Saint Michael in Santiago de Compostela

Today, September 29, is the feast of Saint Michael and all angels, and for this occasion I give you one representation of Saint Michael that I encountered in the cathedral museum of Santiago de Compostela earlier this year. In this granite statue, made in Coimbra in the fifteenth century, Michael is shown weighing souls in order to decide whether the souls are allowed into Heaven, or whether they will be sent to Hell. As is typical in such depictions, we see demons or devils hard at work tampering with the scales, so as to claim the souls that would otherwise go to God. In the scene depicted here, they seem to be partly succeeding, given that one of the two souls - this one belonging to a woman - is weighed down and appears to be sentenced to damnation.  

In medieval iconography, the weighing of souls was but one aspect of Michael's duties, he was also the leader of the angelic host and can often be seen battling Satan in a scene that might have inspired the iconography of Saint George. Due to his importance in the cosmology of Latin Christendom, he is a ubiquitous feature in Latin medieval art, and his iconography is shared throughout medieval Latin Christendom. For the pilgrims of the fifteenth century, he would have been a recognisable figure, no matter where those pilgrims were coming from. 

Saint James the Elder in Lier

At any given moment, I have a number of topics at the forefront of my mind, topics that I have to, or ought to, give special attention to because of my current work. This year, one such topic is that of the cult of Saint James the Elder, centred on Santiago de Compostela, but disseminated throughout Latin Christendom from at least the twelfth century onwards. Because the cult - as it was formulated in Compostela - was so widespread, and has retained a significant impact on the culture of later centuries, including our own, I encounter this figure on several occasions. One such occasion was on a recent trip to Belgium. 

In the town of Lier, a little to the southeast of Antwerp, there is a chapel dedicated to Saint James the Elder, close to the city hall. The chapel was consecrated in 1383, and suffered some damage in the course of the Reformation, which in the Lowlands - roughly corresponding to modern Belgium and the Netherlands - often took a strongly iconoclastic turn. Perhaps this is the context for the loss of the original statue in the tympanum above the entrance door, which is now replaced by a more patriarchal-looking James from more recent times, his apostolic status highlighted by a book. The horizontal figure below, however, points to an older statue, possibly one that has shown the saint as a pilgrim, an avatar championed by the cult centre in Compostela. The pilgrim iconography is suggested by the horizontal figure, who has taken off his own pilgrim hat, one of the key symbols of James' patronage of pilgrims. As for the original symbolism of this figure, however, we are left to surmise. Perhaps he represents the pilgrims who support and serve Saint James the Elder. Or perhaps he represents those fallen pilgrims who fail to keep their promise of pilgrimage - in acknowledgement of which his hat is now removed.   

While Northern Belgium was still under Spanish Habsburg control in the early seventeenth century, the chapel served as the parish church of the Spanish troops stationed in Lier. Saint James was also formulated as a soldier as early as the twelfth century, and he was widely regarded as a protector of Christian, and especially Spanish, soldiers. Perhaps the now-lost figure in the tympanum was a representation of Santiago Matamoros, the Moor-slayer who became a popular iconography in the Later Middle Ages.  

Due to Compostela's new golden age as a pilgrimage site, the connection between the cult centre and the chapel in Lier have been renewed - a connection illustrated by a trail of metal conch-shells fashioned to resemble arrows, which point the way through Lier's streets to the chapel of Saint James, marking the town's belonging on the Europe-wide network of pilgrim routes.  

Autophory, Saint Martin, and the old cathedral of Salamanca

 

A few years ago, I coined the term 'autophorous' to describe words that carry their own meaning in themselves. The word comes from the Greek 'auto', self, and 'foros', carry. There are relatively few such words, but enough to comprise a category distinct from other words. The idea was mainly inspired by the Norwegian word for typo, which is 'skrivefeil' (literally: writing error). In contemporary Norwegian parlance, it is common to render this word as 'skriveleif', which is a misspelling of the actual word, and therefore a demonstration of what the original word signifies. The word 'skriveleif' - but not 'skrivefeil' - is therefore autophorous. The same goes for the English word 'short', as it is both monosyllabic and made up of few letters.  

I am also tempted to extend the idea of the autophorous to certain concepts, objects, or even spaces. This idea is based on a picture I took last year, when visiting the old cathedral of Salamanca, where there is a chapel dedicated to Saint Martin, with a thirteenth-century mural showing Martin cutting his cape in half to give it to a beggar. The event depicted here is the point of origin for the word chapel. With the establishment of the Merovingian dynasty in the sixth and seventh centuries, the cape of Saint Martin became an important relic and symbol for the ruling dynasty. The relic was kept in a room called the capella - the cape room - a name which was based on the cape, and which we today use for a part of church architecture. In this way, the chapel of Saint Martin in Salamanca is autophorous, since it carries in itself a representation of the very event which gave the space its name. 

A game piece and the interconnectedness of the medieval world

 

As is well known in contemporary scholarship, the medieval world - however delineated and defined - was much more interconnected than has commonly been acknowledged. While few individuals travelled vast distances, goods and ideas did so very frequently. Moreover, the interconnectedness of the medieval world existed in sprawling networks of contacts - whether diplomatic, mercantile, religious, intellectual, cultural or military - and movement could occur in many different direction.  

There are several medieval sources that demonstrate and even embody this interconnectedness, and today I was reminded of one such example as I was browsing through some old photos. The object in question is currently housed in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. It is a game piece - possibly for checkers - carved in the Rhineland region around the year 1200. The material from which the piece is carved is walrus ivory, which was an important trade commodity of the twelfth century. It is likely that the ivory was brought from Greenland, possibly via ports in Norway, as this appears to be the most common route by which walrus ivory travelled to the European continent in the period.

Aside from the materiality of the game piece, the image carved into it is an example of how widely stories travelled in the Middle Ages. The scene depicted on the game piece shows Alexander the Great borne aloft by two griffins, one of the most iconic and common scenes from the Alexander legend, as it travelled westward throughout the medieval period through adaptations and retellings of the legend by Pseudo-Callisthenes. Those who played with this game piece were most likely of the secular nobility or perhaps the upper echelons of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, and they are likely to have been very familiar with the Alexander legend - perhaps more familiar with the ideas of distant India conveyed through that legend than the northern waters in which the walrus was hunted.     

The ideas about distant lands entertained by those who used this game piece were most likely very inaccurate and based on legends and distorted reports that had travelled through many stages to arrive in the Rhineland around the year 1200. However, even if they were wrong about the wider world, they knew the wider world existed, and they knew that it was possible to travel back and forth between the familiar and the unfamiliar, yet known, parts of the world

Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, KK 9962