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.