Saint Olaf, Saint Lucius, and Saint Dorothy in Roskilde Cathedral

 

Today, 29 July, is the feast of Saint Olaf of Norway. Since I have spent a lot of my academic career researching his cult in the Middle Ages, as well as the modern reception of him and his stories, I am taking this opportunity to write about one of the myriad cases where the figure of Olaf can be used to explore facets of medieval history. 

Olaf was king of Norway from 1016 to 1028, and died in 1030 in an attempt to regain the Norwegian kingship. The following year, he was proclaimed a saint by Bishop Grimkell, who had been part of the king's retinue and was in practice the only bishop in Norway by 1031. The cult spread quickly throughout the North Atlantic and the Baltic, and Olaf became particularly popular in the Danish cult of saints. While most of the the sources to the veneration of Olaf in Denmark are lost to us, there are some places where there remain some interesting and significant pockets that indicate Olaf's importance. One such place is Roskilde, and I will illustrate this by way of a piece of art visible in the nave of Roskilde Cathedral.  

These restored wall-paintings are found on one of the pillars by the entrance to the choir, and date from the early sixteenth century, when the interior of the cathedral was subject to an extensive redecoration programme. The most famous results of this effort are some of the chapels, where the walls are lavishly decorated with a host of holy figures. The scene shown in the pictures of the present blogpost, however, are more easily missed, but perhaps much more revealing of the priorities of the cathedral clergy around 1500. 

The scene is an interesting summary of how the Roskilde clergy understood themselves in the Christian cosmology. The central figure is the only one without a nimbus in the scene, and it is likely that he represents the bishop of Roskilde, or perhaps the entire cathedral clergy as a pars pro toto. Below him is the tortured - but as-yet uncrucified - Christ surrounded by the instruments of his passion, an iconographic assemblage that was in vogue in the late medieval period, while above the bishop we find the Trinity represented in a similarly typical late-medieval fashion, with the crucified Christ in the foreground, the Holy Spirit descending upon Christ's head, and God the Father seated in the background. This vertical sequence of figures also situates the Roskilde bishop historically and mystically, as his episcopacy is made possible and given meaning through the sacrifice of Christ, while the bishop might also be understood to occupy the historical here-and-now between the historical event of the Passion of Christ below and the Holy Trinity above which sublimates the mystery of salvation and represents the future end of history. This mystic-historical iconography is very common.  

Three other figures, however, who are flanking the Roskilde bishop, comprise a configuration particular to the diocese in question. On the bishop's close left is Saint Olaf, standing atop a dragon in accordance with an iconographic standard that had developed since at least the thirteenth century. Further to the bishop's left is a figure now almost worn away by time, but whose caption tells us that it is Saint Dorothy of Caesarea. Interestingly, she is positioned behind a smaller, cross-legged figure wearing an episcopal mitre, whom she seems to either protect or punish. 

To the bishop's right is the cathedral's patron saint, Pope Lucius I, whose relics were brought to Roskilde at some point around 1100, possibly in the episcopate of Svend the Norwegian (d.1088). The combination of Lucius, Olaf and Dorothy is significant, as Olaf appears together with the cathedral's patron and is in effect the sainted pope's second-in-command, while Dorothy appears to take the place of a third but still important member. The Roskilde bishop is thereby protected by a holy bishop, a holy king and a holy virgin, two universal saints representing early Christendom, and a local (albeit near-universal) saint representing the more recent, perhaps even contemporary Christendom. The placement of these figures served to remind the cathedral clergy at Roskilde that they and their institution are guarded by these saints, and that they are owed particular veneration because of their role in the cathedral's history. In a single work of art, the cathedral and its clergy are positioned within salvation history, and also reminded of their duties towards their heavenly patrons.

Sanctus Lucius

Sanctus Olauus and Sancta Dorothea

Cantigas de Compostela, part 2: Santiago the king?

Today, July 25, is the feast of Saint James the Elder, whose main cult centre is Santiago de Compostela in Galicia. The establishment of Compostela as the cult centre of an apostle whose death in Palestine is recounted by the Acts of the Apostles appears to have begun in the ninth century, and flourished into one of the main pilgrimage centres of Latin Christendom in the early twelfth century. One of the reasons for the success of Compostela's emergence as the location of the burial of Saint James the Elder is the plasticity of saints, and how this plasticity was applied to the figure of Saint James, or Santiago. The term 'plasticity' in this context means that the saints can take on a wide variety of roles, and a wide variety of stories can be written about them. Few saints have had such a successfully varied iconography as Santiago, as he is known and venerated as an apostle, a martyr, a pilgrim, and a soldier. I have written a brief summary of this iconography here. Santiago was, however, also subject to other iconographies. In the Miracula Jacobi, the second instalment of the collection of material pertaining to Saint James which is commonly called Liber Sancti Jacobi, we read a miracle account where a Greek bishop, Stephen, claims that James should be called a fisherman and not a soldier, as was then evidently in vogue. The account continues to narrate a vision of Stephen's, in which Santiago appears to him dressed as a soldier, in order to prove that he was wrong to dismiss those who called the apostle a soldier also. This particular story both shows that there were several ideas about how Santiago should be understood in circulation, and also that the authorities at the cult centre saw the need to convince some audiences that Santiago was also a soldier. 

Another iconographical branch of Santiago can be suggested by a thirteenth-century stone sculpture currently housed in the cathedral museum in Compostela. Here, the apostle-pilgrim-soldier-fisherman saint is depicted in a different way, namely as a seated king. The staff on which he rests his hand is probably the pilgrim's staff rather than the sceptre - as it looks nothing like typical depictions of sceptres from contemporary art - so the figure is not solely regal. Perhaps we should understand the crown as signifying Santiago's status as a martyr, since the crown was regarded as the prize for obtaining martyrdom. Yet it is also possible that those who commissioned this statue and accepted its appearance - namely the episcopal authorities - aimed to imbue their patron with a more royal aura. Perhaps, as the royal authority of Castilla and León was undergoing increased centralisation - especially under the reign of Alfonso X (r.1252-84) - the episcopal court of Compostela sought to use this current to evoke the historical kingdom of Galicia, and to make Santiago even more relevant than before.  

Ultimately, I must leave it to the experts on the cult of Saint James the Elder to provide some explanation of this rendition. In any case, it serves as an excellent example of how so much of the cult's success relied on the ability to adapt the iconography to new contexts. 

 

New publication: Holy Bishops, Papal Canonisation and the Legitimisation of Power in Thirteenth-Century Norway and Poland

 
As part of the project where I have been employed for the past three years, I have co-authored an article with my friend and colleague Gregorz Pac, titled 'Holy Bishops, Papal Canonisation and the Legitimisation of Power in Thirteenth-Century Norway and Poland: The Cases of Eystein Erlendsson of Nidaros and Stanislaus of Kraków'. This article explores how Norwegian and Polish ecclesiastics of the 1200s sought to increase the status of their patron saints, and emphasise the legitimacy of their cults, through papal acknowledgement in the form of canonisations. 

The article was published last week in volum 129 of Acta Poloniae Historica, and it can be accessed here, and here.

A song for Saint Swithun - typology and identity in tenth-century Winchester

Today, July 2, is the feast of the deposition of Saint Swithun. In Norwegian tradition, this feast is called 'Syftesok', Syfte's wake, or Swithun's wake, and is included among those feast days on which work is prohibited in the Norwegian provincial laws from the eleventh, twelfth, and early thirteenth centuries. Swithun's place in the law texts might be due to the close contact between the English and the Norwegian church organizations, or it might be a result of the translation of a relic of Saint Swithun to Stavanger sometime in the early twelfth century, following which Swithun also became the patron of Stavanger.

Swithun was bishop of Winchester in the period 852-62, and his body was translated to a shrine in Old Minster, Winchester, on July 15 971. The early cult of Swithun was overseen by his successor Æthelwold (r.963-84), and several texts were composed within the first few decades following the translation. As part of this early cult material, we also find a number of chants which are recorded in the early-eleventh-century manuscript Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 473. On the folios 186v-189r, thirteen chants comprise the 'Istoria de S[an]c[t]o Suuithuno', the history of Saint Swithun. Several of these chants are marked as responsories, which are chants to be performed after the reading of lessons during the office of Matins on the saint's feast day. Interestingly, the Istoria does not have a narrative, which is what we often find in chants for Matins, and as the name itself - Istoria - implies. The reason for this lack of narrative is unclear, but it might be a consequence of there being no biographical account of the living Swithun by the early eleventh century. Even though several texts recording the translation and the miracles God was believed to have performed for the sake of Swithun's merits were composed in the early stage of the cult construction, it was not until the late eleventh century that Swithun received his own vita, at least as far as we know.    

Although the Istoria of Saint Swithun is not narrative, it is nonetheless full of interesting details that position the holy bishop in a wider Christian historical framework. One such detail is included in the chant marked as responsory 7 in the Cambridge manuscript. The text of this chant is as follows: 



Ecce uere Israelita, in quo dolus non est inuentus, qui probatus repertus est sacerdos magnus iuxta ordinem Melchisedech. 

Behold the true Israelite, in whom no deceit is found, who is discovered to be a great priest according to the order of Melchisedech.

- Translated by Michael Lapidge (see Michael Lapidge, The Cult of St. Swithun, 2003, p. 124) 


What we see here is that Swithun, an English ninth-century bishop proclaimed a saint in the tenth century, is typologically connected to Melchisedech, the priest-king of Genesis, who was seen as an archetype of Christian church leaders. By stating that Melchisedech and Swithun belong to the same social order, and by referring to Swithun as a 'true Israelite', the responsory links the past and the present together, and also England and the Holy Land, in a way that demonstrates how Swithun belongs in God's historical scheme, and how England belongs in the same salvation narrative as does the Holy Land. This kind of historical thinking - where individuals and locations in the present or in a local context were connected to people and places elsewhere in both time and space - was the dominant approach to history in the Middle Ages. By mapping such details, we can therefore see how those who formulated these connections thought of themselves in the grand scheme of things, and how they understood their own identity, either as individuals or, as in the case of the monks of Winchester, as an institution.

Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 473, f.188v