A year in reading - 2022

 
My last blogpost for 2021 was an overview of some highlights from my year in reading, as well as a few other book-related moments. For someone like me, whose life must seem terribly boring to those not living it, my adventures by page and pen remain the most interesting aspects that are worth sharing, and I also confess to finding a great deal of joy in sifting through my notes and pictures from the past year in order to distil those adventures into a reasonable digest. Consequently, I have decided to provide another overview of this year’s reading as well, largely following the template of last year.           

The selection of books included in this blogpost is aimed to provide a representative overview of the range in my reading, as well as the reasons behind those choices. As I explained in some detail in a previous blogpost, my reading is in large part guided by various lists, but also by the vagaries of my professional life, where research for articles and presentations, as well as preparations for teaching, provide significant impetus for specific choices. 

Moreover, a year in reading also encompasses other forms of reading than what is in focus in the present blogpost. For the most part, this selection is comprised of books that I have finished reading in the course of the year. By books I here mean individual, standalone works, either published as a unit or written, disseminated or transmitted as a unit. Consequently, individual articles that are part of a volume or an issue of a journal, are not included in my list of the year. Likewise, the reading of drafts of texts, either my own or those of colleagues, and the reading of page upon page of student dissertations, essays or exams consume a lot of my reading life, especially in a year of much teaching such as 2022, but these pages are never counted. Reading comes in different forms, in other words, and the current blogpost is neither complete nor meant to be particularly impressive or boastful, but merely an attempt to accurately represent my year in reading.   



Travelling by page    

Although I do a lot of travelling for work in the course of an academic year, my main form of travel remains through the vehicle of books. This year I have continued to seek out books from various parts of the world, and I continue in my quest – inspired by Ann Morgan’s 2012 project A Year of Reading the World – to read one book from each country. As is the case each year, my selection does not follow a particular pattern, and depends on what books I can get hold of, as well as which countries that remain unread. Sometimes, however, patterns do emerge, and this year I found myself gravitating towards books from the Arabic-speaking world. One of the joys of the forming of such patterns is that stories from within the same linguistic and/or religious sphere tend to have shared points of reference, even though the cultures and countries are different in many aspects. These similarities make it easier to gain a sense of understanding, and also to pick up on references that might be explained in one work but only obliquely mentioned or applied in another. Consequently, although Syria, Oman, The United Arab Emirates and Jordan are countries with unique histories and cultural configurations, it was also immensely rewarding to read them within the same year so as to note those shared features and gain a better comprehension of the wider cultural context of each country.   

Adunis, Mihyar of Damascus: his songs
(translated by Adnan Haydar and Michael Beard)

Jokha Alharthi, Celestial Bodies 

(translated by Marilyn Booth)

Fadia Faqir, Pillars of salt

Maha Gargash, The sand fish 

As much as I appreciate patterns in my reading, however, I do easily get a bit bored if the pattern becomes too dominant or insufficiently interspersed with variations, so I was also glad to visit Belize, Zambia and Zimbabwe by page this year.  

Kayo Chingonyi, A blood condition

Zee Edgell, Beka Lamb

Chenjerai Hove, Bones 
(translated into Norwegian as Knokler by Mona Lange)

New places for reading        

Although the most far-flung of my travels take place on the page, I also enjoy broadening my horizon physically speaking, and it gives me a great deal of joy to travel to new places, be it a new city or a new country, or simply a place in my local area or my native village that I have not yet sought out. For me, reading in such a place becomes a way of connecting myself to that place in a much stronger way than would otherwise have been the case. It is as if the act of reading weaves the location more strongly into my memory. This weaving means that seemingly insignificant places, or places where I only spend a brief period, take on a greater place in my memory than it otherwise would have done. Moreover, this connection through reading means that many small places visited once become much more firmly lodged in my memory than larger places visited several times. 

This year saw a change from my usual approach to seeking out new places, in that I did not spend much time in my native village this summer, and because of the weather a lot of the time I did spend here was not spent seeking out new locations for reading. As a consequence, the new places in which I did some reading in the course of the past year entered into my list of such places more by accident than deliberation, but this does not mean that the experiences in these places were any weaker or less valuable. For instance, in the middle of February I dedicated most of a Sunday to explore the menu of a café I had been meaning to try for some time, and this culinary exploration was done in conjunction with reading most of the Norwegian translation of François Mauriac’s novel Le Nœud de vipères. I have since returned to that café on several occasions, for instance on one memorable rainy, dark autumn afternoon to escape the rain and fortify myself with a cup of coffee and a read of the Norwegian translation of Siri Hustvedt’s A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women. That first Sunday, however, stands out. Among other such highlights among the new places of 2022 is a café in Warsaw where I read Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s novel Herland, the café at Hovedøya outside of Oslo where I read the Norwegian translation of J. M. G. Le Clézio’s debut novel Le Procès-verbal, and the café at the Gothenburg Central Station where I passed my time waiting for my train back to Oslo by reading Toni Cade Bambara’s short-story collection Gorilla, my love.       

In other cases, my reading was done in transit, and sometimes the entry into a new region or new geography by train or bus makes the reading more noticeable even though you are technically not reading in a specific place, but travelling through a row of different places. Yet as I had the chance to explore the hinterlands of Oslo by train this year, some moments of reading have stood out, such as the reading of Sylvia Plath’s poetry collection The Colossus while travelling into the flatlands and forests north of Oslo along the river Glomma. 

François Mauriac, Le Nœud de vipères 
(translated into Norwegian as Slangeknuten by Fride Friestad) 

J. M. G. Le Clézio, Le Procès-verbal 
(translated into Norwegian as Rapport om Adam by Karna Dannevig)

Siri Hustvedt, A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women 
(translated into Norwegian as Kvinne ser på menn som ser på kvinner by Knut Johansen)

Toni Cade Bambara, Gorilla, my love

Reading by lists         

Throughout the year I have also made sure to maintain my self-imposed goal of reading three books of each of the fixed categories by which I navigate my reading. This goal is easy to achieve since my categories are fairly broad, and several categories can apply for one and the same book. Among the highlights this year was Dracula, read during rainy summer evenings while a three-month-old puppy kept trying to get into my room, thus creating a very suitable atmosphere to Bram Stoker’s descriptions. I was also happy to finally get around to reading Chinua Achebe’s Things fall apart, especially because my copy of the book carries a piece of memorabilia from my own past, namely a price tag from the campus bookshop from my alma mater, the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. Both these books were included on the list I drew up for my future reading in the spring of 2008, a list from which I aim to at least read three books each year.

Chinua Achebe, Things fall apart 

Bram Stoker, Dracula 

Another highlight belongs to the category of scholarly books, a category meant to rectify the unfortunate situation that although I very often read scholarly texts, I often have to either mine them for specific information or references, or I start reading them without finishing. The highlight in question was the article collection St. Sunniva – irsk dronning, norsk vernehelgen, edited by Alf Tore Hommedal, Åslaug Ommundsen and Alexander O’Hara. This collection articles about one of the very few native saints from medieval Norway was a joy to read, and it was especially gratifying because such a collection has been needed for a very long time.

Alf Tore Hommedal, Åslaug Ommundsen and Alexander O’Hara (eds.), St. Sunniva – irsk dronning, norsk vernehelgen (Saint Sunniva - Irish queen, Norwegian patron saint)  


Another pleasing item from one of my fixed categories, that of Nobel laureates, was the play The death of Tintagiles (La Mort de Tintagiles) by Maurice Maeterlinck. What made this read particularly memorable and pleasing was not so much the play itself, although it is very atmospheric. Rather, it was the physical book, which had been donated to Oslo university library by Carl Burckhardt, possibly the Swiss historian. The book also contained an inscription from 1918, where the book had been gifted to someone addressed as “Apollo” by someone describing himself as ‘the least of his satellites’. Who these people were is not clear, but it adds a wonderful layer of bibliographic history to the book as an object, and it is a good reminder of the kind of treasures often housed by university libraries. 

Frontispiece from the collection Three little dramas by Maurice Maeterlinck

(translated by Alfred Sutro)

Dedication to Oslo university library by Carl Burckhardt

Not reading but writing        

Some of the highlights of my literary adventures in 2022 were not strictly speaking related to reading, but rather to writing. This year saw the publication of two scholarly articles on which I have worked extensively back and forth for the past couple of years. What made these publications even more gratifying was the reception of the physical copies of the books containing these articles, and although I have not yet read neither the books nor the articles in question, they stand out as important milestones in my personal literary landscape, and they have been instrumental in making 2022 such a great year for me in literary terms.  

Barbara Crostini and Anthony John Lappin (eds.), Death, Sanctity, and the Cross

Anna Lampadaridi, Vincent Déroche and Christian Høgel (eds.), L’historie comme elle se présentait dans l’hagiographie 



Added to the joy of these texts were a couple of other, smaller publications, such as a brief article I was asked to write for the in-house student journal of my department. As stated in the blogpost I wrote about this publication, I am also greatly appreciative of such smaller outputs that do not register in the publication lists sought by hiring committees or other such bodies, but which provide outlets through which I can disseminate some of my own interests. 

'Helgenkult og institusjonell identitet i mellomalderen - Sunnivakulten i Bergen'

('The cult of saints and institutional identity in the Middle Ages - the cult of Saint Sunniva in Bergen')

A related highlight came in the form of a lecture I gave to MA students, a lecture on palaeography that focussed on manuscripts from twelfth-century Norway. I was able to give the lecture via Zoom, so I could enjoy the scenery of an April fjord while digging into the material aspects of the Kvikne psalter, one of the oldest surviving books from Norway. This lecture required a lot of preparatory reading, and while I did not finish a single volume in the process, the reading culminated in a very satisfactory way that reminded me of how much sheer pleasure I find in talking about books. 

Similar blogposts (from 2022) 

Reading by lists 

How to choose a book 

The biggest book so far 

Contrasts in a reading life 

Assembling my Oslo library 

For Oslo Pride 2022 

Finding nuggets - the rewards of reading widely  

How I learned to love reading - redux 

Outdated materiality in the library 

A brief appreciation for the pathetic in literature 

Saint Stephen and Saint Knud Rex - the typology of martyrdom in twelfth-century Odense

 
Today, December 26, is the feast of Stephen Protomartyr, one of the relatively few Christian saints attested in the Bible, and one of an even lower number whose death is recounted in a biblical narrative (Acts) as opposed to various apocryphal narratives which is typically the case for the apostles. The story of Stephen is one of the most widely known saint-stories in Latin Christendom, both because he inhabits the important role of being the first martyr, the first blood-witness for Christ, and because his story was disseminated in the Bible and narratives that conveyed stories from the Bible, such as sermons, figurative art, ballads and saint-biographies, most of which are tinged with horrific anti-Semitic rhetoric and imagery. 

Due to Stephen's powerful symbolic importance as the first martyr, he also became a widely used point of reference in the regions where Christianity was newly introduced or at least still a recently-established social force, and especially in the first stories about saints emerging from these younger members of Latin Christendom. For this blogpost, I will provide one example from Denmark, found in the material pertaining to Saint Knud Rex (d.1086). 

Knud Rex was king of Denmark from 1080 to his death in Odense in 1086 following an insurrection. The death of the king was recounted in several texts produced by the clerics of Odense who were attached to the episcopal see, and with the establishment of a Benedictine community in the late 1090s the textual production also came to include a liturgical office to be celebrated on Knud's feast-day, July 10. In this liturgical office, we find one of the most striking examples of how the hagiographers in Odense sought to connect their dead king with the first martyr of Christianity. The example comes from a responsory, a liturgical chant performed after a prose reading in the liturgical office. The chant survives in a late source, the printed Odense breviary from 1482, but we have good reasons to date the composition of the chant to the early twelfth century. The text runs as follows (text and translation taken from my PhD thesis):   


Cum furit exterius
trans execrabile uulgus
interius precibus
dux uacat eximius
misteriisque sacris
munitur spiritus eius
[V] Ut stephanus sanctus saxorum sustines ictus 

When outside rages,
The standing detestable mob
Inside with prayers
The excellent leader is undisturbed
And by the holy mysteries
His spirit is fortified
[V] You sustained the blow of stones, like holy Stephen 


The scene described is the interior of the Church of Saint Alban, to where the king and his retinue retreated when the mob had surrounded the royal manor. The insurrectionists sought to break into the church space, and the saints' lives note that they hurled stones and spears through the apertures in the church wall. What eventually killed the king was a spear through his side, which served as an imitation of Christ. But since the image of a saint is usually composed of features meant to imitate other saints, not just Christ, the composer of the office spelled out in clear words what earlier texts had already noted, namely that as the first martyr of the Danes, Knud Rex shared an affinity with Stephen. The typological link between Knud and Stephen is presented in the verse of the responsory, which is the line before the repetition of an earlier line in the chant. 

The purpose of spelling out the link between the two protomartyrs was twofold. First of all, the performers of the liturgy communicated to the saint in Heaven that they were aware of this link, and that they venerated Knud for this reason as well. To show knowledge about a saint's qualities is, basically, a matter of politeness: to ensure that the saint will continue to serve as their representative in Heaven, the venerators need to demonstrate their worthiness, and this demonstration comes through a spelling-out of saintly qualities. 

Secondly, by spelling out the typological link the office serves to educate younger members of the community of Benedictines  in Odense about the nature of their patron. Making sure that the community knew and understood its patron served both to contribute to the maintenance of institutional identity, as well as ensuring that the saint was properly venerated.  

The case of Stephen and Knud is typical for such areas where there were no previous martyrs, or where reports about previous martyrs were sufficiently uncertain as to allow for the claim that this particular saint was the first martyr of a recently-christianised people and a recently-christianised region. This function of typological guarantor was one that Saint Stephen frequently inhabited during the Middle Ages.  



     

New publication: Randmerknader som levd religion?

Earlier today I was notified about the publication of the article "Randmerknader som levd religion?" (Marginal notations as lived religion?" in the latest issue of the Swedish journal of history Scandia. This was a special issue dedicated to the subject of lived religion in premodern Northern Europe, guest edited by Sara Ellis Nilsson and Terese Zachrisson of the project Mapping Lived Religion hosted by Linnaeus University and University of Gothenburg.

I was kindly invited to participate in this special issue, which led to the writing of my most speculative article yet, an article that aims to make a case for interpreting marginal notations as expressions of lived religion. My case study was a late-medieval Catholic legendary housed at the Protestant school Herlufsholm in Denmark at the turn of the eighteenth century. The article is in Norwegian, but an abstract in English can be found here. Abstracts of the other articles of the issue can be found here. The articles will become open access late in the spring of 2023. 

The article gave me a chance to explore some books familiar to me from previous projects, but from a new angle. Hopefully, this pilot study will contribute in some way to new knowledge being extracted from the book collection of Herlufsholm, which is currently kept in the special collections of the University of Southern Denmark. 

New publication: Helgenkult og institusjonell identitet i mellomalderen - Sunnivakulten i Bergen

A couple of months ago, I was approached by the editors of the in-house journal of the history students at the University of Oslo, Fortid (Past), who asked if I would contribute a text to their upcoming volume. This journal, the only one of its kind among history students in Norway, is an excellent venue for publishing scholarship across the full spectrum of experience that can be found at a department such as ours. I was very happy to be asked, not only because it is always a delight to be approached about publications, but also because it was an excellent opportunity for me to put together some thoughts about a topic that has been on my mind for a while, but that I have not yet had time to develop, namely the cult of Saint Sunniva of Selja and her veneration in Bergen. Thanks to the editors of Fortid, who were wonderfully professional in the process, I was able to piece together a few things that I can build on in my later work. 

The article is in Norwegian, and as of yet there is no digital version to be disseminated, so a brief summary here must suffice. The Norwegian title reads "The cult of saints and institutional identity in the Middle Ages - the cult of Saint Sunniva in Bergen". This topic was chosen because the theme of this issue - number 3, 2022 - was institutions, and I was approached to write something about institutional identity since I have worked a lot on that concept for much of my fledgling academic career. Institutional identity, how it is formed and how it is connected to the cult of saints, was the core of my PhD thesis, and it has proven to be a very fruitful framework for exploring source material pertaining to saints. In this article, I took as my starting point the translation of relics said to belong to Sunniva of Selja, which were brought to Bergen from the island of Selja in 1170. Sunniva was named as the leader of a group of Irish Christians who landed on the Western Norwegian island sometime in the late tenth century, and several texts - which are either lost or survive in late text witnesses - were composed in the wake of her translation. The cult was in place already in the eleventh century, but the figure of Sunniva first appeared in 1170 and became venerated as the patron of Bergen. 

Due to the limited scope of the article, I focussed mainly on outlining the theoretical concept of institutional identity, how it worked in medieval religious institutions, and how we can see such identity-formation in the surviving material for Sunniva. One day I hope to write a more comprehensive and exhaustive article about the Sunniva texts, but for now I have been able to put my thoughts in order and provided a good starting point for future writing.    

Old Aker Church, part 2 - the worm

 

In a recent blogpost, I wrote about Old Aker Church and its structure, which is partly comprised of medieval remains and partly comprised of restoration work from the ninteenth and the twentieth centuries. I mentioned, in passing, that one piece of the surviving medieval decoration has survived despite the wear of ages and the tear of restoration, and it is this decoration I present to you here.  

The decoration is not easy to find, and when I was at the church with a group of fellow medievalists we arranged a low-key competition to see who could locate it first. In the end, none of us won the prize because we stood in the right spot, making the guide believe we had found it, when in reality our eyes were much higher up. 

The decoration is to be found close to the base of a rotund structure on the eastern side of the church. It is difficult to see because the defining feature is nearly worn off, making it hard to notice that a stone band stretching along the base of the structure is in fact meant to be a worm devouring its own tail. It is barely noticeable by the jaws extending below and above the band that serves as its body.

How we should understand this decoration is impossible to say with certainty. Since this is a Norwegian church, it is of course tempting to suggest that it could signify the Midgard serpent, Jörmungandr, who circles the orb of the earth. The ecclesiastical context and the Romanesque style might suggest the worm Ourobouros, the symbol of eternity and endlessness. Yet the fluid boundary between folktales and classical lore, between ecclesiastical style and local expressions, not to mention the Christian influence on what we think of as Norse mythology could perhaps warn us not to think in terms of either/or, but that this worm could be understood as both, perhaps even to the same onlookers. 

Saint Edmund the protector - an example from medieval Norway

 

Today, November 20, is the feast of Saint Edmund Martyr, who was killed by Danish raiders in 869/70. His cult became one of the largest cults of a native saint in medieval England, and in the eleventh and twelfth century it was also notable in the Nordic sphere. Since I wrote about the cult of Edmund for my PhD, and how the formulation of his characteristics changed over time, I take the opportunity of today’s feast to connect one of the main iconographic features of Saint Edmund with a reference found in a Norwegian twelfth-century source. If my interpretation of the evidence holds, it suggests that the image of Saint Edmund as it was reformulated at Bury St Edmunds in the late eleventh century was also sufficiently well known in twelfth-century Norway to be a point of reference. 

Towards Hovedøya

The iconographic feature in question is Edmund’s efficiency as a protector and guardian of his territory, who could resort to violent means to carry out his protective role. While the clearest formulation of Edmund the protector first came about in the late eleventh century, the first vita of Edmund, Passio Sancti Eadmundi written by Abbo of Fleury around 985, includes a miracle story that might provide the basis for the later reformulation. This miracle story tells of how a group of thieves broke into Edmund’s resting place at Bury in order to steal the valuables housed there. As the thieves went to their business, they eventually discovered that they were unable to move, and so were discovered the next day by the clergy who served at the shrine. The thieves were subsequently executed by hanging on the orders of the bishop. Abbo remarks that the death of the thieves was an unnecessary tragedy, and the violent aspect of Edmund had apparently not become part of his image at that point. What is important, however, is that it was through Edmund’s merits that God prevented the thieves from moving, and Edmund was then able to protect his property.  

In the late eleventh century, during the abbacy of Baldwin (r.1065-97), Herman the Archdeacon compiled a collection of miracles which also served as a history of the abbey, and especially the period preceding the reform of the church into a monastic house in 1020. Herman recorded a story of how King Svein Forkbeard, the leader of Danish raiders who demanded heavy tribute from the church at Bury, was killed in his bed by Saint Edmund. The killing of the Danish king convinced the raiders to relinquish their demands. With this story, recorded close to sixty years after it supposedly happened, the image of Edmund as a protector had taken a new form. Or, perhaps more accurately, this aspect of Edmund had now been committed to writing and could therefore have a much more tangible impact on the later cult. This impact is notable, both for its early implementation and its longevity. For example, when an office for the vigil of Saint Edmund was added to the already-existing office for the feast-day itself, the story recounted in the four lessons for Matins was that of Edmund’s killing of Svein. The materials for the office were taken from Herman’s account, and although the earliest source of this office dates from the 1120s, it is likely that the office was composed already in the eleventh century. The longevity of Edmund’s reputation as a protector is evident from the wide range of church art that depicts his killing of Svein, but this development is another story, one that is addressed in the two best studies of the cult of Edmund to date, namely Rebecca Pinner’s The Cult of St. Edmund in medieval East Anglia (2015) and Francis Young’s Edmund – in search of England’s lost king (2018).

Towards the abbey church at Hovedøya

In twelfth-century Norway, the cult of Edmund was known, although to what extent is still an unanswered question. The knowledge of Edmund’s cult was due to the close contacts between the Norwegian church and the English church, a contact that had played a signification role in the conversion period of the early eleventh century, and which continued to have an impact on the cult of saints in Norway throughout the twelfth century. One example of this impact is the Cistercian abbey of Hovedøya – Head Island – outside Oslo, which was dedicated to SS Mary and Edmund. The abbey was established in 1147, and became a significant landowner in the Oslo region. It is in relation to this abbey we find our source to the knowledge of Edmund’s role as protector in medieval Norway.         

The source in question is the Registry of Akershus from 1622, an inventory of the records and charters kept at Akershus fortress (see Regesta Norvegica vol. 1, no. 157). One of the records is a letter of donation to the abbey at Hovedøya from the period 1170-78, signed by King Magnus Erlingsson, Archbishop Eystein Erlendsson, Bishop Helge I of Oslo, Earl Erling (the king’s father) and Orm Ivarsson, all of whom were powerful men of the Norwegian kingdom. The letter states that the manor of Frogn, situated north of Oslo, had been given to the abbey of Hovedøya. Moreover, the letter includes the warning that whomever would infringe on the rights and the ownership of the abbey should beware the anger of God and Saint Edmund.

What makes this letter notable is the warning, and the reference to the anger of the saint. To this date, I have not come across a similar formulation in the Norwegian medieval material, and although this does not preclude that it is a common detail of such letters of donations, it is remarkable for how it fits with the image of Saint Edmund that was well established and common by the end of the twelfth century. Granted, that saints could punish those who offended them or who sought to encroach on their territory or their domain is a feature of the cult of saints that was established very early in its history. Punitive miracles are attested early in the literature pertaining to saints. Moreover their role as protectors is often formulated as battle-helpers who provide victory against the enemies of the saint’s clients, and this variant goes back to at least the early fifth century. In Norway, the protective saint was also known in the figure of Saint Olaf, whose role as battle-helper was recorded in the 1150s, and whose punitive miracles were recorded in the 1180s at the latest. There is, therefore, no guarantee that the threat of a saint’s anger in the donation letter should be linked to the image of Edmund the protector as formulated at Bury St Edmunds in the late eleventh century.

The interior of the Church of SS Mary and Edmund, Hovedøya

However, the anger mentioned in the letter is precisely the anger of Saint Edmund. Considering that the Cistercians at Hovedøya were familiar with the legend of their patron saint, and considering that Archbishop Eystein also is likely to have known about it, it would make sense to see this threat as an expression of the knowledge of Edmund’s violent guardianship whenever his territory was threatened or challenged. We do not know of any manuscripts containing the legend of Saint Edmund from twelfth-century Norway, but that absence of evidence is almost to be expected considering that the vast majority of Latin texts produced and/or kept in medieval Norway have been lost. There is, however, one important survival that suggests that Edmund’s role as guardian was known to the Norwegian clergy, at least at the diocesan churches. The survival in question is a fragment from an antiphoner written in Bergen in the first quarter of the thirteenth century. This antiphoner, whose fragments have been digitally collected by scholars at the University of Bergen led by Åslaug Ommundsen, contains an excerpt from the office of Saint Edmund, an excerpt that earned this antiphoner its current name, namely “the Saint Edmund antiphoner”. Pleasingly, at least from the perspective of my argument here, the fragment (NRA Lat. fragm. 1018) contains one of the antiphons for Lauds which recounts the episode of the thieves who broke into Edmund’s shrine. While this miracle antedates the violent version of Edmund’s protective qualities, it is nonetheless a concrete piece of evidence that points to the knowledge of Edmund and his characteristics in medieval Norway. The threat of Edmund’s anger in the donation letter should, therefore, be seen as a manifestation of the idea of Edmund as a violent protector, and that this idea was sufficiently familiar in late twelfth-century Norway to be used in such an official document as a letter of donation.    

Old Aker Church, part 1 - a medieval frame

 
Last week I visited Old Aker church for the first time. Old Aker church - in Eastern Norwegian and Bokmål "Gamle Aker kirke" - is one of the few surviving remnants of medieval Oslo, and one of very few such remnants situated outside of the centre of the medieval town. The church is located on the top of a hill which overlooks the river plain where the now-diminutive river Aker runs into the fjord, and which now is covered by modern Oslo.   

The current stone church was probably built around 1100, possibly on the site of a wooden predecessor, which is a common pattern in Scandinavia. In that period, several stone structures were being erected in medieval Oslo, predominantly the churches whose foundations have now been excavated, but possibly also the royal manor. The emergence of these stone buildings can be understood as a result of both a greater amassing of resources in the area, as well as a stronger and more independent episcopal power, since Oslo was one of the three oldest mainland Norwegian bishoprics.  

Unfortunately, little is known about the history of the church. Its location outside of the city centre and its costly stone edifice both point to an important building. The district, presumably including the church, was donated to the Benedictine nuns of Oslo by Bishop Helge I in 1186, suggesting that the income generated in this district could go a long way of supporting the community of nuns. Beyond this donation, there remain few sources to its earliest history. The most important source is the church itself, or at least what has survived the nineteenth-century restorations. As it stands today, most of the outer walls of the basilica-shaped building belongs to the medieval building programme, shown by the locally quarried limestone. The base of the medieval tower has also survived, but the current tower is a modern reconstruction whose dimensions are drawn from the surviving tower base. Only one piece of decoration from the medieval period has survived, but that will be a topic for a future blogpost. 

The interior of the church is heavily restored, and it is likely that the medieval building was covered by wall-paintings that since faded or were covered by post-medieval Protestants, which in turn might have caused the nineteenth-century restorers to remove all the remains of plaster to get to the naked stone underneath. The restoration work also resulted in the added series of windows in the upper storey. These alterations to the interior has both added a source of light that was not there in the Middle Ages, and at the same time darkened the room my removing the colours of the interior surfaces, colours which would have radiated the light of candles and what natural light could enter through the first storey windows. 

Old Aker church is a very beautiful and peaceful spot, but also one - perhaps to a greater extent than most restored Scandinavian churches I have visited - where the lines between the original edifice and restoration is blurred to the point where it almost ceases to feel medieval.   

A quiet anniversary in celebration of community

Today, November 15, the feast of Saint Albert the Great, is the anniversary of one of the most important events in my life. On this date in 2012, I finished my MA dissertation and submitted it for printing. It was the penultimate stage of a labour that had lasted one semester more than it was supposed to, a labour that enabled me to understand much more than I had imagined, both in terms of scholarship but also on a personal level. Throughout my MA period, I kept thinking about the brief, matter-of-fact aside one lecturer had uttered at an introductory gathering for MA students, namely that it is not always pleasant to get to know oneself better. I experienced the truth of this at several points during my studies. 

Ten years after, I can more fully appreciate the importance of this date, as I can now look back and see what came after. November 15 unlocked the door for my academic future, and December 15, the date of my MA defence, opened it. It was the conclusion of a period of great excitement, but also great frustrations, a period of important lessons and bad habits, a period of solitude and company.

Much of what I am as a scholar today was shaped in that period which came to its transitional point on November 15. I came to learn the importance of academic generosity, as my MA adviser went above and beyond in his guidance, his patience, and his help. I came to learn to trust my own judgement in a way that skirted outside of arrogance, as several of my inklings were proved to be sensible and my work turned out to be quite solid. And, perhaps most importantly, I came to value the importance of community. This last point is perhaps what I stress the most when talking to students today, because to me it was invaluable. 

We were four medievalists finishing our MA that autumn. One of us was on schedule, having begun half a year after the ordinary starting point, and the rest of us were scrambling to put together something coherent as we were nearing the Christmas period. We met often. Three of us, historians, sat in the same cubicle, while the fourth, an art historian, was just a short walk away. While our daily rhythms often varied - I being much more of a night owl and a slow worker, a slow reader, and a slow thinker - but having that community to turn to was invaluable. Knowing that there were people who could help, and also knowing that there were people whom you should help, created a sense of belonging that is absolutely crucial in order to retain one's humanity in the face of immense pressure and uncertainty.  

I will skip further details of the MA process. Or perhaps I will just return to them when I celebrate the ten-year anniversary of my defence in a month. But I will say this: Knowing now that the labour gave me the opportunity to pursue my interests, to gain a range of new experiences, to travel, to meet new friends whom I dearly love, and to earn a living - for the time being at least - makes me all the more grateful that I was able to carry out this labour. And I am grateful that I did not have to do it on my own.     
  

New publication: Symbolic Crucifixion and Royal Sainthood: Two Examples from Benedictine Saints’ Lives (c. 985-c. 1120)

 
Today, I was notified of the publication of a collection of article to which I was fortunate enough to contribute with an article of my own. The collection is titled Death, Sanctity, and the Cross - Crucified Saints in Image and Text and it is edited by Barbara Crostini and Anthony John Lappin. The articles explore different ways in which the singular significance of the crucifixion of Christ was negotiated in the cult of saints, where the saints were expected to imitate Christ, but where the boundary between imitation and sacrilegious copying could sometimes be blurry and not a matter of universal consensus. 

The book is published by Viella, and can be purchased from the publisher's website: https://www.viella.it/libro/9791254690024. 


My article, 'Symbolic Crucifixion and Royal Sainthood: Two Examples from Benedictine Saints’ Lives (c. 985-c. 1120)', is an examination of texts from the cults of two saints, Edmund Martyr (d.869) and Knud Rex of Denmark (d.1086). Through a close-reading of the material, I explore how crucifixion imagery was used to amplify the holiness of these two royal saints. I argue that this imagery was employed within a Benedictine context where the holiness of kings was something that could be met with scepticism, due to the many different aspects of the king's office that made holiness very difficult to attain.  









 

A brief appreciation for the pathetic in literature

Today I finished reading a work I had been looking forward to for a few years already, namely the novel El anacronópete (1887) by Enrique Gaspar. Unfortunately, as I was unable to obtain a physical copy in the original language, and since I do not like to read on a screen and therefore preferred to use the file on Project Gutenberg mainly as a control text against the English, I had to rely on the excellent translation The Time Ship by Yolanda Molina-Gavilán and Andrea Bell from 2012. I first learned of this book thanks to the third season of one of my favourite TV series, El Ministerio del Tiempo (The Ministry of Time), which is an excellent way to become introduced to both major and minor aspects of Spain’s rich, layered, complicated and varied cultural history.       

There are many interesting things to say about the novel, more things than I as a neophyte in science fiction literature can embark on and still do them justice, at least within the confines of a blogpost. But one thing of which the novel did remind me was an aspect of the speculative literature of the nineteenth century that I greatly appreciate, namely the pathetic protagonist. And in this blogpost, I wish to provide a brief explanation of what I mean by this description, and why I appreciate it so much. 

As far as the novel goes, Gaspar does not hold back in his construction of pathetic figures when fashioning the two main male protagonists of the tale. Chief of these two is the scientist Don Sindulfo García, maker of the time ship or the anacronópete, who is a man in his forties. The second is Benjamín, a man in his thirties, a humanist polymath who has studied a vast array of languages, and who serves as Don Sindulfo’s assistant. Together with the two female protagonists – Clara, the fifteen-year-old ward and niece of Don Sindulfo and Juana her nineteen-year-old maid – they travel back in time. The two male protagonists, however, have very different key motives for doing so, and both these motives are in their way pathetic because they are founded on pettiness and selfishness. Benjamín is mainly concerned with obtaining the recipe for immortality rumoured to be found in Han China, while Don Sindulfo is in search for a less liberal age in which it will be legal for him to marry his own niece. The selfishness of these two individuals plays out in different ways that endanger both themselves and other characters, but to go into any detail on this here would spoil too much. The point is that in their efforts to indulge in this selfishness, the two scientists are displayed as the all-too-human, all-too-foibled individuals that they are.     

I appreciate such protagonists greatly, because they are the opposite of hero-worship, and their fallible nature gives a sheen of realism even to the wildest and most absurd stories (two categories to which El anacronópete definitely belongs). It is that kind of human realism that makes it much easier to suspend any disbelief concerning other aspects of the story, and that allows me to heartily enjoy all kinds of unrealistic coincidences or even the use of deus ex machina. As I generally abhor any kind of hero-worship and as I prefer to emphasise the human aspect of even those individuals whom I consider the greatest and the best among us, I like seeing the pathetic aspect of humanity written large on literary protagonists.            

It is this kind of pathetic humanity that has made me enjoy certain speculative novels – novels that explore ideas and that are not confined to neither fantasy nor science fiction but can easily be classified as both – from the nineteenth century. A few memorable cases can be listed here. In George Sand’s Laura, a Journey into the crystal (Laura, Voyage dans le cristal) from 1864, a poor geology student is dragged along on an unlikely expedition by his megalomaniac and demonic uncle. In Jules Verne’s masterpiece Journey to the centre of the earth (Voyage au centre de la Terre) from 1864/67 a similar uncle-nephew dynamic is notable, one which might be explained by Verne’s apparent inspiration drawn from George Sand’s novel, as noted by William Butcher in his 2008 translation. In Verne’s story, however, the uncle is not as theatrically demonic, but his obsession and stubbornness come very close and do give the scientist in question a very pathetic touch to his otherwise evident resilience. The nephew, who is also the novel’s first-person narrator, is more traditionally pathetic in that he is doubtful, scared, yet too much in his uncle’s thrall to rebel, and this is why is all-the-more relatable and, indeed, likable. (Note that I do not use pathetic as a pejorative but as a neutral, if not downright objective, description.) Two final examples here will be Henry Rider Haggard’s protagonist Allan Quatermain, of whom I have read in King Solomon’s Mines (1885) and Allan Quatermain (1887), and Horace Holly from She (1887). Both these men are pathetic in different ways, but in each case they are pathetic by not conforming to the ideals of their society, one by being frail and emotional, one by being ugly and eremitic.          

Due to the pathetic nature of the protagonists of these novels, the reader, at least in my case, is drawn all the more vividly into the story-world because there is something very human and therefore relatable about them. In some cases this humanity makes them also likable, although that is not always a given. (I will state that I detest Horace Holly with a vengeance because of his misogyny.) The pathetic element of these figures gives both the characters and the novels they inhabit greater depth, and it is that kind of depth that in my mind is one of the many possible hallmarks of great literature.  

Or, perhaps I appreciate these pathetic literary figures because they remind me of myself, and we all, I suspect, appreciate seeing ourselves reflected and represented in the works of culture that we imbibe. 

Outdated materiality in the library

libros cuyas páginas, finalmente, aprendí a cortar, para no comprobar, meses después, que estaban intactos   

books whose pages I at last learned to cut [in advance] so as not to find them still intact months later

- Jorge Luis Borges, El Aleph (my translation)



Even though I am not a book historian per se, I am frequently reminded of various ways in which the book as an object has been designed and made, ways that are no longer in use but which remain within our field of vision because we still make use of books belonging to a bygone era of book-craft. Today was such a day, as I was looking up a few sources in a 1938 volume of Diplomatarium Danicum, a series of edited letters and documents that pertain to medieval Denmark. One of the pages that I needed had evidently not been needed by anyone else at the University of Oslo, because the quire – the sheet folded into pages during the binding of the book – had not yet been cut. As can be seen in the photographs below, this book was a relatively cheap paper-bound volume where the quires were left for the buyer or the reader to cut themselves. It reminded me of the quoted passage in Jorge Luis Borges’ story ‘El Alepth’, in which the narrator recounts the painfulness of seeing the books gifted to the woman he loves lying uncut and therefore unreadable in her house. 

Today was not the first time I encountered such uncut quires, but I decided that the wisest thing to do would be to ask a librarian for help rather than taking the matter into my own hands. (First of all, I do not have a knife of any kind in my office, which I probably should rectify.) The librarian I encountered, a helpful man who has been very good at solving problems for me before, remarked that he was glad that I had not done the cutting myself, which in turn prompted me to suspect that there are those who do things their own way. He first produced a paper knife, but upon closer inspection, seeing that there were several quires that were uncut, he took the book with him to another part of the library to trim the edges of the book and open the quires by simply cutting away the outermost part of the edges where the folds were.

 

When the librarian returned, he expressed delight in the sensation of rubbing one’s finger along a freshly cut edge, so I decided to test it myself right away. And he was right: the smoothness of the trimmed paper – paper that is thicker than what we often encounter in books produced nowadays – was pleasant, both because of the feeling itself but also because this was an unexpected opportunity to come closer to a material aspect of the book that I had not reflected on. I felt that I had been exposed to a part of the practice of book-handling that has been lost to us, but which once was part and parcel of buying and reading books. The whole matter became like a micro-adventure, an object lesson in a historical reading practice. That brief moment of running the flat of my fingertip against the smooth edge of the book gave me a deeper understanding of the materiality of the book in this particular period, the period when books were still cut.           

The librarian made a joke about how this was a case of going into unknown territory, since those particular pages definitely had not been read by anyone at this university. This joke made me realise that on a very small level I did feel a kind of ownership to this book since it was on my prompting that these quires were now opened. The feeling is not serious, of course, but nonetheless a nice reminder that when we handle books the way we do in academia – daily and in many different formats and conditions – we come to appreciate them as more than mere tools of communication and conveying knowledge, but as historical relics in their own right. And if I leave no other mark on the University of Oslo, having made a few more pages of an old collection of edited sources is not a bad legacy. 

Learning to see a question in context

 
This autumn is my first full term of teaching at the University of Oslo since my employment there a year ago. During that past year, I have been involved in supervision of BA students and one seminar, but to oversee and participate in planning a course through an entire term is new to me, at least at this university. However, notwithstanding my previous experiences at other universities in other countries, each new start brings with it new experiences, and every time I settle in at a new institution it does feel a lot like learning how to teach from scratch. Partly this has to do with the different ways that higher education is conducted in different countries. Even at different universities within the same country there are practices and solutions that are particular to one specific institution. And moreover, returning to Norway after eight years abroad also means that several aspects in university education have changed since I myself was a part of that system.        

One of the fascinating and enjoyable things about teaching at a university is that you get constant reminders of how utterly complex and varied we are as individuals, and people come with such different frames of references and experiences that what we, the lecturers, communicate or what they encounter during a course can be received so very differently from person to person. While this variety is well known to anyone who has been at university, and while it is by no means unique to the university, I do forget from time to time just how tricky it can be to convey a message in such a precise way as to give no room for misunderstanding. Teaching is a constant reminder that the audience of your communications can read the key words of a message in very different ways, and so you must do your best to avoid any kind of misunderstanding. And even then there are glitches and cracks.   

These glitches and cracks, however, are part of the educational process, both for myself and for my students, as they provide ample opportunity for teachable moments. Recently, I was reminded of this when I came to realise that the historian’s dictum of learning to ask the right questions also has a counterpoint: learning to see the question in context. This realisation came about when I was organising the obligatory oral assignment for one of my courses, a half-term course that was to be concluded with that assignment. The course consisted of two groups of students, and for each group there were between twenty and twenty-six registered participants. In order to make each student participate in the seminar I formulated individual questions that the students were given one week to prepare for, and then they would answer that question in class. The questions were relatively simple in the sense that they did not demand long answers, but they did require that the students had paid attention during the seminars and read the syllabus. Those who could not attend the final seminar were allowed to submit their answers in writing. All in all, most of the students did a very fine job of it and showed great potential in their further studies. Indeed, some who had been quiet and withdrawn during the entire course were among the ones who showed most understanding of the topic. While it is neither surprising nor uncommon, it is always a bittersweet sensation when students show their competence at the end of a course, demonstrating that they could have contributed so well and so productively in the seminar discussions.            

The questions all pertained to the course and its syllabus, and I had thought it obvious that when answering these questions the students should consider this framework. It turned out that yet again I had failed to learn the age-old lesson that nothing should be considered obvious when communicating with students, especially when they are first-year-students. One question that reminded me of this lesson ran as follows: “What does the term ‘universal history’ mean?”

The half-term course is on the cult of saints and identity-construction in twelfth-century Norway. Within the context of the course, universal history is the history of the known world beginning with Creation, ending with Judgement Day, and maintained, guided and planned by the omnipotent God. This is the Christian sense of universal history that underpinned the history-writing that began in twelfth-century Norway, and in this course we had read several primary sources that served to exemplify this approach to universal history. I had repeated time and again that the identity-construction of twelfth-century Norway was bound up with the concern of showing Norway’s place within this universal history. The question was, in other words easy – or so I thought.  

It turned out that the two students who got this question struggled to understand it on the terms that I had expected, and I realised that I should have added a few more details to anchor the question more firmly in the course itself. But when I gave feedback to one of those students, who submitted their answer in writing, I also came to realise that it was not solely a matter of how firmly it was anchored in the course, it also had to do with how these students had not learned to see a question in its context. When I gave my feedback, I remarked to the student that while the answer was in and of itself not wrong, the answer had also nothing to do with the course. I accepted the answer as a pass and not a fail – it was, after all, a very low-key assignment – and explained to them that in the future they needed to read the question in light of the context in which it was asked. The topic of the course should have given clear indications, and so should the syllabus and the many references to the key term of the question in the seminars. The student responded by thanking me for the feedback, and said outright that they had not thought about this issue because to them, a question was just a question.                    

The student’s response was intriguing to me, because it was the perfect diagnose for one of the main problems with communication in general, namely that to see a question in its proper context needs to be learned. In answering the question in a way that was unconnected to the course, the student was not stupid. They had just not been taught that very simple aspect of the nature of questions, namely that questions all depend on context. For a historian – as well as any other participant in society – learning to see a context in question is crucial, because the quality of our answers depend on it, and because our follow-up questions can only be relevant when understanding the context of the original question.

There really needs to be a course in its own right where we dig into the basics of abstract reading that is part and parcel of human daily life. Because learning such basic elements as seeing a question in context is important, but also too easy to not learn.