
As all human beings, I experience coincidences that might loosely fit under the term 'synchronicity', that elements that are thematically connected, or resemble each other, happen at the same time or to the same person without there being any causal connection between them. Mostly when this happens, I relish the coincidence and I find it very pleasing, and one such pleasing case came about during my current sojourn in Madrid.
By the time I am writing this, I am sitting in a small room in an apartment in Madrid, preparing for the next step of my journey and reflecting on the various experiences I have had in the past few days. In preparation for my holiday, I decided to bring something to read on the road, as it were, even though I already have ended up expanding my personal library with a few items - to say nothing of those that are likely to be added in the days ahead. The novel is the gut-wrenchingly beautiful By night the mountain burns by Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel, a writer from Equatorial Guinea, translated into English from Spanish by Jethro Soutar. The book is a novelised rendition of Ávila Laurel's experiences on the island of Annobón some distance from the Atlantic coast of Africa, and now belonging to Equatorial Guinea, which was a Spanish colony until 1963.
lørdag 27. april 2024
Random resonances - the Law of the Gulathing Province and the First Book of Samuel
As a historian, I am trained to look for patterns and connections in history. Not in the sense of how the learned understood history in the Latin Middle Ages, which was founded on the idea that history was shaped by a divine creator, and that the patterns, symmetries and repetitions of history were part of God's plan. In modern academic history, we have thankfully lost this methodological principle, a principle that I believe to be both bad history and bad theology. In modern academic history, however, the patterns and connections have to do with detecting influences and offering hypotheses about how impulses and ideas might have travelled, and whether phenomena appearing in one part of the world is connected to similar phenomena elsewhere.
In general, it is fair to say that people in my geography of expertise, Western Europe, have received and passed on impulses across a much larger chronological scope than we often tend to given them credit for, and that roads of trade, travel, pilgrimage and plunder have been established much earlier than the surviving sources allow us to ascertain. Yet despite the undoubtable un-reconstructable routes of contact, it is also important to keep in mind that some similarities have nothing to do with influence, but are rather random resonances. These resonances are such that they might allow one individual familiar with both ideas or impulses to recognize the similarity, but this similarity would be more of a surprise, something uncanny, perhaps, rather than the kind of recognition that comes from something familiar.
The concept of random resonances was something that occurred to me as I was preparing a presentation for a conference on Mostertinget, the Moster assembly, which traditionally has been regarded as the place where Christian law was introduced to Norway in 1024. Modern scholars are doubtful about this narrative, at least when it comes to the claims about the importance of this assembly. Nonetheless, it is reasonable to accept that something important happened at this assembly, and that we are still unlearning a lot of the accumulated tradition in order to better understand the importance of this historical event.
Moster, an island south of Bergen in Western Norway, was part of the law province that is called Gulatinget, the Gula thing or the Gula assembly, which covered most of Western Norway south of Møre up until the implementation of a law of the realm in 1274. The rules of this provincial law were passed down orally until they were written down in the second half of the twelfth century. One of these rules lay out the proper and legal conduct for when a ship called out to defensive service in the event of an attack from the sea, is running out of food and needs to replenish its stores. This rule is found in the part of the law that Erik Simensen, in his 2021 translation of the Older Gulathing Law, has rendered as 'The book on the naval levy'. In his translation, the rule is as follows:
Now they return northward and run out of food, then they should call other ships to witness and show them their food, that they have no more food than one month’s rate of each kind for two squads, then they may slaughter two head of cattle from a householder with impunity, and they should pay two aurar for a cow and the same (amount) for a three-year-old ox, and two and a half aurar for a full-grown ox; and they should leave the head, the hide and the feet behind; then they are free of guilt if they slaughter in that way. But if they take away the head or the feet or the hide, then they are liable to punishment.
- The Older Gulathing Law, translated by Erik Simensen, 2021: 203
The rule is typical of the old Norwegian laws: detailed an eminently practical. The command that the head, the hide and the feet should be left behind is probably to be understood as a form of receipt, a physical proof of what a family had lost in the name of the kingdom's defence. Perhaps we might also see this as a way of leaving parts of the animal that would also yield some food in the even that the family in question were likewise in dire straits.
The age of the Gulathing law is an unsolvable historical question, especially because it underwent changes across centuries, and even though it is a very conservative law - as most laws tend to be - it is far from as stable as some people might imagine. Consequently, when talking about the random resonance to this passage, some caveats are in order. The resonance I encountered - as randomly as is the resonance itself - comes from 1 Samuel, one of the books of the Old Testament that would probably have not been widely known in Norway by the eleventh century. I emphasise this caveat because we know very little about the transmission of the Bible in medieval Norway. Christianity is likely to have arrived in Norway much earlier than we traditionally think - which is the second half of the tenth century - but it is only in the eleventh century that a Norway-wide church organisation came into being. The transmission of the Bible, in this early period of Christianisation, was predominantly oral and conveyed through the sermons of the priests. Some books of the Bible might have been available at certain religious centres, but I very much doubt that any one-volume edition of the Bible ever existed in medieval Norway. This is all to say that big chunks of the Old Testament are likely to have been unknown to most medieval Norwegians until at least the twelfth century.
Given the probability of the books of Samuel having had little cultural impact in the time when the section on the levy of boats in the Gulathing Law was implemented, I was struck by how someone familiar with the Gulathing Law might have reacted to the following passage from 1 Samuel:
And the next day again, when they rose in the morning, they found Dagon lying upon his face on the earth before the ark of the Lord: and the head of Dagon, and both the palms of his hands were cut off upon the threshold
- 1 Samuel 5:4
The passage in question relates the destruction of the statue of the god of the Philistines following their stealing of the Ark of the Covenant, which was brought to the land of Azotus and placed next to the statue. The breaking of the head and the hands was the culmination of a series of signs that led the Philstines to return the Ark to the Israelites. In a way, the hands and head of Dagon can be understood as a kind of receipt, evidence for the stronger power of the god of the Israelites, and a manifestation of a certain hierarchy. However this was encountered, whether written, spoken or, which is unlikely, in pictures, to Norwegians familiar with the Gulathing Law, this story would perhaps have resonated in a particular way, seeing that the head and the feet - or the head and the hand - carried a specific legal connotation that also marked the trust to be placed in a higher authority, in this case the king of Norway. By bringing the feet and the head of the commandeered cattle, Norwegians had hope for restitution, a hope that in turn legitimised the government of the king over that of local lords. Norwegians might, therefore, have understood the importance of this display of power enacted on the statue of Dagon, precisely because their own culture had a similar symbolism that was also connected with the hierarchy of power.
Of course, we do not know of any medieval Norwegians, at least outside the clergy, who knew of the fate of Dagon's statue. The juxtaposition has laid the ground for an entirely hypothetical scenario, but one that might be of some academic value nonetheless. Because the imagery of the head and the hands in the Bible is older than the Gulathing Law, but did most likely not influence the latter. The similarity between these two texts, that each in their own way pertained to the recognition of power and authority, is an entirely random resonance - one that might have taken on a particular meaning to a particular audience owing to complete coincidence. Such resonances might affect the reception of the new, unfamiliar element of the juxtaposition. Consequently, even though we cannot assert any historical examples of such receptions, we might imagine that they existed, and by imagining this we might come closer to acknowledge how the patterns and similarities that we encounter in the study of history might be nothing but coincidence.
tirsdag 23. april 2024
Saint George in Vienna - the protector and the shield
Today is the feast of Saint George, who, according to his legend, was a Roman soldier martyred during the Diocletian persecutions of the early fourth century. The early history of his cult is obscure, and scholars have yet to piece together something close to an overview of the cult's trajectory throughout the medieval period. What we do know, however, is that from the twelfth century onwards, George became increasingly popular in Latin Christendom, and in the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the image of George as a dragonslayer became dominant in his iconography. I have written a short piece on this trajectory here. That George was both a soldier and a dragonslayer made him a very suitable patron for knights and other soldiers, and we often find his image in a military context. One such context I encountered by chance while I was visiting the Wien Museum on Karlsplatz in January, which has a small but very interesting selection of artefacts from Vienna's medieval past. Among these artefacts is a late-fifteenth-century shield featuring Saint George in the act of slaying the dragon, standing atop it and piercing the beast with a spear - a posture inherited from the iconography of Saint Michael the Archangel.
The image of Saint George is quite typical of the period and resembles a number of contemporary depictions in church art, such as a wall-painting from Sanderum Church in Denmark. However, it is the first time I see the dragonslayer on a shield, an object which really highlighted the close ties between the cult of saints and the military life of the Middle Ages. The shield is called Setztartsche, or in English a pavise, and was developed by the Hussites during the Hussite Wars of the early fifteenth century. The shield featuring Saint George, however, was used in Vienna, and was part of the city's own armament efforts of the late 1400s.
The ubiquity of the cult of saints in medieval life is a continuous source of fascination for me, and the many ways in which the saints were present in people's lives - if only as images - is a good reminder that we are still a long way away from understanding the full impact of the the cult of saints in medieval society.
lørdag 13. april 2024
New publication: 'Saints and Urban Medievalism: The Case of Saint Knud Rex in Modern-Day Odense'
Earlier this week, I was notified about the publication of the collection of articles Doing Memory: Medieval Saints and Heroes and Their Afterlives in the Baltic Sea Region (19th–20th centuries), edited by Cordelia Heß and Gustavs Strenga. The book is open access, and can be read and downloaded here. I was elated by these news, as the collection also features an article written by me, namely 'Saints and Urban Medievalism: The Case of Saint Knud Rex in Modern-Day Odense'.
The article is an examination of how the figure of Saint Knud Rex - who was king of Denmark from 1080 to his murder in 1086 - has been used in the cityscape of Odense, the city where he was killed and later venerated as a saint. The article puts together a range of materials from artworks, signage and place names in Odense, and examines these sources through the concept of urban medievalism, a term I coined for a conference presentation in 2020.
I am very proud of this article, because it allowed me to explore a new timeframe and types of historical sources with which I am not accustomed to working, such as temporary art works. It also provided a great opportunity to become more familiar with the concept of medievalism - the reception of the medieval past in a post-medieval era - and to think more carefully about how we, as modern humans, make use of the Middle Ages.
The article was also a joy to write, in part because the writing and subsequent publication mark the culmination of a process that began in the autumn of 2014, and I can see how ideas and observations from back then have flourished into the text that now has been published. It was in 2014 that I moved to Denmark to begin my PhD, and as I was exploring my new home I was frequently bemused by the numerous details of the cityscape that showed some sort of engagement with the Middle Ages, or with ideas, concepts and aesthetics from the medieval period. For instance, that autumn I wrote a blogpost on artworks depicting dragonslayers in Odense.
In the course of the five years I lived in Denmark, I accumulated a collection of pictures and notes that I intended to put together into some sort of overview. Eventually, that goal did not come to fruition, at least not as I had intended it to do, but the process of collecting and reflecting on these aspects of the cityscape of Odense did provide me with the groundwork for writing this article. I am very happy that the article has given me an opportunity to engage with these materials that I gathered during my Danish sojourn. Moreover, I am quite proud to note how the article provides glimpses of a process in the history of Odense, as many of the pictures and details used in the article were taken and noted down during the now-completed building of the Odense tramway, as well as apartment complexes. The tramway and the apartments have significantly changed the Odense city centre, and the archaeological excavations and subsequent construction work allowed for an engagement with the city's medieval past - both through the items encountered in the excavations and the artworks that served to beautify the temporary walls around the construction site. During my time in Odense, the city was changing, and I was living through a temporary state that was designed to end in the near future. This feeling of living in a moment with a looming endpoint - a transformation nearing completion, as it were - made me all the more alert to the importance of recording some of these changes. The article has allowed me to share some images of a cityscape that is no longer there, because even though the constituent parts of the city are still in place, new buildings have been erected and the vistas are no longer the same. The article, in short, provides some snapshots of a lost past, recorded in the process of losing that past.
lørdag 6. april 2024
The early cult of saints – an attempted history
[The following is an attempt at a brief history of the development of the Christian cult of saints in the first 500 years. This period saw a rapid development of this phenomenon, yet the relative paucity of the sources means that it can sometimes be difficult to understand that despite the rapidity of the process, it was also piecemeal and slow, as well as both decentralised and not streamlined. What prompted me to write this text was a promise to help a colleague with providing an overview of the cult of saints, and I ended up putting together this text which is aimed at giving those unfamiliar with the topic some sense of the historical process, as well as some key terms and dates.]
Terminology and the first hundred years
The word ‘saint’ is the English translation of ‘sanctus’,
which in turn is the Latin translation of the Greek ‘hagios’, which means ‘holy’.
In the epistles of Paul, this term is used indiscriminately about all followers
of Christ, but it later came to signify an especially holy kind of Christian.
There was, in other words, shift from the more general use of ‘hagios’ to a
kind of elite Christians. Here, the elite status is based on whether they died
for the faith, not their social standing or their position in the early church
hierarchy. The circumstances of this shift are nebulous to us, and it was
likely a gradual development that grew out of the early persecutions of
Christians. (Although it is likely that the persecutions under Nero were too
early to have an impact on this shift, and it is more likely that the persecutions
under Domitian and Trajan had the most immediate effect – especially those of
Domitian.) It is not clear how this change in terminology began, whether it was
initiated by the leaders of the early congregations, or whether it emerged from
common usage that eventually became the standard way of referring to those who
had shown their faith more clearly and publicly. These persecutions served to
solidify the sense of a shared identity among Christians, and therefore also
gave root to a stronger development of a Christian collective memory. This
memory was perpetuated in part through the celebration of the anniversaries of
those who had died for the faith. These celebrations were held at the graves of
the dead, and from this practice grew the elaborate liturgical celebrations
that came into place in the fourth and fifth centuries. The day of the saint’s
death became known as ‘dies natalis’, birthday, as it was the beginning of the
saint’s life in Heaven. Eventually, as Christianity became more widely common
and eventually legalised, the remnants of the especially holy dead Christians could
be moved into churches or other sacred spaces intended for the veneration of
these remnants. These remnants were relics, which were held to be sacred, and
to provide a tangible contact point through which the power of God could work
miracles for the glory of the saint (cf. ‘translation’ below).
We
do not know who were the first saints. Arguably, the apostles, John the Baptist
and perhaps also the Virgin Mary are likely to have been held in very high
regard from the earliest stages of the Christian religion. Because the early
church was both scattered and very heterogenous, however, it is doubtful that
we can surmise any coherent approach to the memorialisation of those who died
for the faith. In both the Latin and Greek traditions, one of the earliest saints
is said to have been Polycarp of Smyrna, whose death is conventionally dated to
155 CE. Early accounts of his death were written in both Latin and Greek, which
shows that there was a lot of exchange between those Christians who were Greek-speaking
inhabitants of the Roman Empire – not necessarily citizens, although some, like
Paul, were – and those whose main written language was Latin. Stories
travelled, and so did the terminology. In some cases, this exchange led to the
translation of Greek terms into Latin – ‘hagios’ to ‘sanctus’, for instance –
but in other cases the Greek terms became dominant also in the Latin language.
The best example of this retaining of Greek is seen in the word ‘martyr’, which
means witness, and came to mean someone who bore witness to their Christian
faith by accepting death rather than recanting their faith. Another of these
Greek terms is ‘apostolos’, which means envoy or messenger, and which became
slightly Latinized as ‘apostolus’.
The early literature: c.160-c.400
The account of Polycarp of Smyrna’s death –
commonly known as The Martyrdom of Polycarp – is believed to have been
written relatively shortly after his death, and is often dated to 160 CE. This
text is interesting because it shows that many of the typical features of later
literature about saints were already in place by the mid-second century CE. For
instance, there is an elaborate martyrdom, the remnants of Polycarp were
gathered by Christians and held in greater value than jewels – this is perhaps
the earliest reference to the veneration of the relics of saints – and the text
also exhibits very strong anti-Semitism. Throughout the second and third
centuries, several texts about the especially holy Christians appeared, perhaps
most famously the Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas, written in Carthage
around the year 200 CE. In this early period, however, there was no coherent
genre for writing about saints. The term ‘hagiography’, writing about the holy,
was first used by Greek-speaking Jews to refer to the Ketuvim, but at some
later point became adopted by Christians to refer to the accounts of saints and
their deaths and deeds. As far as I know, we cannot say for certain when this
terminology came into this Christian usage.
Following
the legalisation of Christianity during the reign of Emperor Constantine, the churches
became more stable centres of administration and memory-production. The various
church leaders were able to communicate more frequently with one another, and
this exchange led to a streamlining of both terms, practices and forms of memorialisation.
By Constantine’s death in in 337, the veneration of relics had become standard
practice among Christians, and rich Christians had begun collecting them and
turning their house complexes into memorial spaces. The memories of the recent persecutions
under Diocletian – particularly in the period c.300-305 – were transformed into
a collective memory that further solidified a Christian, but also a Roman
Christian, identity. One of the best examples of this memory-making is Pope
Damasus I (r.366-84). He himself was born around the time of the Diocletian
persecutions, and as bishop of Rome he began to collect the bones of those who
had died in the persecutions. These bones were placed in churches and the
places of their martyrdoms were memorialised through epigrams. This effort effectively
converted Rome into a Christian space, and several popular saints – such as Agnes
and Sebastian – became famous through the efforts of Damasus. These epigrams
were also part of the early literature about saints.
In
the second half of the fourth century, some of the most impactful texts about
saints were written, and these came to establish the form that hagiography
would retain throughout the medieval period and into the modern era. The
biographical accounts of Martin, bishop of Tours, written by Sulpicius Severus
(d.397) while Martin was still alive, and the account of Anthony, the Egyptian
hermit, by Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria (d.373) came to provide a template
for later saint-biographers. The biography of a saint – often called ‘vita’,
life, or ‘passio’, passion, or even ‘acta’, acts – typically described the
saint’s childhood and background, their conversion or at least deeper
commitment to Christianity, their suffering, their good deeds, their deaths, and
eventually also the appearance of miracles. These two biographies also
established more clearly that even those who had not died for their faith –
which neither Martin not Anthony had done – could be considered holy, because
their way of life had proved their commitment to Christ. They were ‘confessores’,
confessors, of their faith, rather than martyrs.
The
emergence of a more formally coherent Christian literature also led to the more
coherent stylistic form of saint-biographies. Although a Christian was always
supposed to imitate the life of Christ, this was paramount in the case of the
saints. The early saints had imitated Christ by choosing death, and died like
Christ, even though the manner of dying was not necessarily on a cross. This
imitation of Christ, ‘imitatio Christi’, became more important to demonstrate
with the cessation of persecutions, and the relative scarcity of new martyrdoms
that followed the legalisation of Christianity. From the late fourth century onwards,
therefore, saint-biographers modelled their accounts even more explicitly on
episodes from the Gospels, and emphasised the parallels between the life of
Christ and the saints more strongly. This practice continued throughout the
medieval and modern periods.
As
part of the more formalised and streamlined cult of saints, collections of
miracles became more common. I do not know exactly when such accounts of
miraculous events first became committed to writing, but it is likely that an
expectations of signs and miraculous cures led to orally transmitted accounts
in the early period of the veneration of saints. Augustine’s City of God
includes an account of the miracles said to have appeared in the wake of the
finding of the body of Saint Stephen Protomartyr in 417, and the arrival of
some of the relics of Stephen in Carthage in 424. The popularity of Augustine’s
writings also had an impact on later miracle collections.
Saints in the Christian cosmology
We know little about how the earliest
venerators of Christian saints understood the place of the especially holy dead
in the greater scheme of things. There was an expectation of an afterlife, and most
likely the saints were believed to be in Heaven. It is unclear whether the
veneration of the early saints was done with the hope that those who were
venerated would provide help, but such an expectation came into place as the
cult of saints became more Romanised. The collection of verse biographies by
the poet Prudentius – Liber Peristephanon – shows that by the turn of
the fourth century, Christians in the Roman Empire, at least those who belonged
to the upper classes, understood the saints and ‘advocati’, intercessors or
ambassadors, in the Heavenly Senate. In other words, the system of Roman
society – where the rich were patrons who bestowed favours on the common people
in return for services, and where the Senate was the house of ultimate
authority – was transposed onto the greater cosmology. Saints were understood
as patrons, and in return for their aid – ‘beneficium’ – the living Christians
performed their duties or their labours, ‘officium’. This idea of saints as
interceding before God on behalf of the living has remained a key point in
Christian thinking. The ‘beneficium’ usually came in the form of cures or other
miraculous events by which God was believed to demonstrate the holiness of his
saints. The ‘officium’ usually signified the celebration of the anniversaries
of the saints, mainly their day of death or the day of the moving of the
relics, the so-called translation. The term ‘officium’ later came to denote the
performance of liturgical songs and readings in the course of a daily round in
a church or a monastery. Saints interceded on behalf of the living, but they
could also punish the living for wrongdoing, neglect of their patrons, or
heresy.
Continuity and discontinuity
There has been a lot of discussion about the
degree to which we can see a continuity from the pagan polytheism to the role
of the saints within Christian monotheism. The traditional argument has been
that the old gods were simply replaced with different figures, and that people
attributed to these figures a lot of the same properties and powers that they
did the old gods. Since Peter Brown’s monograph The Cult of Saints (1981),
however, the main consensus is that the situation is more complicated than
that. Naturally, there might well have been Christian converts who did not
discern much of a difference between the saints and the old gods, but to the
Christian theologians and, indeed, to the bishops and missionaries, there were
many important differences. First of all, a saint does not make any decisions
of their own, but with the approval of God. Miracles, moreover, are not brought
about by the saint. Instead, God performs the miracle as a favour to the saint
in return for the saint’s merit – ‘meritum’ – which is the quality of the saint’s
life on earth. Furthermore, while the Christians venerated the saints as
heroes, and although Paul’s epistles uses terms like soldier and athlete –
there was nothing physically violent about the way the saints met their demise.
They fight consisted of enduring violence – often described in gruesome detail
by Christian authors – and from the point of view of the pagan Romans, there
was little heroic about such passivity. In other words, and following the
arguments of Peter Brown, the heroes and gods of the pagan pantheon had little in
common with the heroes of the Christians.
The
differences between the worship of pagan gods and the veneration of Christian
hero, however, do not mean that there were not continuities. As the Christian
religion became legalised and increasingly infused with Roman impulses – one of
which was the transposition of the patron-client system onto the Christian
cosmological system – there were several aspects of the various polytheistic
religions that came to shape Christian religious practice. For instance, the
practice of incubation ritual, where someone sleeps at a shrine in order to
acquire a religious experience, was very common among various polytheistic
religions. This practice was adopted by Christians, and from miracle
collections from the Middle Ages we often read about cures and visions that
happened to those who slept or kept a vigil by the saint’s shrine.
Another
form of continuity can be seen in the deliberate re-use of pagan cult places by
Christians. Pagan shrines, temples or sacred trees were destroyed with the
purpose of replacing the pagan holy place with a Christian one. Among the
earliest surviving records of this idea is the Life of Saint Martin by
Sulpicius Severus, where Martin cuts down a sacred tree. In Gregory the Great’s
Dialogues – a collection of saint stories written during his papacy (590-604)
– we read that Saint Benedict of Nursia destroyed a shrine of Apollo and replaced
it with an altar of Saint Martin, which suggests a deliberate imitation of the holy
bishop. This incident is also a reminder that saints could imitate other
saints, not only Christ or biblical figures. In addition, however, it is
important to be cautious about whether this hagiographical topos was
indeed enacted in real life, or whether it was only a literary claim. It is
likely that the hagiographical topos did indeed inspire real-world events,
but it is also possible that in some cases we are dealing with a claim of
imitation only, not an actual event.
+++
Key terms
Apostolos: Greek for envoy or messenger; term used
for those of Christ’s early followers who were missionaries, but also used about
those saints credited with introducing Christianity to a new place or a new
people
Beneficium: the favours given by a saint to the
living
Confessor: those who testified to their faith
by their Christian living, but who did not die a violent death (cf. martyr)
Dies natalis: the Heavenly birthday of the
saint, meaning their day of death
Hagiography: writing about the holy; in the
Christian sense, any text that provides an account of the saint’s life, characteristics,
death, and/or associated miracles. What makes a text hagiographic is that it
has its focus on the saint, and many different types of texts therefore qualify
as hagiographic, not solely biographies of saints
Hagios: Greek for ‘holy’, Paul’s word for the
early followers of Christ
Imitation of Christ: every saint was expected
to imitate Christ to some degree; this imitation could be achieved in many
different ways, either by simply sacrificing their life for the faith, or by
imitating specific episodes from the Gospels. Saints could also imitate other
saints
Martyr: Greek for witness; a term used for
those who died for the faith and thereby testified to their conviction
Meritum: the quality of a saint’s life which
makes the saint earn the goodwill of God; the better a saint’s meritum, the more
efficient the saint is as an intercessor for the living
Miracle: in Christian terms, signs by which God
shows His will on Earth, and through which humans are expected to recognise the
holiness of a saint
Officium: the veneration given by the living in
order to deserve the favours given by the saint
Passio: Latin for ‘suffering’, a word commonly
used to describe accounts of the saint’s tortures and subsequent death (cf. The
Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas)
Relics: the remnants of the saints, usually their
bodies or bones; some relics were so-called contact relics, meaning relics that
had absorbed some of the holiness of the saints by contact with them – either while
the saint was living or after the saint’s death. Through this contact, items
such as clothes placed on the saint’s relics or the saint’s shrine could become
a new tangible relay point through which God’s power worked miracles. The
container in which these relics were placed is commonly referred to as a
reliquary, but also sometimes a shrine (cf. ‘shrine’)
Sanctus: Latin for ‘holy’; the root of the
English ‘saint’
Shrine: can be used to refer to the holy space
in which a saint is placed and venerated, but it could also mean the casket or
container in which the saint’s body or the saint’s bones, dust and ashes were
placed
Translatio: the moving (translation) of a saint’s
relics to a place of rest, sometimes to a new place of rest. The occasion could
be celebrated by an anniversary feast.
Vita: Latin for ‘life’, a very common term to denote
biographical account of a saint (cf. Life
of Saint Martin)
+++
Brief timeline (all years in CE)
c. 30: commonly accepted date of Christ’s death
c.35-64: the missionary activity of Paul the
apostle
54-68: reign of Nero; possibly the first, and
if so very limited, Christian persecutions
81-96: reign of Domitian; first major
persecutions of Christians
155: conventional date of Bishop Polycarp of
Smyrna
c.160: composition of The Martyrdom of
Polycarp
203: conventional date for the death of
Perpetua and Felicitas in Carthage, whose imprisonment was recorded in an
account that partly might be dictated by Perpetua herself
249-51: reign of Decius, which saw a major
persecution of Christians
257-58: the Valerian persecutions; Bishop Cyprian
of Carthage died in 258
c.300-305: the Diocletian persecutions
313: the Edict of Milan, which legalised
Christianity
366-84: papacy of Damasus I, one of the major
campaigns for Christianising the topography and urban space of Rome
373: death of Athanasius of Alexandria, author
of The Life of Anthony of Egypt
397: death of Sulpicius Severus, author of The
Life of Martin
415: death of Prudentius, author of Liber
Peristephanon
417: the finding of the body of Stephen
Protomartyr
424: the arrival of some of the relics of
Stephen Protomartyr in Carthage
430: death of Augustine of Hippo
543: death of Benedict of Nursia
590-604: the papacy of Gregory the Great
søndag 24. mars 2024
Trondheim without worms - echoes of a lost legend of Saint Olaf?
In medieval art, Saint Olaf of Norway is commonly depicted standing on top of a figure. The nature of this figure appears to have changed over time, although I myself have not mapped the evolution of this iconography, and I should emphasise that there might be several parallel iconographical traditions. In any case, very often we see that in images from the thirteenth century, the figure in question is a human being, the interpretation of which is uncertain. Later on - I hesitate to be precise - the figure takes the shape of a serpent or a dragon, very often with a crowned human head. It is very common in medieval art to see saints standing on such figures, presumably because of Psalm 90:13 in the Vulgate, where God is verbally depicted as trampling lions and dragons underfoot. Consequently, the shift in Olaf's iconography might be part of a wider trend, or perhaps a more localised offshoot that came to take on a life of its own in Northern Europe. The interpretation of this human-headed serpent has been subject to much debate, and I will not enter into here. However, I was reminded of this iconography while I was reading passage from a text written in the seventeenth century, and which might represent some sort of echo of a lost legend of Saint Olaf, or perhaps rather a confusion that ultimately has its root in this late-medieval iconography.
Museum of Cultural History, Oslo, C6113
Whichever animal Foigny had in mind when writing this passage, it is a claim that I have not encountered elsewhere. The claim is not to be found in Latin medieval chronicles from Norway, even though these books do mention various marvellous properties of various Norwegian locations. It is possible that the claim appears in Olaus Magnus' Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus (History of the Northern peoples) from 1555, which was printed in Rome and - due to being in Latin - would have been accessible to a man like Foigny, but such a connection remains to be verified. At the present, I remain at a loss to explain the inclusion of Trondheim in this list of marvellous topographies. What is possible, however, is that there is a connection with the legends of Saint Olaf, and that the absence of worms in Trondheim is based on some now-lost miracle story.
During the Middle Ages, several miracle stories were told about Saint Olaf. The earliest of them are likely to have emerged among the Norse mercenaries who had followed the living king into battle, and became some of the most effective disseminators of his cult. Sometime around 1180, a number of these stories were collected and recorded in Latin in a text now known as Miracula Olavi, the miracles of Olaf. This work contains a broad range of miracles that God is said to have brought about in order to prove Olaf's holiness, and the selection includes both old and contemporary stories. However, it is important to note that this collection was never complete, and that several stories are likely to have emerged after this particular text was compiled. Miracula Olavi does not mention any worms or serpents, so even in the unlikely event that Foigny would have had access to this text, it would not have provided the basis for this idea. Other stories might have circulated, however, and it is possible that there once existed a story about how Olaf had liberated Trondheim - which was the centre of his cult and the place of his shrine until the Danish-Norwegian Reformation of 1536/37 - from worms. Such a claim might be based on the beast frequently seen under Olaf's feet in late-medieval art. There might have been some inspiration from the story of Saint Patrick in Ireland, who was believed to have chased the serpents out of the island - a story available to Norwegians in the thirteenth-century book Konungs Skuggsjá (The King's Mirror), which contains a description of the marvellous properties of Ireland. Similarly, a story of how Saint Hild of Whitby chased away the snakes - a legend believed to have been confirmed by the ammonite fossils often found in that region - is also likely to have been available to late-medieval Norwegians. These various elements, as well as others that I have not thought about, might have mixed in the Norwegian mind and produced a story about how Trondheim had been liberated from worms by Saint Olaf.
Now, Gabriel de Foigny does not mention Saint Olaf, just as he does not mention Saint Patrick when he mentions the absence of spiders and worms in the forests of Ireland. Consequently, if there is a lost story in the distant background of this claim, it was also lost to Foigny. It is very likely that he had never heard about Saint Olaf, a saint whose cult never gained any strong following outside of the Nordic Sphere, eleventh-century England, and the late-medieval Baltic theatre. Some echoes might have arrived, however, possibly in the form of Catholic exiles from Norway, historical figures about whom we know practically nothing, yet of whose existence we can be certain. Such a surmise is hypothetical, however, and I must emphasise that I do not suggest that such a tenuous transmission of stories actually did appear. Yet the possibility remains - the possibility that some warped version of such a legend did reach Foigny, albeit a version evacuated of its explanatory content, a version where the cause - divine intervention on behalf of Saint Olaf - was divorced from the effect, namely the absence of worms in Trondheim.
Other explanations also exist. The absence of worms - if these are earthworms - might be based on the perceived coldness of the land, the cultural trope of a frozen North willingly believed by someone who had not ventured into that North themselves. Ultimately, however, we do not know, and most likely we will never know. Such a lack of certainty does not give licence to completely free and unbridled speculation. On the other hand, the lack of certainty does force us to reflect on the intangible yet forceful nature of stories - their ability to subsist on very little and to be transported far and wide, even if not always in their original form.