A minor academic blast from the past

Every now and again, I am reminded of how small the world of medieval studies actually is. Recently, however, I was reminded of this by an encounter with my past self, a version from the spring of 2019. For the past few weeks, I have been putting together a draft of an article which seeks to put together a lot of sources spanning about seven centuries, as well as looking at the roots of these sources. Consequently, I have probably driven the university librarians slightly insane with my incessant interlibrary loan requests over the summer. Now that I am back in Oslo, I have to reap what I have sowed, and my office contains more books than ever before. One of these books is a collection of articles edited by Kai Brodersen, simply titled Solinus. New Studies, concerning the fourth-century Roman writer Gaius Julius Solinus, whose work known as Collectanea Rerum Mirabilium was one of the most influential sources by which Graeco-Roman ideas entered into the Latin Medieval learned world.    

The collection is one of relatively few such academic books that I have read in their entirety. Most often, I will read one or two articles while trying to build an argument for an article of my own, or assembling the syllabus for a class. However, as I always do prefer to read books in their entirety, I started adding post-it notes to the table of contents, in order to tick off which of the articles I had already read, so that I could make sure that I had finished the entire book. It was this practice that proved to me that not only had I read this book before, I had also read this specific copy of it before, loaned as it was by the University Library of Southern Denmark.  

This encounter with my past self is a good reminder that one's interests and academic pursuits do not follow a straight line. More often than not, we circle back to some previous point of departure, sometimes with renewed interest, sometimes out of curiosity, and sometimes because we forget that we have covered this material already. To my mind, this is a very positive aspect of scholarly pursuits, because it means that we never know what will serve us well at a future junction, so no matter what we read or write in any given year should be considered frivolous or wasted, just because it is not continued for some time, or because it does not appear in its originally intended form. For some people, these reappearances might be frustrating, since they might easily give the impression that one's work is not going anywhere. I for my part, however, think of it as a very good thing, because being able to return to something with knowledge and experience you did not have at the time when you were first dealing with something, can only make your current work on the material better and better founded. 

 

A Dutch haul

Two weeks ago, I spent a few days in Belgium to attend a friend's wedding. As this was my first time in the country - layovers at Brussles Airport do not count - I was eager to get a chance to explore its literary scene, one which I primarily know through the comic book production of the great Francophone masters of the ninth art. However, as I was in Flanders, most of the available literature was in Dutch, a language that I do not speak, but which I find easier to read than French. Moreover, since I travelled via Schiphol, my first opportunity to buy reading material was also in the Dutch language, represented by the Donald Duck comics. For reasons of time and available luggage space, my literary exploration did not delve too deeply into the shelves of Standaard - a Belgian chain of bookshops that I was happy to learn about - but in-between sightseeing, excellent food, and social activities, I was able to practice some of my very rusty Dutch through reading stories both unknown and - in the case of some Donald Duck stories written in the Netherlands and made available in the Norwegian Donald Duck magazine - very familiar. I'm happy to have some materials for learning Dutch, and I look forward to discovering some of those words that are typically encountered in comic books, namely words that might not be very common outside that literary universe, but which do nonetheless carry a lot of cultural context within them. 

 

Birds in Antwerp Cathedral - centre and universality in a Christian space?

Last week I spent a few days in Belgium, a journey which included a trip to Antwerp and its cathedral. As this was my first time in both the country and the city - and as the excursion to Antwerp was something I had not planned in advance - I was completely unprepared by the lavish decorations to be found within the church space. The cathedral is perhaps most famous for its marvellous paintings by Peter Paul Rubens, but I was even more struck by a pulpit situated in the nave, which probably dates to the seventeenth or early eighteenth century.  

The pulpit is made from wood, and it is a masterpiece of woodcraft, whose components are made to look like a living forest. While its most sumptuous side is the front, I first saw it from behind, and even that was enough to stop me in my tracks. What caught my attention most firmly was its array of birds in extremely lifelike details that perched along the pulpit like a guard of honour. More than the vivisimilitude, perhaps, I was also struck by the types of birds, which include an eagle, a peacock and - even more delightfully - a turkey.  

These birds might have had various functions in the decorative programme of the pulpit. Partly, they no doubt served to amaze its spectators and demonstrate the wealth of the cathedral - perhaps even of the bishop himself. But perhaps they also serve to make a point about the universality of Christianity and the place of Antwerp in this universal space. After all, eagles, peacocks and turkeys were exotic birds to seventeenth-century churchgoers in Flanders, and still are to this day. And while this exoticism might have been sufficient in and of itself to have them commissioned for this pulpit, it is nonetheless tempting to see these birds as signifiers of different parts of the world: The eagle in the far north, the peacock in Asia, and the turkey in the still relatively new world of the Americas. And in the middle of all this: Antwerp. If this orientational function of this wooden menagerie was not one of its original function, I very well imagine that it made several of the cathedral's congregants see themselves as part of a much wider world. 

Saint Lawrence from a Burgos workshop

Today, August 10, is the feast of Saint Lawrence, a deacon of Rome reportedly martyred in 258. He is one of the oldest and most popular of the post-biblical saints to have enjoyed a sustained popularity and widespread cult since Late Antiquity. Part of his popularity might stem from the nature of his legend, according to which he was placed on a large gridiron to be roasted to death - a story narrated in gruesome detail by the fourth-century Christian poet Prudentius in his book on martyrs, the Liber Peristephanon. Due to his popularity and that he is easily recognised by his main attribute - his gridiron - he can often be found in medieval and early modern art.  

One example of Saint Lawrence in medieval art is the below detail from a predella belonging to an altarpiece made by a workshop of artists in Burgos, Spain, in the second half of the fifteenth century. This is a period of great artistic craft in the style now known as Hispano-Flemish Gothic, a name that points to the close artistic ties between Spain and Flanders in the period. Lawrence is found next to Ambrose of Milan, and the predella also features SS Sebastian, Augustine, Helena, and Barbara. The predella is currently housed at the Museo Arqueológico Nacional in Madrid.