Typological rejoicing for the feast of SS Peter and Paul

 

Today, June 29, is the feast of SS Peter and Paul, who are among Rome's patron saint, since Rome is both their place of martyrdom and their place of burial - at least according to the medieval tradition. Due to their historical connection to Rome, both Peter and Paul have been key figures in the construction of Rome's Christian identity. This identity has been predominantly orchestrated by the Papacy, but it has also been added to, perpetuated, disseminated and maintained by a range of other historical actors across the social hierarchy of medieval Rome.     

To map the many forms in which Peter and Paul have been used to construct and maintain Rome's identity would require a study of its own and at least one hefty monograph. Even today, Peter and Paul are ubiquitous in Rome, and they continue to provide a cornerstone for the city's identity. In this blogpost, therefore, I will only look at one aspect of this identity construction, one that I encountered by chance while I was preparing a talk on the issue of typological rejoicing. 

Before I return to Peter and Paul, however, it might be necessary to briefly explain what I mean by typological rejoicing. Typology, or the study of types, was one of the main keys through which medieval Christians understood their place in Creation. The term refers to the patterns and similarities - types - that can be found in the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the post-biblical period. In other words, typology reveals the pattern in God's plan, and through typological connections a person, a city, an institution, or a country can see itself as a new version of an old phenomenon. This connection across time - a connection divinely ordained - carries prestige as the glory of the earlier iterations, or types, is reflected onto the new iteration, or the antitype. (In this case, 'anti' does not mean contrary to.) 

Typological connections can be sought in many different ways, and one such way is rejoicing. Several biblical versions contain exhortations to rejoice or to be happy. Isaiah 52:9 tells deserted Jerusalem to rejoice because a better future will come, while Paul, in Philippians 4:4 tells the Christians in general to rejoice in the Lord always. Similarly, addressing a city, a country, or a people to be happy is another form of establishing a typological connection through joy. 

Lauds for the feast of SS Peter and Paul

Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France - Département des Manuscrits, Latin 1090, f.175v

One such typological connection can be found in the liturgy for the feast of SS Peter and Paul. The above manuscript page - from a late-twelfth-century antiphoner from Marseille, whose content can be found here, and a digitized version of which can be found here - contains chants for the hour Lauds on their feast. Lauds is celebrated around six hours after sundown, and is one of three important services in the daily round of the liturgical office, the performance of which is divided into eight slots in one twenty-four-hour cycle. Lauds is typically where the chants describe miracles of whichever saint is being celebrated on that particular day, and these are described in chants called antiphons, each of which is sung before and after a psalm from the Bible. There is also a hymn, and in our case here, the hymn is called 'O Roma felix', O happy Rome.

Rome is here called happy because it is the resting-place of two such important martyrs as Peter and Paul, two of the most important apostles and two of the most powerful saints in the Latin Christian collegium of saints. Importantly, in this chant, Rome is not only connected to Peter and Paul by way of containing the primary shrines of these two saints, but through its happiness the city is connected to biblical locations which also have reason to rejoice, such as Jerusalem (cf. Isaiah 66:10), Israel (Zephaniah 3:14) and Sion (Zechariah 2:10). Even though the wording is different - 'felix' instead of 'gaude' or 'laetare' - the point remains the same: Happiness brought on by the divine machinations of the Lord, which has ensured that the city or the country or the people can rejoice. 

By calling Rome happy, Rome's identity as a Christian city is further enhanced because its happiness is an echo of biblical events. This echo proves that God protects and guides Rome's progress through history. Moreover, since the happiness is caused by Rome being chosen as the location of two of the most important martyrdoms in Christian history, there is also a connection to the New Testament. This biblical, cosmic background is neatly summarized in the incipit, or opening words, of the hymn: 'O Roma felix'.  

O Roma felix - hymn for Lauds

Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France - Département des Manuscrits, Latin 1090, f.175v

Briseld - the fires of Saint John's Eve, and a reflection on historical methodology

 
In Norway, Saint John's Eve, June 23, is the celebration of midsummer. The traditional name for this feast is 'jonsok', which is a contraction of 'jonsvaka', or John's wake, since this is the evening before the feast celebrating the birth of John the Baptist on June 24. This name points to the practice of keeping vigil during the night of important Christian feasts, usually in the hope that miracles would occur during the vigil. When we read medieval miracle accounts and catalogues, several of them recount how people were healed or had visions during the night hours. The night of a saint's feast was a mystical highpoint, both because of the expectation that miracles occurred in these hours, but also because this was when the clergy would celebrate the office of Matins, the most extensive performance of chants and readings in the course of the daily round of divine services. 

Midsummer traditions are often seen as forms of religious continuity, where pre-Christian traditions have been taken up in the Christian context and given new meaning. Such claims of continuity are often difficult to ascertain, partly because they often seem to stem from some kind of wishful thinking concerning the possibility of salvaging pre-Christian traditions. Interpreting these traditions as pagan survivals, or paganism pretending to be Christianity, is to underestimate the variety and complexity of Christian practice. Moreover, such interpretations tend to expect that the rules and norms of ecclesiastical ritual were the only forms of religious practice that was imagined in the Middle Ages, and that anything which deviated from these rules should not be labelled 'Christian'. To pursue such a line of thought is to accept the thinking of ecclesiastical leadership, those bishops, abbots and occasional parish priests who doggedly sought to ensure that their flocks kept to the straight and narrow path, and who saw deviation as a breach with orthodoxy. In other words, while we might encounter claims of pre-Christian continuity and pagan survivals in the writings of medieval churchmen, we tend to forget that these claims have a specific function for those ecclesiastics. This function is to signal the triumph of Christianity over paganism. The desire to write history as a narrative of progress and victory from the ecclesiastical point of view, means that stories of pagan survival has less to do with historical accuracy than with a particular view of teleological history. Such a narrative can be seen in the chapter on the feast of the Nativity of Saint John the Baptist in Legenda Aurea, in which Jacobus de Voragine recounts that the bonfires of midsummer stem from a pre-Christian practice which served to keep away dragons. The smoke of the fires prevented dragons from ejaculating their sperm into wells, thereby poisoning the drinking water of the villages and farmsteads. While it is possible that such a practice has historical foundations, and while we should expect that Jacobus himself believed this practice to be a historical fact, we must remember that Jacobus wrote his collection of saints' legends in the 1260s, after more than a millennium of Christian history. Consequently, those so-called pre-Christian practices might just as well be early Christian practices replaced by more recent, or 'reformed', Christian practices.   

In more recently-Christianized parts of Latin Christendom, continuities in religious practice are more likely, but must therefore be approached with even more caution. This is especially the case in the Norse world, where there has long been a tendency to seek out pre-Christian practices in search for a so-called authentic Norse culture. This tendency is connected to the national romanticism and nationalism of the late nineteenth century, when the quest for the folk spirit of the Norse peoples was in vogue. 

Some aspects of the midsummer traditions of the Nordic countries do appear to have pre-Christian roots. The concept of the vigil, for instance, resembles the practice of 'uteseta' or 'out-sitting', which occurs in several Norse sagas written in the Christian period. This practice consisted of staying up at night to gain access to the secrets of the world, and to learn of hidden knowledge. The idea that nights, and especially nights imbued with extra holiness and mysticism like Saint John's Eve, were periods pregnant with revelations and visions has also continued in Norwegian folk tales, where we, for instance, learn that the animals gather at the night of July 29, the feast of Saint Olaf, to tell stories to each other. While we here might see Saint John's Wake as a pagan survival, we should nonetheless be cautious to suppose that Norse Christians themselves saw the vigil in this way, rather than as a way of petitioning Saint John the Baptist to intercede for them before the throne of God.   

Another aspect of the midsummer traditions that might at first seem like a pagan survival is the word 'briseld', which in my dialect is used about the bonfire itself. This version of the word is typical of Nordfjord, whereas the word is rendered as 'priseld' in Sunnfjord, which, as the name suggests, is the fjord south of Nordfjord. The word briseld can be translated as glimmering or shining fire. The prefix 'bris' appears in more well-known contexts such as 'brisingamen', the necklace worn by the goddess Frøya, which shone and glimmered with gold and jewels. It can be tempting to see the word briseld as a pagan survival, referencing some pre-Christian practice. However, we must also remember that although the Norse vernacular was the language of of the pre-Christian Nordic cultures, it was also the language of the Nordic medieval Christians, and the name itself can simply stem from a Christian context rather than anything older and pagan.  

The main point of these examples that I have listed here is that we must be cautious when interpreting traditions as survivals and continuities of something older. While we should expect that there is a lot of continuity in religious practice across the conversion from paganism to Christianity in several cultures, those aspects that are most typically taken as evidence for such continuity might easily be evidence of the opposite, or might at best echo a narrative that comes from a triumphalist Christian point of view. 

Histories from home, part 3 - an unassuming pile of stones

In the first blogpost of the series 'Histories from home', I showed pictures of a stone structure that served as a gate for directing stoats into a trap. That particular trap gate was a something I had known about for years, and something I had seen several times when walking in the area. Recently, however, I found another, similar, structure in a part of my village where I had never been before (yes, such places do exist in abundance, because the landscape here is full of nooks and crannies). 

The structure in question was somewhat different from the trap gate described in the other blogpost. First of all, the trap gate was located at the opening of a sort of cave made up of several rocks of various sizes that have been brought together by the ice and the effects of various avalanches and rockfalls in the distant past. Such caves are typical shelters for stoats and foxes, and were typical locations for the traps which people of the village - predominantly young men or boys - constructed in order to catch animals they could skin for their fur.   

What I found on my recent excursion, on the other hand, was not just a trap gate but the entire trap itself, a structure with four walls, and most likely a stone in the middle which would fall down and crush the stoat when the animal moved a stick which kept the stone precariously in place. Moreover, while the previous example was located at the entrance of a potential shelter, this trap was placed right next to the naked rock face of a cliff. The edge of this cliff was no doubt a typical thoroughfare of various animals, such as stoats and martens, since keeping the naked rock on one side would ensure that they were protected from enemies on that side, while also keeping them less visible to birds of prey from above. Placing a trap in the middle of such a thoroughfare, a trap which guided the animal into a crushing death, was a time-honoured strategy. 

 
When I first came upon this trap, it looked like an unassuming pile of stones. As I was walking a dog at the time, I might easily have walked past it without giving it a second look, being dragged on by an energetic beast eager to trace the scent of deer. However, being brought up in this village in the Western Norwegian fjords, where so much of the past is lost and survives predominantly in such unassuming piles of stones - humanmade piles of stones, that is - I have become more alert to stones that seem too unnatural, one way or the other. Because this is mainly how history comes down to us: stone structures hidden in the grass, covered by roots, camouflaged by nearby stones, their original shapes bent or distorted by the elements.

This trap in the middle of an animal thoroughfare is a remnant of a lost past, one in which trapping for pelts was done without the aid of pre-made traps, and served as a way for people to supplement their income in a way that is now only rarely practiced (and no longer necessarily as a way of earning much-needed money). In other words, this trap is a remnant of a by-gone era, and a reminder of a small but important aspect of the economy of the early twentieth century Norwegian rural districts. This unassuming pile of stones, therefore, tell us about a much wider historical picture, which is one of the reasons it is so rewarding coming across these structures in the wild.    

Transcription as reliving the past - notes from a personal history of writing

 

I relive the situation
Still see it in my mind 

- Dire Straits, You and your friend 



A few weeks ago, I spent several evenings at a café in Madrid, writing a draft of an article by hand, quietly labouring away in order to gather various thoughts into a reasonably coherent whole. These were very pleasurable evenings, filled with a kind of serenity that made me forget about the world and just enjoy the very act of writing. Such serenity is sometimes hard to come by, especially when what you are writing is supposed to result in an academic publication, and the very act of writing can serve as a reminder of all the inherent stress of the process which takes the draft all the way to the printed page. What helped create this sense of detachment from the world, I believe, was not only the pleasurable surroundings - a quiet street in a country I love - but the fact that I did my writing by hand, quarreling the text into existence through the friction between pen and paper. The manual labour of such writing, I believe, helps connecting the act to the place in which the act is done to a much greater degree than is the case for writing on a computer, and these evenings helped anchor me more strongly to the locality in which I was committing words and thoughts to paper.   

The pleasure of those late evenings are currently coming crashing back into my mind in a process of intense and very delightful recollection, as I am now transcribing the draft into a document on my computer. This is not merely an act of transcription, however, as I also make sure to polish some of the formulations and add a few things here and there. And it is perhaps precisely this kind of engagement with the text written just a few weeks ago, the active part of it, that requires me to stop from time to time and reflect on the writing. Or maybe it is mostly my awful handwriting - made more awful by the intense bouts of inspiration I experienced those evenings - that forces me to progress slowly. Whatever the reason, the evenings are returning to me, and am currently feeling, more strongly than ever, how transcription not only serves to make a text more accessible, but also how transcription makes the very process of writing more accessible, enabling me to relive the creative process with all those elements that went with it: the scent of trees in bloom, the taste of beer, the loud but pleasant hum of an active street in Madrid, and the infrequent attempts to improve my Spanish. There are many virtues in writing by hand, and reconnecting with the past is sometimes one of them.