December lights in the fjords

Whenever a year draws to its end, it feels appropriate to find some form of concluding statement or summary that bridges the past months with the months ahead. As this strangest of years comes to a longed-for close, however, I find it difficult to formulate anything that is not either trite or too self-serving or self-centred. Whatever my own experiences and challenges, they have been fairly mild and short-lived compared to what so many others have had to deal with. And although there are things I am likely to talk about at length at a future point out of frustration and anger, it feels pointless to rehearse these now. Instead, I leave this year with a few pictures of my home village this December, to where I was fortunate enough to return at the beginning of the month, and where I was able to quarantine safely and work while enjoying the crisp freshness of the December cold in the fjords. If nothing else, I hope to continue to immerse myself in this landscape in the months ahead. 

 

Saint Thomas of Canterbury at Lund

Today is the feast of Thomas of Canterbury, better known as Thomas Becket, archbishop, who was killed at the altar of Canterbury Cathedral in 1170, when a group of knights broke into the church. The murder must be understood against the six-year-long conflict between Thomas and King Henry II of England about the juridical borders and the power balance between church and king, which in turn was part of a power struggle that marked the political discourse of all of Latin Christendom at the time. When the English strand of this conflict culminated with the death of Thomas, he became a figurehead for the reformists of the church who championed the idea of the supremacy of the church not only in spiritual but also in worldly matters, and also the independence of the church from worldly government. Consequently, Pope Alexander III canonised Thomas in 1173, and his cult was disseminated widely throughout Latin Christendom. 

The cult of Saint Thomas of Canterbury came to the Norse world very early, and while we do not know much about the concrete details of the dissemination, we know that there were several routes by which his cult could have travelled to each of the different Nordic countries, such as trade, diplomacy, ecclesiastical connections or monastic networks (in particular the Cistercians). Our earliest sources for Thomas' cult in Denmark can be seen in three stories recorded by William of Canterbury in a miracle collection, while printed breviaries from the Danish archbishopric of Lund can be seen to retain the liturgical repertoire that was imported into Denmark already in the latter quarter of the twelfth century.

While there are many things that deserve to be said about the cult of Thomas in the medieval Norse world, there are also many of those things that need to be more thoroughly researched and that are tied up with various works in progress. So for this blogpost - marking the 850th anniversary of his death and forming part of the hashtag Becket 2020 - I'll limit myself to commenting on a late source that perhaps points to a continuous, or at least long-lasting, popularity around the martyred archbishop in medieval Denmark.  

Breviarium Lundense (Kongelige Bibliotek København, R 665 8°), f.98v

The source in question is a detail I encountered in the breviary of Lund, which was printed in 1517 in Paris. By this time, Lund was part of the medieval kingdom of Denmark - it is now in Sweden - and had been its metropolitan see since 1104. Due to Archbishop Eskil's connection with the reformist movement and the Cistercian order, it is likely that Lund was one of the first religious centres in Denmark, even in the Norse world, that adopted the cult of Thomas of Canterbury. The liturgy used for the celebration of Thomas' feast-day was likely brought directly from Canterbury, and it was retained without any notable changes in the printed breviary from 1517, pointing to the durability and conservative nature of liturgical material.

Yet even though the liturgical content of the printed breviary can, in the case of Thomas of Canterbury, be traced back to the twelfth century, there is one aspect of the breviary that is distinctly contemporary with the book itself, namely the note scribbled along the top margin of the page seen in the picture above. The page, folio 98v, begins with the eighth lesson for the hour of Matins - the liturgical apex of the daily round of hours - in which Thomas' role as a good shepherd is highlighted. The good shepherd is one of the roles of Christ, and every clergyman serving as a shepherd is modelled on Christ in this aspect. When Thomas' role as a good sheperd is highlighted here, the author of the liturgical office - belived to be Benedict of Peterborough - strengthens the sainted archbishop's similarity with Christ, as Thomas not only was a martyr in imitation of Christ's sacrifice on the cross, but also was a shepherd in imitation of Christ as a protector. This lesson caught the attention of some canon or priest - perhaps the archbishop himself - in the early sixteenth century at Lund. And since the Reformation was brought to Denmark in 1536/37, the window for dating the writing of this note is pleasingly narrow. 

The content of the note itself I have not yet managed to decipher, despite some frustrating attempts. The handwriting is not from my period of expertise, and I will probably ultimately have to rely on colleagues for this part. Yet even so, until such time that this is solved, it does nonetheless show that Thomas retained relevance in medieval Denmark as late as the period 1517-36/37, and that his liturgical office continued to be performed and exert an influence on at least some of its listeners centuries after it first was introduced to Denmark.


For other blogposts touching on Thomas of Canterbury, see:


A comparison of the cults of Thomas and Edward the Confessor

The chant Thomas Gemma Cantuarie

A wall-painting in the Cistercian monastery of Chiaravalle, Milan

A liturgical commemoration from the Norwegian medieval liturgical ordo

A fifteenth-century wall-painting in Skive, Denmark

Some reflections on the iconography of Saint Thomas in late medieval Europe

The Christmas story at Sanderum Church

 
As today is Christmas Day, I was reminded of a scene depicting the Christmas story in the vaults of a Danish parish church at Sanderum, a small village to the north of Odense. The church is from the twelfth century, and has featured in several previous blogposts, but the church space was enlarged in the fifteenth century and covered with an extensive wall-painting programme, some of which has now been heavily restored. The central vault of the church, as seen below, fixes the eye of the churchgoer as soon as they enter into the nave, and the central view is Christ in majesty. On the vault on the left-hand side is a judgement scene, showing the just entering into Heaven, and below that, on each side of the vault, is a summary of Christ's nativity.

On the right-hand side of this vault is the centre-piece of the Nativity, namely the manger with the Christ-child, the Virgin Mary standing above, and the ox and the ass in the background, who, although they do not feature in the gospels, were expected features because of the popular Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, and because they feature in the prophecy of Isaiah. On the other side of the vault we find the sleeping or contemplative Joseph, surrounded by a coiling vine. Together, these two separate pieces convey to the onlooker the most important elements of the Nativity. In this way, those in the parish who could not read were nonetheless familiar with the Christmas story, both from the paintings and the vernacular sermon of the parish priest - the first illustrating the words of the second, and the seoncd giving context to the first in an interplay that was integral to how the medieval church conveyed biblical and historical narratives to its audiences. 

New publication: Spor etter folkeleg kult

Earlier this month, I was notified of the publication of a volume to which I was able to contribute an article. Unfortunately, the publication is not in Open Access, so I cannot link to an online copy. But for anyone who can read Scandinavian languages, I recommend this volume on the cult of saints in the north. A table of content can be seen in the second image, and the book itself can be purchased here.


The volume as a whole offers new studies about the cult of saints in Scandinavia and the wider Northern European world, a subject where a lot of work still remains to be done, and a subject to which this volume provides some very interesting chapters. My own contribution - "Spor etter folkeleg kult – aspekt ved helgendyrkinga av Sankt Knud Rex i dansk mellomalder" (Traces of a popular cult - aspects of the veneration of Saint Knud Rex in the Danish Middle Ages) - is a discussion about popular veneration of Saint Knud Rex of Denmark, the king who was killed during an insurrection in Odense in 1086. As is so often the case when studying medieval Scandinavia, our few surviving sources chiefly pertain to to official cult as overseen by ecclesiastic authorities. Some sources do however allow us to piece together a somewhat general understanding of how the laity could participate in the cult of Saint Knud Rex, and what sources we have to this participation.  

Nada - a translation into Norwegian of a poem by Raquel Lanseros

This is another attempt at improving my Spanish by translating short, yet complex, poems into my mother tongue. As these are exercises in language proficiency rather than the result of a fluent speaker, they are of course rough and unfinished, yet they provide me with three things. First of all, the sense of accomplishment and progress. Secondly, the opportunity to share some of my favourite poetry with others, and perhaps alert some readers to a poet they might not have heard of. Thirdly, these translations provide me with an opportunity to give a public sign of gratitude and affection to the poet whose verses have come to mean very much to me, and which have served as a great relief throughout this strange millennium we call 2020. 

This time around, I present you with a translation of the poem Nada by Raquel Lanseros, printed in her latest collection, Matria, from 2018. A reading by the poet herself can be found here. A rendition into English of my Norwegian translation will follow at the end. 



Ingenting


Lat deg ikkje lure
av den påtekne audmjukskapen. 
Bak den harmlause framtoninga 
finn vi ein blodtyrstig dommar. 
Ein sofistikert liturgi av mangel. 
Ein bør akte seg for å misbruke namnet hans. 
Der finnast ikkje eit meir hemngjerrig uttrykk. 
Han tek til seg rommet. 
For han er det lettare å drepe enn å dele. 
Ved hans side er det ikkje plass til anna enn tomrommet. 

Det nyttar ikkje å appellere til hans miskunn. 
Hans einaste kjende lidenskapar 
er ordet "ingen" 
og ordet "aldri". 



Nothing

Do not be deceived 
my the feigned humility. 
Behind the harmless appearance
we find a bloodthirsty judge.
A sophisticated liturgy of lacking. 
One should be careful not to take his name in vain. 
There does not exist a more vindictive expression. 
He appropriates space. 
To him, it is more easy to kill than to share. 
By his side there is room for nothing more than emptiness. 

It is no use appealing to his clemency. 
His only known passions 
are the word "nobody" 
and the word "never". 












 

The order surrounding the chaos - an interpretation of figures in stone from Sotosalbos, Spain

While I am not an art historian - and while I live and work in perpetual awe of my friends and colleagues who are - I always try to broaden my understanding of medieval art, and I love using medieval art in my teaching. When it comes to the art found in an ecclesiastical context - be it the wall-paintings of the interior church space, the illuminations of manuscripts produced for an ecclesiastical institution (a category of manuscripts that can include books not aimed predominantly for liturgical use), or the stone figures populating the church exterior - one of my favourite aspects is that this art served as a mute, often wordless, language that communicated a message to a broad audience. Moreover, this language was a lingua franca of the churches across Latin Christendom, and as the various church organisations were part of the same transregional network of tastes and impulses, we find this language in stone and vellum to be used in the same way from Spain to Scandinavia, from Ireland to Illyria and beyond, and in this way it becomes possible to note patterns and and coherences that might seem absent at first glance to the modern eye, unaccustomed as it is to the logic behind this largely-lost language. 


While I am not an art historian, I do not avoid the temptation of interpreting this language whenever I come across it, although I am always careful to defer to my colleagues who are experts in this field. Before getting to the grain of this blogpost, therefore, I will emphasise that the following is speculation from a non-expert, so do consult your go-to historian of medieval art - and if you don't have one, get one - before accepting my interpretation. 

The subject of my interpretation is a section from the exterior programme of carvings of the Church of Saint Michael in Sotosalbos, a village near Segovia in Spain. The church is a splendid romanesque structure, and was built around 1200. The gateway and its arcade - which can be glimpsed on the left-hand side of the second photograph of this blogpost - are decorated with a sequence of carvings featuring persons, representations of the labours of the months, battle scenes, animals and geometric patterns. As was pointed out by Professor Miguel Larrañaga, who was the guide for the excursion that brought me to Sotosalbos last year, the individual carvings united in a communicative totality, one that conveyed the order and structure of the Christian cosmos, and that communicated the stratification of power in ways that would have been recognisable even to a non-ecclesiastical audience. This is the general purpose of the programme of carvings, and we find this throughout Latin Christendom. However, while we know this to be the purpose of the programme, it can often be difficult to read some of its individual component, and - at least for a non-expert such as myself - it can be a challenge to understand how one particular set of images contributes to the totality. 

The other day I was talking about medieval art with a friend who is not himself academic, and I suspect this fact allowed me to speculate a bit more than I might have done if talking with one of my friends who are historians of art. One of the examples of medieval art that I presented to him was this photograph which shows a small portion of the programme at Sotosalbos. In the top row of niches, we see - from right to left - 1) a praying individual who might be an ecclesiastic, 2) a figure pruning the vines who thus represents the labour of the month for February, and 3) a figure, possibly another ecclesiastic, displaying an open scroll that might at some point have contained a short prayer that the rain has chiselled away through the centuries. 

In the row below these niches, we find corbels interspersed with stones covered in geometric patterns. While the rightmost of the corbels in the photograph is effaced by time and weather, it is possible to interpret that as some sort of fighting scene when compared with the other two, one showing a man spearing a dragon and the other showing to figures in each other's choke-hold. While the individual figures are easy enough to interpret, at least with a basic knowledge of the motifs of medieval Christian art, the geometric patterns provide more of a challenge. The purpose of each individual figure seems clear enough, but what about the geometric patterns? Is there some message in these as well? Or are they just decorative, pleasing to the eye, fulfilling that dictum that nature abhors a vacuum and every void should be filled by something?

After a while, it struck me that these patterns might serve a purpose beyond mere decoration. If we consider their placings, we see that they punctuate what would otherwise be a series of violence, and this might be the clue to their collective purpose. The individual acts of violence represented by the corbels - fighting against one's fellow humans, fighting against beasts - might perhaps be understood as the chaos embedded in the world inhabited by humankind. In medieval thought there was a clear division between the order of society and the chaos of the untamed, uncivilised, lawless world of the beasts and of devils. It was this lawless world, the postlapsarian world of sin, that showed itself in acts of violence and breaches against the social order. Against this chaos, precipitated by the devil's deceit in the garden, stands the social order and the harmonious symmetry of God. The social order is here represented by the clerks whose prayers connect Heaven and earth, as well as the farmer pruning the vines, a representative of the unbroken annual cycle of labours that presides over the social life of humankind. 

Then there are the patterns. If we consider this contrast between violent chaos and social order, the interpretation of these geometrical symmetries appear more accessible. The symmetry of these patterns might be understood as that divine harmony by which the entire universe is fashioned, and they might thus serve as a counterpoint to the aberrant, destructive violence of the corbels. If we understand the patterns in this way, they are not just beautiful symmetrical carvings, they are communicative statements that insist on the resilience of order, and which serve as a contrast against the chaos that exists in the world. In this way, we might understand these carvings as communicating to the onlooker that the church and the society - represented in these particular carvings by clerks and workers - provide a bulwark against the violent chaos of the world outside society. This might serve on the one hand as a message of comfort, as well as an implicit threat that if one does not conform to the law of the church and society, one is cast out in that outer darkness mentioned by Christ in the Gospel of Matthew. This is at least my interpretation. 

I should emphasise, however, that this interpretation is of only one section of the pictorial programme of the porch of the church, and in order to verify or falsify the validity of my interpretation, it would be necessary to see the programme as a whole. This has perhaps been done by scholars already, and if not I hope some expert will do so. Until then, I am tempted to suggest that this interpretation might at least provide some answers, and perhaps even the correct ones. 

Nørre Nærå Church in Denmark

In the spring of 2019, I had my last months in Denmark at the end of a five-year stay, and in that time I managed to do a bit of churchcrawling, something I had long wanted to do. One of the wonderful things about Denmark, especially for a medievalist, is that there are numerous churches from the Middle Ages that have survived with their medieval elements intact, at least to various degrees, and they can be found all over the country. The sheer plethora of these churches means that it is also possible to encounter them by chance when driving along, and this gives plenty of opportunity for unexpected treasures to materialise into view. 

During my last months in Denmark, my parents came to visit and I had planned an itinerary that would bring us some places we had not visited before, focussing - of course - mainly on medieval churches. However, knowing full well from previous trips how rewarding it can be to also keep an eye out for lesser-known churches, we were always prepared to take an unscheduled stop along the way. One such stop was the church of Nørre Nærå on Fyn. 

The name Nørre Nærå is a confusing name in several respects. First of all, it is one of two locations with "Nærå" in the name, this being the northernmost of the two, whereas the other location, also the site of a medieval church, is called Sønder Nærå, i.e. the southernmost of the two. Furthermore, the name "Nærå" initially seems to suggest a river, since the word "å" is a Norse word for river, which can be found in both modern Danish and modern Norwegian. However, according to specialist Lisbeth Eilersgaard Christensen, in a study available from the website of Odense Museum, here, the name is a muddling of the word "høj", pointing to a hill or a mound, as seen in Norwegian "haug" or English dialect "how". Finally, the element "Nær", which in modern Danish would be "near" is interpreted as a muddling of the name Njord, one of the Norse gods. So the name essentially means "The Northernmost Hill of Njord", thus possibly pointing to an old site for rituals or other religious gatherings. This is one of many names in Fyn that point to a pre-Christian religious practices, most famous of which is the main city, and episcopal centre, Odense, which is interpreted as Odin's vi, or the sacred place of Odin. 

The bishopric of Odense, which covers all of Fyn, was established at the end of the tenth century, the earliest reference to which is a letter of privilege sent on behalf of the boy-king Otto III, later emperor, to the Danish bishops. At this point, the Danish church organisation was not extensive, and it is questionable whether there actually was a resident bishop in Odense at that time. In the course of the eleventh century, however, this changed, and by the end of the twelfth century the bishop of Odense was the head of a large number of churches, many of which were erected in the second half of the 1100s. It is likely that one of these churches was that of Nørre Nærå, since there are several Romanesque elements surviving, one of which is a baptismal font (imperfectly photographed by me, see below). 

In written sources, the village of Nørre Nærå appears for the first time in 1282, while the church appears in 1304 - that it, if the Nærå church mentioned is the northernmost and not the southernmost of the possible candidates. Irregardless, the Romanesque elements indicate a point of origin of the church that is at least a century older than its first possible appearance in textual documents. 

The church building as it stands today is mostly the result of an expansion of the original church space towards the end of the fifteenth century, and at times heavy restoration work in mid- to late 1800s. Several of the features of the church space are modern, such as the pulpit from 1848 and the altarpiece from 1937. These are both beautiful pieces, and although not medieval they are nonetheless part of that rich melange of remnants from various points in time that is is common in the Danish churchscapes.

The foot of the Romanesque font which at the time drew my attention more strongly than the font itself

For a glimpse of the dimensions of the font, see the blogpost's first picture of the church interior.

Danish churches are historical treasure houses, and they can contain surprising gems, even in the smallest and most remote cases. The truth of this became evident when entering Nørre Nærå Church, because in the left-hand corner of the aisle just before entering the choir, there is a stone with a runic inscription unostentatiously placed on its own below a candelabra from 1934. The stone has been moved into the church during renovation work, and in earlier records it was mentioned as placed in the cemetery. This is a wonderful survival from medieval Denmark, and the most fantastic part of this artefact is not so much that it is found in a church of such chiefly local significance, but that it is dated to the ninth century, possibly close to as much as three centuries older than the oldest surviving part of the church itself.  

The text itself has stumped runologists, as the inscription - which seems to be partly lost - is difficult to interpret. It reads "Thormundr Niut kumbls", which has been interpreted by Erik Moltke as being a kind of burial formula, but I for my part dare not say more on the subject here. However we understand the text, its very presence is a wonderful reminder of the wealth of the Danish medieval material, and how much of it can be encountered even in the most remote, humble places. And this is the reason why it's always a good idea to stop when a church appears in view.

The information about the various details of the church can be found in the chapter on Nørre Nærå in the monumental encyclopedia Danmarks Kirker (Churches of Denmark), available online here.

Songs for Saint Edmund - liturgy and identity at Bury St Edmunds

 


Today is the feast of Saint Edmund Martyr, the king of East Anglia who was killed by Danish Vikings in 869, and who became one of the most important native saints of medieval England. This year's feast is, moreover, a special occasion, as it is the millennial anniversary of the founding of the monastic community at Edmund's shrine in the town that came to be Bury St Edmunds, and which is referred to in Edmund's saint-biography by Abbo of Fleury from c.987 as Bedricurtis, or Bedricsworth. The shrine of Edmund had been established shortly after his death, although the actual historical circumstances were in all likelihood very different from how they are depicted in Abbo's Passio Eadmundi. What we do know, however, is that Edmund's shrine was the centre of a local cult for most of the tenth century, but one that attracted the veneration of several magnates and bishops and was a significant feature in the religious life of East Anglia. Based on the miracle stories included in Passio Eadmundi, this shrine was maintained by priests and recluse women, and it had amassed a trove of wealth that was sufficiently large to attract the attention of a group of thieves. So while it was not a monastic community, it certainly had both monastic elements and a great status - which is probably why the shrine was selected to be reformed as a Benedictine abbey. 

The reformation of the community took place under the auspices of King Knud I of England, Denmark and Norway. Knud was an active patron of religious houses in England, and Bury St Edmunds was one of several to which he turned his attention. However, the Danish background of the king must have been particularly poignant aspect of Knud's patronage of Bury, as his father, Svend Forkbeard, had died only six years prior during his invasion of Denmark, and according to the local legends it was Saint Edmund himself who had killed the Danish king for having exacted a heavy tribute from Edmund's shrine. This episode became one of the most iconic scenes to be depicted in pictorial renditions of Edmund's legend. 

In its first few decades, the change to a monastic community at Bury is likely to have been important, but not necessarily dramatic beyond the introduction of a monastic liturgical use, which was more elaborate than the one that was performed previously - although we do not know anything about the details of that liturgy. In the second half of the eleventh century, however, Bury became a major cult centre that established connections with other religious houses on the continent, and that actively promoted and disseminated Edmund's cult beyond its own territory. The man in charge of this dissemination programme was Abbot Baldwin, a former monk at Saint-Denis who had been the physician of Edward the Confessor, and who was appointed by the king to the abbacy. During Baldwin's reign, Bury was the location of a significant textual production, which included the copying of books as well as the composition of new material. Arguably, the most important of the new productions was the liturgical office, because it was through this medium that the abbey formulated its own relationship to its patron saints, and formulated its own identity through its presentation of the life and history of that patron. This identity - this blend of history and iconography - was taught to the monks of Bury through the annual celebrations of Edmund's feast day, November 20, and through this communal, immersive performance the community reminded itself of its role in the holy scheme of God, of the merits of its patron, and of the place of Bury St Edmunds in the fabric of Creation. This kind of identity-construction and identity-perpetuation was a key element of liturgy, and one of the reasons why a new monastic office was composed under the auspices of Abbot Baldwin. It is perfectly possible that another monastic office existed prior to Baldwin's abbacy, but I for my part find it unlikely. 

The office for Saint Edmund is of great interest to us, not only because of its key position in the cult of Edmund and the life and identity of the abbey, but because it has come down to us in one of the oldest surviving sources from Bury: A manuscript dated to around 1070, København Kongelige Bibliotek GKS 1588, in which an almost-complete version of the office can be found, along with the earliest known copy of Passio Eadmundi. For the millenary of the abbey of Bury St Edmunds, I here present a little selection of the content of this office. The translations are based transcriptions and translations from my PhD thesis. A modern arrangement of the office of Saint Edmund can be found here.  

København Kongelige Bibliotek GKS 1588, f.28r

The first song of the office as it has come down to us from MS GKS 1588 is the Magnificat antiphon, performed in conjunction with a psalm during the hour of Vesper. In this chant, Bury's identity vis-à-vis its wider geography, as the chant asks the church of the entire English people - i.e. not only the local branch of East Anglia - to celebrate Saint Edmund. This imparts the idea that Edmund is of so great a standing in the senate of God - a typical metaphor for Heaven - that he can intercede for all the English people, not just those of his own community at Bury. 


Exulta sancta ecclesia totias gentis anglice ecce in manibus est laudatio eadmundi regis inclyti et martyris inuictissimi qui triumphato mundi principe celos ascendit uictoriosissime sancta pater eadmundo tuis supplicibus intende

Rejoice, holy church of the entire English people, behold in [whose] hands is Edmund praised, the illustrious king and invincible martyr, who triumphing over the prince of the world ascended victoriously in heaven. Holy father Edmund, hold out your prayers

København Kongelige Bibliotek GKS 1588, f.28v

The next chant I want to emphasise is third antiphon of Matins. The hour of Matins was the climax of the liturgical celebration of the feast day. This was the longest of the eight services of the daily round, and it was here that the community shared in the story of their patron to chants and readings. The chants of the office were chanted by all the monks, and chants are thus an immensely powerful vehicle of identity construction since the singing makes each individual monk of the community take part in the perpetuation of the institution's collective memory.

This antiphon, Legem dedit, is of particular interest because it adds a new element to the iconography of Saint Edmund. It introduces the idea that the Danish chieftain, Hingwar, threatened Edmund with exile lest he submit to him. The invocation of exile is not mentioned in Passio Eadmundi, but it is a signficant addition in the liturgy, because even though the legend does include an exile for Edmund, the mere threat invokes the image of the exile, and the archetype of exiles for all saints was Christ, who had gone into exile as a child to escape the slaughter by Herod. Since the efficaciousness of saints was often measured in the extent to which they imitated Christ, an added element of this imitation, the threat of exile, served to impress upon the community at Bury how Christlike was their patron.  

Legem dedit rex crudelis hinguuar / ut eadmundus exilio relegarent / aut capite potius detruncarent / si eum suis legibus inclinare aut subdere non possent

The cruel king Hingwar gave the condition / so that Edmund would be banished into exile / or else decapitated, if he could not / bend to his laws and place himself under them

København Kongelige Bibliotek GKS 1588, f.29r

The final example for this millenary blogpost is the first responsory of the office, also performed during Matins. A responsory is a chant sung after a lesson, and it is comprised of three parts: The main part which is the responsum (literally, the response, as it responds to the lesson), then comes the verse, v, and then finally the repetenda, r, which repeats the last line of the responsum for emphasis.

The first responsory comes after the first lesson, in which we learn about Edmund's characteristics and his merits as a king and saint. The responsory emphasises that Edmund was pre-destined to become a saint, and that his entire life was planned by God so that Edmund would join him in Heaven as one of his soldiers in the fight against the devil. This pre-ordained destiny was typical of all saints and not unique to Edmund, but it was nonetheless an important trait, and by repeating this aspect of Edmund twice in the same chant, the community at Bury were reminded, and reminded themselves, that their patron was one of the elect of God, and could therefore aid them in their needs. Such a comfort, the idea of a patron who was especially beloved by God, should be understood as a crucial aspect of a cult centre's identity construction.

Sancte indolis puer eadmundus ex antiquorum personis regum natiuitatis sumpsit exordium quem sue milicie informauit rex celestis ut sibi coheredem transferet in celis.
[v] Cuius infantium illustrauit spiritus sancti gratia quoniam complacuit sibi in illo anima domini iesu

[r] ut sibi

With inborn holiness, the boy Edmund, born from old royal lineage, was taken from the beginning, whom the heavenly king shaped [into] his soldier so that as His coinheritor He could transfer him to heaven.
[v] Whose childhood shone with the gifts of the Holy Spirit, since it was acceptable to him in this soul
[r] so that

The examples I have pointed to here are only three of many. The office is of course a unit in the sense that it conveys a unified legend in a short space of time, but it is also comprised of episodes in which particular aspects of the saint, the saint's qualities and the institution's identity are given particular attention. The full scope of the programme of identity construction begun under Abbot Baldwin requires an immersion in the entire office, not just its texts but its texts performed with music, but even by these few examples we manage to see some of the key aspects of this identity-construction. 

Material minutiae - the curious case of the discoloured incunable page

One of the books to which I often return in the course of my research is a 1492 edition of the collection of saints' lives Das Leuend der Hÿlghen, printed by Steffen Arndes in Lübeck. This book is now kept in the library of the University of Southern Denmark, which is where I encountered it in the course of a brief employment as a research assistant there. The book is magnificent for many reasons, and one of the many aspects that continue to delight me is the material evidence of use - various clues as to how its readers interacted with the book. Since this edition came to the university library from a Danish school established in the mid-sixteenth century, these clues are particularly interesting for what light they might shed on the reception of these saint stories in a post-Reformation Scandinavian context.

Syddansk Universitetsbibliotek RARA M 15, f.403v

The material clues come in various forms, often as marginal notations of different kinds - scribbled notes or simply marks to highlight a passage - and sometimes these clues are more accidental. One such accidental clue can be seen on page 403v, the last page in the collection's chapter on Saint Erik of Sweden. As can be seen in the photograph above, the left column of the page is curiously streaked by some kind of discolouration. At the time of writing, I do not know how to explain this or what it might tell us about how this book has been used, but I'm opening this up to readers with more experience in codicology, in the hope that some suggestions might appear.

The paradox of historical imagination

 

The Vikings probably went to the moon
- David Mitchell, QI S17E14

Truth, it is often said, is stranger than fiction. As a medievalist I have often found this to be correct, in the sense that the source material with which I engage has confounded my prejudice or my neophyte imagination time after time, and continues to do so. It is partly this never-ending itinerary from revelation to revelation – moments both big and small – that makes it so very fulfilling to immerse oneself in the past, and to have one’s comprehension of reality expanded by this unsteady pulse of learning and discovery. Truth is strange – but mostly because how we conceive of truth is laughably narrow, and because our ability to measure truth is hemmed in by our expectations of what is possible. This often yields strange results in how we conceive of the past, or at least certain iconic moments of aspects from the past, because very often we tend to conceive of these as they have been handed down from previous generations, as a second- or third-hand idea shaped by the prejudice and state of the art of a bygone period. The past provides a template for how the future thinks of an even more distant past, and it can be difficult to realise how that template needs to be altered to fit with the knowledge and understanding that have accumulated in the interim. This inability to properly modify the received template often leads to a paradoxical thinking about the human potential in historical epochs: We sometimes tend to think both too broadly and too narrowly at one and the same time. Our historical imagination often becomes like a lake bursting from a dam and spreading broadly in all directions, but without creating the depth needed to sustain it or to acquire substance.     

In an attempt to write this in a clearer way, I will take as my example how neatly people tend to categorise humanity into different nations, groups, tribes, ethnicities, or – to those who cling to an anachronistic, unnecessary and harmful lexicon – races and civilisations. This very neat categorisation – too neat for reality to fit into it – has provided a foundation for ideas about the immutable relationship between ethnicity and geography. This foundation has been used to build delusions such as the one that the concept of the nation-state is somehow natural and old, as suggested by well-known demagogue Nigel Farage, or that there is such a thing as an Urheimat, an original home, for certain ethnicities. The human past, even if we only look to the last two millennia, is infinitely more complex and brimming with nuance than such neat categorisations can capture.          

In the field of medieval studies, this neat categorisation along ethnic lines has recently sparked a lot of controversy, because people bottle-fed on nationalistic notions inherited from the nineteenth century struggle to accept the idea of the Middle Ages as a temporal space that can be conceived as multi-cultural. The idea that the cultures of medieval Europe kept to themselves and were separated by these neatly demarcated categories has presided over a lot of historical thinking, both within academia and without, and this idea has been shaped by very modern notions of ethnic differences. In short, it is very difficult for a certain type of modern humans to envisage a medieval past in which ethnicity – or its perverted double, “race”, – was not such a wall-maker as that type of modern humans would wish it to be. The racist ideologies of the modern world are simply incompatible with the truth of the source material, and truth becomes much stranger – or at least much more complex – than the fictions these people tend to weave. 

The limited nature of this historical imagination, an imagination that cannot imagine a Europe that is not monolithically white in its skin, is paradoxical. And what makes the limitation of this historical imagination so paradoxical is that the very figureheads by which they seek support for their ideas are proof of the exact opposite of what they believe. The figureheads in questions vary, but very often they tend to be Vikings or crusaders, Europeans who are best known and even celebrated by these racist groups for the well-documented breadth of their travels. We know that the Norse reached the coasts of modern-day Canada, and connected with the trade routes of Central Asia. We know that the crusaders established themselves forcefully in the Levant and attempted to gain footholds in Northern Africa. And there are fantasies about these figureheads reaching even further. There are fantasies about Vikings and Knights Templars reaching further south along the American landmass. In some cases, these fantasies are just that, fantasies, and they revel in an imaginative exuberance that can easily be enjoyed without the need of embracing them as facts. We have, for instance, Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant who joins a Viking expedition into the forests of West Africa. Or the case of Hugo Pratt’s Mu, the latest instalment in his series about Corto Maltese, in which the lost continent of Mu is found in the depths of Amazonas – or perhaps the depths of the earth, it’s not very clear in the story – and we learn that it was reached by both Vikings and Templars. Similarly, there are several Italian Disney stories in which proof of Viking settlements are found near Duckburg – and as aficionados will remember, Duckburg is located in the fictional state of Calisota, located somewhere along the Pacific coast, an entire continent away from where we know that the Norse actually landed.          

The ability of popular culture to envisage a medieval world that is in effect boundless and in which cultures from very different geographical locations can meet one another is boon to the historical imagination. This pop-cultural vision is of course tempered by reality, in which we know that the Norse never reached the Pacific Ocean, the subterranean depths, or the moon, yet this vision provides is with a reminder that we should not think too narrowly about the possibilities furnished by the world of medieval travel. And because we should not think too narrowly of this world, we also come to the realisation that the cultures that comprised the medieval period, the groups and tribes and peoples whose histories we try to comprehend through a frustratingly incomplete source material, they were part of a unified geographical world – the Afro-Eurasian landmass – whose connectedness and whose roads and infrastructure facilitated cultural encounters and sustained contacts that were probably much deeper and long-standing than we often realise. This reminds us, in turn, that we should not think too narrowly along the lines of modern concepts of ethnicities, because people of the Middle Ages were not – at least to the same extent.

Granted, we know that the peoples of the medieval period – as people have always done to various extents – had clear ideas about geographical belonging. I am currently reading Jordanes’ Gothic History (translated by Mierow), in which the sixth-century Gothic scholar unequivocally locates the Gothic place of origin in the island of Scandza, calling it a womb of nations, an idea that has fuelled later ideas about the Urheimat. In this sense, the historical imagination of Jordanes is quite narrow, in that we today would – or at least should – hesitate to accept such a clear geographical starting point for any group identified by an ethnic label, unless – of course – one belongs to those groups who pathetically cling to fictions of belonging as if their worldview depended on it (which it does).         

Yet at the same time, Jordanes also paints a picture of the history of the Goths that envisage a known world in which cultures met, interacted and intermarried. In the first few chapters of the History, we learn how the Goths left the island of Scandza – often identified as Scandinavia – and then roamed across the known world, coming into contact with, and often marrying into, peoples such as the Scythians, the Seres (traditionally but not uncontestedly identified as the Chinese) and the Persians, and even pushing as far south as into Egypt, hindered only by the fortifications erected to keep out the Ethiopians (a reminder that the term “Ethiopian” meant something less precise in the world of Late Antiquity than it does today). In short, the historical imagination of Jordanes had no problem accepting as truth these ideas that a people from an island in the far north could, in the course of generations, reach distant corners of Asia and even into Egypt, and that these northerners established relationships with and married into people very different from themselves. The historical imagination of the learned medieval world, in other words, as far less narrow in its limits and constraints of geographical thinking than several of those of the modern era who venerate idealised figures of that same medieval past.       

This is the paradox of historical imagination: To accept, and to even expand, the geographical vista suggested by the medieval source material, yet to deny the very human implications of that vista for how we think about culture, cultural exchange, and multiculturalism. This is the paradox of a type of modern mind that embraces the forgery of the Kensington rune stone as authentic, yet that struggles, or refuses, to understand that the Roman Empire of the time of Jordanes, for instance, was a hodgepodge of ethnicities and cultural impulses that demonstrated the interwoven world of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, connecting through a range of intermediaries all the different coasts of Africa, Asia and Europe. It is in this refusal to accept cultural contacts as sustained and having a long-term impact rather than being ephemeral or interpreted as proving the dominance of one’s favoured culture, that the modern racist mind fails to comprehend that truth is both much stranger and much more interesting than the fictions of its narrow confines. 

Harmonious disharmony - Pär Lagerkvist and Carlo Gesualdo

This evening I finished reading the novel Dvärgen (The Dwarf) by the Swedish novelist Pär Lagerkvist. The novel is narrated by the dwarf of a late-medieval Italian prince, who is an extreme misanthrope and observes the world through a filter of hatred and incomprehension, interpreting the actions and natures of those around him from his vantage point of the outsider who is often mocked and ignored, yet who thereby manages to come closer to the realities of courtly life. It is a wonderful novel, but in an extremely discomforting way. Since the protagonist considers himself in opposition to the doings of humans - whom he considers a different species of beings altogether - he also breaks norms, performs impieties, and presents the twisted, childish view of the world of a supreme egotist who feels insufficiently powerful and who is dissatisfied with everything - everything but violence, that is. This contradictory nature of the protagonist runs like a jarringly discordant note through the entire novel, a note made all the more discordant because his hatred is of such a petulant nature. It has taken me significantly longer to finish this novel than I expected, and it is precisely because of this disharmony.

As I began reading the novel, I was struck by the idea that a fitting soundtrack to my reading would be something by Carlo Gesualdo (1566-1613), one of the most notorious composers of Renaissance music, known for his heavy use of dissonance which is in notable contrast to earlier Italian composers. It is not quite clear to me why his music came to mind, as I have not listened to it since the months following a conference in Italy back in 2013, which coincided with the anniversary of his death. Perhaps it was the late-medieval/Renaissance setting of Lagerkvist's novel that prompted the connection. Perhaps it was that like the novel's protagonist, Gesualdo also broke the norms of his day and also committed murder (I misremembered and thought he had murdered his father - I realised later that he had murdered his wife and her lover). Whatever the reason, I found that the homicidal composer's disharmonious music suited the murderous disharmony of the novel's narrator disconcertingly well, as if the two horrible human beings - one real, one fictional - echoed each other and brought something more living into the art. It was an uncomfortable exercise at times, but one that was rewarding in strange ways, as the disharmony of it all allowed me to immerse myself somewhat more deeply into the twisted reality of the novel's nameless misfit of a protagonist. And it served also as a reminder that - as shown by both the novel and the music - the idea of the Renaissance as a time of glory is a gross misconception that only survives because it fits certain grand narratives, and because we give too much credence to the art it left behind and not the circumstances in which that art was made, or by whom or to whose cost that art came into being. Although fictional, Lagerkvist's misanthropic narrator helps us remember that.    

A medieval view of Växjö

Yesterday I walked into town for the first time in several weeks, and I had selected a route which I had not travelled before. It turned out to be a very rewarding choice, as the road took me to the top of a hill sloping down into the centre, as it cut through an allotment. This angle gave me a lovely view of Växjö cathedral, and it struck me as a notably medieval view, because from this perspective there were no tall houses to rival the height of the cathedral or to obscure its spires, there was no industrial or mercantile complex to remind me of the present times.

I call this view medieval, not because there were no modern components in the vista. After all, the cathedral itself is to a large extent an early modern renovation of the medieval structure, remnants of which can still be found inside and around the church. Yet at the same time, this view - with the cathedral clearly outlined against the sky, dominating the horizon and foregrounded by patch of cultivated greensward - would have been essentially the same as the view of medieval churchgoers wending their way down the slope in the Middle Ages, when Växjö was the frontier zone between medieval Sweden and medieval Denmark, and when the bishops of the city claimed to preside over the oldest of all the Swedish dioceses (a claim still made).  

There was something lovely and peaceful in the stability and permanence offered by this view. And even though that stability and that permanence are belied by the very features that make up the view, it is enough to give a calming sense that while the individual pieces might have changed significantly in the past thousand years, a lot of it still remains the same, and this allows us to get a better sense of how this landscape was experienced by its inhabitants several centuries ago. There is something to be said for that kind of sensations. 

Leikanger Church in Norway

This summer, my family and I undertook a couple of excursions to medieval churches in the fjords. I have previously written about another of these churches, Hopperstad, here, here, and here. In this blogpost, I will give a brief introduction to another church that has elements dating back to the Middle Ages, but which has undergone significant rebuilding in the modern period. This is Leikanger Church, situated in Sogn, and a the centre of a large parish in the medieval period.

The oldest parts of the church are elements of the stone choir, and a wooden crucifix which is currently housed in Bergen University Museum. It is likely that an older church made out of timber stood on this spot before the building of the stone church, but this has not yet been ascertained. The few medieval remnants only allow for a rough dating of the church to sometime in the thirteenth century, with a tendency to favour the latter half of the 1200s. 

The church appears to have been in continuous use throughout the medieval and early modern period, and there are several items - such as the altarpiece, the pulpit, and fragments of a baptismal font, all of which are seventeenth century. The building itself received its current appearance in the course of two restorations, one in 1872 and one in 1955. It was during the first of these restorations that the church received its octagonal apse.  

While the church has undergone significant changes since the medieval period, it is nonetheless a very beautiful church with a lot of interesting details. It is located in a wonderful landscape that was once busy with trade from far and near, and it served as the religious centre for many of the far-flung villages surrounding it. For me, the most important aspect of this church was that it was the church that my mother attended during her years as a kindergarten teacher in Leikanger in the 1970s. At a time when a lot of the old features of the villages in the fjords are changing and disappearing, it feels very heartening that although Leikanger church has also changed significantly through the times, it still allows a connection with the past and a sense of permanence.  

Copy of the medieval crucifix. The original is probably thirteenth century

SS Cosmas and Damian in Segovia

 

Today is the feast of SS Cosmas and Damian, the famous saintly brothers who were medical practitioners in the time of Diocletian (284-306). According to legend, they refused to accept payment for their cures, and they were executed as a part of Diocletian's persecution of Christians. There is a great likelihood that they never existed, but their cult seems to be an old one, and their feast can be found in calendars and liturgical books from all over Latin Christendom. I have several times come across them in Spain, and their widespread distribution in the northern parts of the country would suggest that the cult was introduced to Spain already in Late Antiquity. However, this is merely an hypothesis. 

I have written about elements of the cult of Cosmas and Damian in previous blogposts (here and here), but this time I will have a quick look at a spectacular representation from one of the early modern chapels in Segovia Cathedral. The chapel in question is the Chapel of SS Cosmas and Damian, and can be seen in a more complete view here.

Upon the death of Damián Alonso Berrocal in 1603, the archpriest of Pedraza, one of the villages within Segovia's jurisdiction, the cathedral chapter donated this chapel for his inhumation. It appears that the dedication of the chapel to the saintly brothers was occasioned by the archpriest's connection to his namesake saint. In 1629, the retable of the chapel was commissioned, and in the early 1630s the sculptures decorating the retable were completed by a carver. 

Cosmas and Damian as envisioned in the 1630s

One of the many interesting elements of this retable is how it conveys the legend of the two saints. As is typical of medieval and early modern Christian art, stories become compressed into a sequence of highlights, capturing the most important points of the legend of the saints, reminding the viewers about the story, and demonstrating to the saints in Heaven that their ministrants on earth were familiar with their story and therefore worthy of their help and prayers. In this, the retable in Segovia Cathedral is typical and in no way unique, but nonetheless fascinating and astounding in the way it communicates the story of the brothers.

At the base of the retable we can follow the story. The two brothers heal a man bitten by a serpent, a miracle that is likely to be an echo of one of the stories about Saint Paul, who reportedly was bitten by a snake during one of his missions and was unharmed. The second and final scene of the base is their execution before the seated emperor. It is noteworthy that their death by decapitation - a very common way of dying for late-antique saints - follows after a failed attempt at killing them by arrows, as the arrows redounded back onto their would-be executioners. 

Lifting the eyes from the base - which seems to be logical sequence of reading this retable - we see the brothers safe and sound and with their heads reattached to their bodies, signifying their current state as saints in Heaven. Above them, we see - though not in these pictures - the Virgin Mary. 

There are several elements of the legend of Cosmas and Damian that have not been included in the version of the retable. The story of how their sanctity was confirmed by a speaking camel, and the miraculous cure of how they performed a leg transplant are not to be found, for instance. The absence of these episodes, however, are only natural given the limited space for visual storytelling in the retable, and by looking at what is kept and what is omitted, we can understand what was considered to be the most important elements of the story.  

Saint Mauritius in Roskilde

Today, September 22, is the feast of Saint Mauritius of the Theban legion. According to legend, he was the commander of an Egyptian contingent of the Roman army who were stationed in the Alps during the reign of Diocletian (284-306). These soldiers were Christian, and when they refused to recant their faith, they were all martyred. While the exact number of these martyrs differs from version to version, they are usually counted in the thousands, and this has spawned several offshoots of the cult, where individual members of the troop are said to have survived for a bit longer and become martyrs elsewhere. The large majority of these saints are anonymous. 

The cult of the martyrs of the Theban legion is particularly pronounced in the Alps, and cult centres dedicated to them can be found in all the Alpine countries, as seen in the case of St. Moritz in Switzerland.  Beyond the Alpine region, however, I do not know how well-known was the cult prior to the mid-thirteenth century. It is likely, however, that the inclusion of the legend of Mauritius and his companions in Legenda Aurea by Jacobus de Vorgaine made Saint Mauritius into a saint known throughout all of Latin Christendom. 

One of the Scandinavian witnesses to his cult can be found in the cathedral of Roskilde, which was decorated with extensive wall-painting programmes towards the end of the fifteenth century. In the chapel of the three kings, Saint Mauritius can be see on the wall behind one of the statues of the grave of King Frederik II (d.1588) and Queen Sophie of Mecklenburg (d.1631). Already in the thirteenth century, if not earlier, Mauritius was often portrayed as a black man, pointing to him being from Africa, and his iconography is one of our best sources to how Africans were depicted in Latin Christendom. 


 

The imperfectly remembered archbishop - three late-medieval images of Saint Thomas of Canterbury

Today, September 18, I virtually attended a workshop on hagiography, comprised of scholars working in the Nordic countries. It was a welcome opportunity to present research, which is something I have missed more than I thought I would in this year’s string of conference cancellation. My talk was focussing on the cult of Saint Thomas of Canterbury in medieval Denmark, a topic on which I have spent a lot of time this year, and which continues to fascinate me. As I was preparing for my talk, I was reminded of one quandary that has been in the background of much of my research on the cult of saints. When trying to chart the development of a particular saint’s cult, or the role of saints in a particular historical period, one important perennial question is this: How do we measure the popularity of a saint outside that saint’s cult centre? And more to the point, how do we measure that popularity when the saint in question is of very widespread fame?       

This matter is particularly pressing in the case of Thomas of Canterbury. Due to his role as a figurehead for the struggle of ecclesiastical power against royal power in the twelfth century, the cult of Thomas was disseminated throughout Latin Christendom very rapidly following his canonisation in 1173. Because of this widespread reception of his cult, the figure of Thomas is a ubiquitous feature in sources pertaining to the cult of saints in the later Middle Ages, and in particular liturgical books and legendaries. The papal request to include Thomas in liturgical calendars meant that Thomas can be encountered in probably every church province of the papal church. Similarly, because Thomas was one of few modern saints included in Legenda Aurea by Jacobus de Voragine in the 1260s, the martyred archbishop was included in practically every edition, translation and adaptation of this collection of saints’ lives, which was one of the most popular books produced in the medieval period. Consequently, Thomas of Canterbury appears in a wide range of sources from all over Latin Christendom from the late twelfth century onwards. Because of this wealth of cult material pertaining to Thomas of Canterbury, I find myself asking the question: To what extent do these numerous witnesses to his cult actually indicate popularity?          

To answer this question would require a scholarly article, perhaps even a monograph, but all I have at the present is this blogpost. I therefore wish to go into some of the ways in which we approach this question, and what follow-up questions that we need to posit in order to find at least a tentative conclusion.    

First of all, we need to ask whether the source in question contains a version of the legend of Thomas which follows the narrative of his vita. This is of course a question that can only be put if the source allows for a narrative, be it textual or pictorial. In the event that the source provides a narrative of sorts, we need to consider whether this source follows the narrative of the vita to a significant degree. If the answer is yes, we might tentatively interpret this as evidence of popularity.   

However, if the source only follows the narrative of the vita to a limited degree, or perhaps not at all, we have to go back to another set of questions. In this case, we need to consider whether the discrepancy in the narrative can be explained by a local tradition about Thomas. If so, we should probably interpret this as an expression of popularity. On the other hand, if the discrepancy stems from an imperfect attempt at recording a narrative that is not well known in and of itself, we should not interpret the inclusion and depiction of Thomas as anything but the sign of the universality of his cult, and not as a sign of popularity.    

In addition to the narrative of the vita, we also need to pose these questions when looking at the iconography of Thomas that appears in the source, and here I mean both textual and pictorial iconography. Do the images employ or point to a notable familiarity with the legend of Thomas and with his iconographic tradition as it was established in the twelfth century? Does the iconography differ? And if it differs, is this because the source in question follows a local tradition – which would suggest popularity – or does it differ due to a lack of familiarity with the established iconographic tradition? Moreover, if the divergence comes out of a lack of familiarity with established iconography, should we interpret this as a lack of popularity, as indifference, or even unpopularity?    

I do not have the answers to these questions myself – at least not yet. But as a kind of scholarly experiment, I want to point to three late-medieval images from different parts of Latin Christendom. All these images depict the martyred archbishop of Canterbury in different ways, and in ways that do not correspond very well to the iconographic tradition of the twelfth century onwards, as it was formulated in England and France. 

A very curial Thomas of Canterbury
Avignon - BM - ms. 0136, f.015v, missal, Bologna, late C14
(courtesy of enluminures.culture.fr.)

 
The first image comes from a fourteenth-century missal, produced in Bologna and used at the papal court of Avignon, with the shelfmark Avignon – BM – ms. 0136. This book reportedly belonged to pope Urban V and his controversial successor antipope Clement VII, and it is a sumptuously illustrated manuscript. On folio 15v, we find the above initial in the introit of the mass for Thomas of Canterbury. Thomas himself is depicted as what we might presume to be a typical senior churchman of the times, holding the palm to signify his martyrdom. This image is very different from the earlier depictions of the archbishop with which I am familiar. The difference lies in the static nature of the image. In older illuminations, we usually see Thomas being martyred, usually with an indication of how the archbishop received the wound in the head. In the Bologna missal, however, we see a typical martyr-archbishop, a stock figure ready to be inserted whenever the need arose. Should we interpret this as a sign of papal veneration of Thomas of Canterbury? Or should we see this as a sign that in this missal, Thomas was just one in the crowd of universal saints and of no particular importance? Or should we perhaps see this in another way? Perhaps as a way to present this famous archbishop as a contemporary bishop, which would signify a departure from iconographic tradition for the purpose of exploiting his symbolism? It is impossible to say for certain, of course, but we see a clear departure from the iconographic tradition as it had been formulated in the past two centuries.

Thomas of Canterbury out in the open
Das Leuend der Hÿlghen, Syddansk Universitetsbibliotek RARA M 15, f.311r

The second image comes from Germany. This is a woodcut from the incunable Das Leuend der Hÿlghen, printed by Steffen Arndes in Lübeck. The image in question comes from the 1493 edition, here seen in the book with the shelfmark Syddansk Universitetsbibliotek RARA M 15. Das Leuend der Hÿlghen was one of several German collection of saints’ lives that were based on Legenda Aurea, but which also added a number of local and regional saints, and which were adaptations rather than translations in the strictest sense. In this image, we can clearly note a connection to the established iconographic tradition: The protagonist is an archbishop, and his killer has raised his sword in a movement that foreshadows the imminent blow to the head. That the archbishop has his back to the murderer is in keeping with the established tradition, but this would also have been the case if Thomas had faced the murderer, since this was also a version which came into place already in the late twelfth century.          

However, there are two other features in this image which suggest that this depiction is not in keeping with the established tradition. First of all, the archbishop is being led away by a soldier. In the traditional narrative, as depicted in all the early vitae and almost all older representations of the scene, the knights do not lead away the archbishop, but murder him on the spot. What appears to be an arrest of Thomas in the woodcut is, therefore, a feature that is not based on the original narrative. Moreover, the scene of the martyrdom is clearly out in the open, as seen by the winding road in the background. This, too, is a deviation from the narrative of the vitae, since the martyrdom expressly took place inside the cathedral of Canterbury, which added to the transgressive nature of the crime. Here, too, it is difficult to assess how to interpret these deviations, but it does beg the question whether the Lübeck printers had any particular interest in the famous archbishop.

Wall-painting from Skive Church, Northern Jutland, c.1500

The final image is also one of German production, although it is situated in Northern Jutland in Denmark. This is a detail from the wall-paintings of the Church of Our Lady in the town of Skive, and it is one of several saint figures that decorate the vaults of the church interior. The church itself was built around 1200, but the wall-paintings are from around 1500, and they are believed to have been produced by a workshop of German painters. The iconographic programme of the church shows a selection of the most common and famous universal saints in the liturgical calendar, with a few Nordic saints included as well. In other words, the frescoes seem to be a standard selection of the saints deemed most powerful and meritorious among those in vogue at the time. This is in and of itself an indication that the selection should not be interpreted as a sign of the personal devotion of the donors of these wall-paintings.      

This suspicion seems strengthened, perhaps even confirmed, when we turn to the depiction of Thomas of Canterbury. The image clearly depicts him as an archbishop, and the text-scroll above his head states that he is indeed the martyr of Canterbury. However, the sword protruding from his chest is not in keeping with the traditional narrative of his death. The sword is pierced through his breast from the front and out the back, whereas the established tradition clearly states that Thomas received his wound in the head. There exist other images that also present Thomas as dying from being pierced rather than being cut, but these are later and do in their own way deviate from established tradition. In light of how the image differs from the tradition, and in light of the general context of the pictorial programme, it feels relatively safe to say that this depiction of Thomas of Canterbury does not suggest a particular popularity, but rather a more general fame, a fame shared with a plethora of other saints also depicted in the church.


These thoughts are some tentative ideas about how to interpret images that do not conform with iconographical tradition. But to be more certain of these interpretations, I would have to delve deeper into the issue, and one day I hope I get the chance and the time to do just that.