My Albion: mai 2019

fredag 31. mai 2019

Stenløse Church

One of the great things about being a medievalist in Denmark is the plethora of medieval churches that are open to the public. Last week my parents came to visit me in Odense, and so we took the time to explore some of the many churches situated in the vicinity. This blogpost is a brief introduction to one of them, namely Stenløse Church.

The oldest part of the church, which is comprised of the nave, the choir and the apsis, is built in the Romanesque style and dates to the 1120s or 1130s, while the roof and the tower are of late medieval origin. The dating of the oldest part of the church is interesting in light of its location on the island of Funen as well as its vicinity to Odense. By the time the church was built, the entire island was part of the bishopric of Odense - which is still the case - and the centre of this bishopric was the Benedictine abbey church of Saint Knud in the city. This was the cult centre of Saint Knud Rex who had been killed in Odense in 1086 and the cult was maintained by a community of Benedictine monks who were attached to episcopal church. The time in which this church was built was towards the end of the period in which the cult of Saint Knud Rex enjoyed its greatest popularity in all of Denmark, and it is possible that the building of the church should be understood in light of either the cult activity or the income generated for the Benedictine community in Odense. It should, however, be pointed out that the church appears to have been dedicated to Saint Clement (it was noted as such in 1291), and as such it is not directly linked with the veneration of the martyred king in Odense. However, the time of its construction and its proximity to Odense allow us to speculate about whether the cult had an impact on the building of the church. What we do know about the relationship between Stenløse Church and the Benedictines at Saint Knud's Church is that in the thirteenth century, the Benedictines appear to have had some control over the church's income. We can guess as much from a letter - Diplomatarium Danicum II, 2, no.289 - according to which the monks at Saint Knud's Church attempted to have the income from this church allotted to stipends for Odense monks studying in Paris. Stenløse Church was, however, not formally annexed by the abbey church until 1316. These details concerning the relationship between the episcopal abbey church and Stenløse Church are also interesting for the brief insights they give into the community of monks in Odense.

While the foundation of the church and its earliest layer is early twelfth century, the vaulting and the roof are both late medieval. In the early sixteenth century, the vaults were likely covered in wall-paintings, but only a few fragments of these have been discovered and restored. However, from these fragments we can surmise that the church was once richly decorated, both because the fragments appear to be details in a grander whole and because such extensive iconographical programmes were relatively common in late-medieval Danish parish churches. The best preserved fragments are the ones shown above from the vault just immediately before the choir, one showing the resurrection of Christ and His defeat of the devil, and the other showing the doubting of Thomas. Underneath these scenes are coat of arms belonging to the local noble family who were the patrons of the church.

Like so many medieval parish churches of Denmark, Stenløse Church houses a lot of minor treasures from various parts of its long history. Below are two of my favourite details as we were explore the church. The first is a Romanesque baptismal font with vegetal decoration, now standing on a new plinth. Fonts like this one were common in medieval Denmark, and although the decoration is worn and difficult to make out, it gives a good indiciation of the craftsmanship that went into making it. The second detail is the pulpit, made in oak in 1584 and containing a brief encomium for the donors and beautifully carved details. What is particularly interesting about this pulpit is that its text is in Latin, even though it was made forty-eight years after the Reformation was implemented in Denmark-Norway. However, while it is interesting it is neither strange nor peculiar, because Latin was still widely in use by this time, especially on tombstones, but it is does date from a transitional period that would, in the seventeenth century, give way entirely to Danish as the language of obsequies and commemorations.

Stenløse Church is a beautiful building and contains several treasures, even though the modern-era whitewashing of the wall is still the dominating feature of its interior. Even so, when one carefully explores the church space, one finds a number of very pleasing details that provide some notion of past times.

tirsdag 28. mai 2019

Achronicity and the lives of saints - the case of Saint Martin of Tours at Skive Church

Last week I visited Skive Church in Northern Jutland, a beautiful stone church built around 1200 and dedicated to the Virgin Mary. What brought me there were the early sixteenth-century wall paintings covering the vaults of the nave and the choir, which is an impressive catalogue of saints similar in selection and execution to the wall paintings of Roskilde Cathedral, which likely were painted by the same workshop of artists. There are many beautiful details in the iconographic programme of Skive Church, but here I want to touch on one particular issue that really struck me as I was examining the various figures, namely how medieval art often employs achronicity to convey a saint's life in a single image. This use of achronicity is a very effective way of telling a saint's story through an assemblage of key aspects of that story. In so doing, the medieval artists fused various times, or perhaps rather various temporal moments, into one unit. The result is similar to what we often find in liturgical offices, where past and present commingles in a way that effectively - to use a beautiful phrase by Henry Parkes in a 2014 article - collapses time. In Skive Church I saw this particularly clearly in the depiction of Saint Martin of Tours.

Vor Frue Kirke, Skive, c.1200

Martin and Roch

Skive Church, Northern Jutland, early fifteenth century

The story of Saint Martin was widely known in the Middle Ages, as he was one of the oldest of the major non-biblical saints in the calendar, and as his cult was disseminated throughout all of Latin Christendom. In short, Martin was a Roman soldier of Pannonian origin who converted to Christianity, abandoned the army and settled as a hermit in some old ruins outside of Tours. When the bishopric of Tours became vacant, Martin was approached to become the next bishop, a position he very unwillingly accepted. His unwillingness later became the foundation for a story about how he hid among geese so as not to be found, but the geese made such a fuss about it that he was found. This story is neither in the first life of Martin by Sulpicius Severus (before 397) nor in any of the miracle accounts recorded in the sixth century by Gregory of Tours, Martin's successor and most efficient promoter. The most famous story from Severus' Life of Martin is arguably the story of how he divided his cloak while he was a soldier in order to give half of it to a beggar. This scene - usually featuring an equestrian soldier cutting his cloak with a sword - is found in many media of art throughout the medieval period. This scene is also used in the depiction of Saint Martin at Skive Church.

What struck me about Saint Martin at Skive, however, was that it was not the soldier on horseback who divided his cloak with his sword, but the bishop in full regalia who performed this act of charity. In terms of the legend of Saint Martin, this is a historical impossibility since Martin only became a bishop at a much later stage in his life. But in the narrative, achronic logic of medieval art, it makes perfect sense. The people attending services in the church who knew the story of Saint Martin - and such people were most likely in an overwhelming majority to those who did not - would easily recognise Martin from his particular act of charity, and they would know that he is to be remembered as a man of the church rather than a soldier saint. Because even though Saint Martin was a soldier, his story is only concerned with this aspect of his life to a minor degree. His most iconic act took place in this period, but it was also this act which prompted Martin to leave the army, as he afterwards had a vision of Christ praising him for his Christian charity. To put it in a different way, the deeds of Martin were carried out mainly as a bishop and his Christian acts were predominantly enacted as a man of the church. This is unlike soldier saints such as Mauritius and the Theban Legion who were martyred as soldiers and therefore enacted their sainthood as soldiers. This means that in the painting at Skive Church, Martin's role as an ecclesiastical saint is emphasised, and his saintliness is not given a militaristic tinge, so as to make clear his saint-type as a bishop and confessor, not a soldier and martyr.

In this way, we see how achronicity serves to summarise the key points of a saint's story - in this case by fusing one specific act with the profession he held at a later point - and at the same time provide the correct typology for the saint in question. Various temporal points in Saint Martin's life are merged into a symbolic, achronic here-and-now. It is, however, not timeless - at least not in the way liturgical narrative is often timeless by fusing past with the present and sometimes even with an apocalyptic future through references to Judgement Day - because both of the aspects represented in this image are of the historic, past Martin. However, there is still a sense of timelessness in what we see here as well, because this achronic representation of a historical person is also there to serve as a reminder that he, the saint, is always present and ready to receive the supplications of the faithful. In other words, while the image itself represents two separate stages of the past, it also contains in itself the promise of aid in the present as well as in the future, forever and ever, in saecula saeculorum.

This is, in short, a reminder of how wonderfully complex and sophisticated medieval art could be.

Bishop Martin dividing his soldier's cloak

Skive Church, Northern Jutland, ealry fifteenth century

onsdag 15. mai 2019

Whose Utopia is it anyway? – some brief reflections on the inherent vice of the ideal society

Screenshot from the Disney short Plutopia (1951), presumably showing the country's coat of arms

For several years I have been fascinated with the various forms of Utopian societies and how they have been imagined by writers through the centuries. As a general rule, I hold that a Utopian narrative is interesting mainly for what it can reveal about its author, and not so much for what it can offer for the sundry societal ills of our own time. Indeed, the majority of the Utopian societies I have read about are practically dictatorships where one person’s preferences and pet peeves have a disproportionate impact on people of different tastes and views. Such an impact becomes all the more problematic in those cases where the Utopian society in question is described in minute detail, something which inevitably makes the whole narrative a catalogue of the author’s obsessions and blind spots. In most cases, these blind spots highlight that the creators of these Utopian societies predominantly are not women – with some notable exceptions such as Margaret Cavendish – and so there are several problems affecting mainly or only women that are either not dealt with or that are dealt with immensely poorly. For instance, I do not recall having read any Utopian narrative that addresses problems such as domestic violence or rape, or admit to the possibility that such crimes might occur in any given society. This is just one of the elements which show to what extent Utopian narratives are predominantly about the critique and lampooning of a select bundle of issues, and not a literary genre that can provide much practical guidance. It is also one of the elements which suggest that an author of a Utopian narrative very rarely ought to be in a position of power. Quite the opposite, I argue that one way to keep people away from power would be to ask them to describe their own idea of a Utopian society, and then have the atrocious ones disbarred from any future participation in the government.

Title woodcut from a sixteenth-century edition of Thomas More's Utopia

Courtesy of Wikimedia

It is both impractical, unrealistic and, to be frank, completely undesirable to make use of Utopian narratives as wholesale guidebooks to how a society should be organised, above all because of how the faulty ideas of the creators tend to bleed into the very structures and foundations of these imagined perfect societies. As an example, Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) relies on slave labour, and even though these are criminals and soldiers from other countries taken prisoners in war, the very existence of a slave class shows that even the prototype of all later Utopias has something very rotten at its core. Granted, More does say at the end of his book that he does not agree with all aspects of Utopian society, but I find little reason to think that the use of slave labour is one of those aspects.

Another example can be found in Tommaso Campanella’s City of the Sun (1602), where the Utopian state practices extensive eugenics and consequently does not operate with the concept of love and infatuation. It therefore is of little use that both More and Campanella criticise very severe problems of the respective societies in which they themselves lived, because they have allowed other types of problems to be an integral part of their imagined ideal societies. In other words, Utopian narratives can provide excellent vehicles for identifying individual societal problems and even identify the main causes, but because these narratives are the products of individual authors it is no wonder that the Utopias usually fall short of providing any real solutions. Hence the question in the title of this blogpost: Whose Utopia is it anyway?

Utopias are not always political, however, and often the name Utopia takes on the meaning of a kind of paradisiacal society where it is the sensual rather than the logical which serves as the linchpin. Such imaginary societies predate the publication of More’s Utopia by centuries, and they are an important part of medieval satirical culture. One of the most famous of these societies is the Land of Cockaigne, where everything is made of food and the very raison d’etre appears to be gastronomical excess. Then there is the land of Cornucopia mentioned in Boccaccio’s Decameron (c.1353) (day 8, third story), which can count among its distinctive geological features a mountain made of parmesan cheese. Stories such as these are often interpreted as a kind of earthly counterpart to Paradise, where it is the stomach rather than the soul which is rewarded, but they can also be employed to lampoon the base and myopic desires of those who are more concerned with earthly gain than spiritual gain, and are unable to see beyond the diameter of their own stomachs. An example of this is the island of Narragonia, situated just beyond Spain, which is the destination of the eponymous vessel in Sebastian Brant’s Ship of Fools (1494).