Back to the old haunt - a brief note about a workshop in Odense

 

A little over a week ago, I was able to travel back to Odense in order to participate in a workshop on fragments of medieval manuscripts. The occasion was immensely joyous to me for several reasons. Most importantly, I got to meet up with old friends, and I was able to revisit some of the places I used to frequent when I was living there. The workshop was also a great opportunity to present some of the material I started working on during the last year of my PhD, and which I have been dealing with on and off ever since then. In particular, it was a true delight to give my presentation in the research reading room of the university library, where I had conducted quite a lot of my research and where I had gathered most of the material for my work on fragments. Another very pleasant detail was that my colleague and friend - with whom I had worked together on a pilot project right after completing my thesis - had put out a few of the books that had fragments in their bindings, some of which I mentioned in my talk. It was great to see those fragments in the vellum again, and it was very much a nostalgia trip. In one sense the workshop was the culmination of research that has been going on for five years, and it was wonderful to share my findings with colleagues who were able to both appreciate and add to the work that had been done. Additionally, however, the workshop was also a reminder that this work is not yet complete - that there are conclusions that need to be questions, hypotheses that need to be calibrated, and an ever-increasing stream of new fragments that come to light in the library's special collection. In other words, the workshop was a reminder of the long processes in academia - the good type of long processes, the ones that mature thoughts into substance and make things come out in a clearer light. I have been very fortunate to have been able to keep up this kind of long-term work despite the vicissitudes of my professional life in the past five years, and for that I remain very grateful, especially to my friends and colleagues who enable me to conduct this work in the middle of everything else.  

Unfortunately, in all the excitement and the discussions with friends and colleagues, I was sidetracked from the photographing I had hoped to do, so I only have a few pictures to commemorate the event - including the library's strict prohibition against dancing on the tables.  

Achronology and exoticism - the past as a muddled country

 

My thinking was: very olden days; almost mythical; so 1628

- Philippa Perry, Richard Osman's House of Games S05E59



Earlier this week I stopped by the campus bookshop, and was met by the array of books for sale shown in the picture below. At first I was naturally drawn to the selection of titles – each of these books covers a subject that I know very little about, and I did end up with a book on the Phoenicians. But once the initial excitement had subsided a bit, I found myself immensely annoyed at several aspects of this series. For now, however, let us leave aside the issue concerning the decision to dedicate one book to “The Barbarians”. Let us also leave aside the troubling word choices that underpin the rationale of the series, namely “lost” and “civilisation”, choices that could fill essays of invective. Instead, I will here say a little bit about why the selection of cases for this book series is, in my view, very problematic.         

As can be seen in the picture, the selection favours what we consider ancient history, with Sumer setting the starting point quite far back in time. This selection is representative of the entire series, where the only other post-ancient cultures represented are from the Americas (the Maya, the Inca, and the Aztecs), with the exception of the Goths. Focussing on the table that I encountered in the bookshop, the problem with this selection becomes even more acute: The Aztecs – or rather, the Nahua – are lumped together with cultures that are much more distant from the Nahuas themselves than our twenty-first-century contemporaneity is to the Nahuas. In other words, the inclusion of the Nahua in a collage of the past that contains elements unmistakably ancient means that the non-expert onlooker is fed the impression that the Nahua, too, are immensely ancient.   

While I am no expert on the Nahua culture, I am deeply concerned about any kind of exoticising of the past, and one way to present something as exotic is to place it in a deep, distant, remote, unimaginable past. By emphasising the chronological distance, historical cultures appear incomprehensible and alien, perhaps even barbaric, depending on how you view history and humanity. The main problem here is, as mentioned, that what we tend to call the Aztec empire, or the Aztec culture, flourished in a brief period of time beginning in the fourteenth century and ending in the sixteenth – not by loss but by destruction. Moreover, while the polity of the Aztecs was conquered by the Spanish and their native allies, the people, the Nahua, continue to live in Mexico to this day. The idea of the Aztecs as a lost civilisation, therefore, not only buries the culture in a distant, cut-off past, but also blinds us to what continuity there actually was in the wake of the Aztec polity’s demise. A series that advertises “lost civilisations” and places the Aztecs on the same plane of chronological remoteness as the Sumerians, the Phoenicians and the Etruscans fortifies the alienation that a general lack of knowledge about the Nahua has already established.          

As a historian, I am frequently alerted to the fact that my vision of history is very different from that of people who are not experts in history. Even though my particular area of expertise is very limited – I mainly work on Latin Christendom in the period 1000-1300, with a particular focus on Northern Europe – I still need to understand my slice of time within a wider geographical and chronological context. I might not know much about what happens, say, in Eastern Europe in the course of the sixteenth century, or about the evolution of the Graeco-Bactrian culture of Central Asia, but if someone tells me that an event took place in 1649 or in 543 BC, I can place the event in question in a rather different way than people who see everything before a certain date to be uniformly remote. An example of such thinking – of the distant past as an achronological chronotope – is shown in the epigraph for this blogpost. To me, 1628 is not very olden days. Neither do I consider the Aztec empire, for want of a better term, to be ancient.           

I do not, however, judge non-historians for thinking in this way. It is quite natural, and the only reason I think differently is that I am trained to do so in my profession. The problem is when the kind of muddled achronology that contributes and prepares the ground for an exotic outlook on the past is aided and abetted by a serious publisher whose books are put together by experts. As much as I welcome the opportunity to get a crash-course in the history of the Aztecs, I also have to recognise that this publisher, Reaktion Books, is also making my job as a teacher much more difficult.  

Jetmundkyrkja - The church of Saint Edmund in Åheim, Norway

 
Today is the feast of Edmund of East Anglia, a king who was killed by Danish raiders in 869, and who shortly afterwards became the subject of a cult. I wrote about Edmund in my PhD thesis (which can be accessed here), and I have written several blogposts about aspects of his cult throughout the medieval period (for instance here, here, and here). My interest in Edmund continues, and I am always on the look-out for evidence of his veneration. This blogpost is about one such piece of evidence from Western Norway. 

February this year, my parents and I went for a roadtrip to the coast of Selja municipality, a dangerous area on the sea route from Bergen to Trondheim, known for its often harsh seas and stormy conditions. In the medieval period, Selja was an important node in the traffic between Trondheim - one of the main trade hubs and ecclesiastical centres of the kingdom - and the rest of the world. Of particular importance to the topic of this blogpost was Selja's connection to England. The currents of the North Sea made Selja a natural stopover for pilgrims, merchants and travellers of any other kind, as is suggested by the idea that Olaf Haraldsson, the later Saint Olaf, went ashore here on his return to Norway from England in 1016, at least according to the twelfth-century chronicler Theodoricus Monk. A more concrete testament to the English connection can be found in the Benedictine abbey of Selja, which was founded around 1100 and dedicated to Saint Alban, the protomartyr of England, ruins of which still stand today. Not far from this abbey, in a fjord a little to the north, lies the Church of Saint Edmund, known in Norwegian as Sankt Jetmund-kyrkja, as Jetmund is the Norse variant of Edmund.   

The Church of Saint Edmund, Åheim, looking east

The commonly accepted scholarly interpretation is that the church was built around the middle of the twelfth century, although the exact date is unknown, and that it was connected with the abbey at Selja, possibly as a tithe church established to generate funds to the Benedictine community. The dedication of the church to Saint Edmund supports the connection to the English monks, although the general influence from England on the cult of saints in Norway was significant. 

Little is known about the church throughout the medieval period, and to my knowledge it has not left any traces in the surviving written material. The best clue to the medieval church is the building itself, or at least what can be reasonably dated to the medieval period. Unfortunately, as the building was abandoned as a parish church for the village of Åheim in 1863, much of the stone was repurposed. This was a consequence of a law from 1851, which stated that all churches needed to have sufficient room to house 30 percent of the congregation within its walls, and the small medieval structure failed to meet these demands.  

The church was subject to a restoration project that began in the 1930s, discontinued in the course of the 1940s due to the war, and completed in 1957. In many ways, the reconstructed building represents a reasonable hypothesis about the shape of the church, as it follows the design of typical Norwegian twelfth-century church with a square basic structure, pointed roofs, and a free-standing church tower in wood. Some elements, however, appear to have survived the dismantling of the church, such as the decorated capitels of arch separating the choir from the nave. Similarly, a segment of the wall that rises about one metre from the ground appears to have been remained by the time the restoration began, and this original section can be seen below a horizontal line visible on the inside of the wall, separating the older and the newer layer (cf. photograph below).

A piece of the original church decorations

The layer that separates the medieval, undisturbed section and the later restoration

The choir
Note the horizontal line that separates the original and the restored layer

The Church of Saint Edmund as it stands today in its restored fashion is a beautiful piece of architecture, and although we will never know exactly how well it corresponds with the building used in the Middle Ages, we are nonetheless able to get some sense of the importance of the church in the local landscape. Due to the topography in the fjords, which in many places has remained unchanged in its basic elements through millennia, we have a very good sense of how the church must have appeared to travellers coming by boat into the Vanylven Fjord, either from the coast or one of the neighbouring fjords. Lying on the alluvial plain where Åheim River runs into Vanylven Fjord, the church would have been easy to see from afar, and it would have stood out in the deceptively open landscape. And this visibility can still be appreciated and noticed by a modern traveller.

The view from the church, as would have been visible to medieval churchgoers

Conference: The Cult of Saints and Legitimization of Elite Power in East Central Europe and Scandinavia until 1300

 
Next week, from Monday November 8 to Tuesday November 9, I am co-organising a conference as a part of the project where I am currently employed. The project, ELITES: Symbolic Resources and Political Structures on the Periphery: Legitimization of the Elites in Poland and Norway, c. 1000-1300, is a collaboration between the University of Warsaw and the University of Oslo. The conference will be held in Warsaw. 

The title of the conference is 'The Cult of Saints and Legitimization of Elite Power in East Central Europe and Scandinavia until 1300', and can non-participating audiences can follow this conference by livestream from the University of Warsaw's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCO3-bjLxBShHeZQQWUn19Ew. 

All are welcome!