A brief note against the notion of useless knowledge

I think any fact is a good fact, in fact 

- Karen O'Leary, Taskmaster New Zealand S04E04

There is a common attitude that one encounters as someone who has studied in the humanities, namely that those disciplines are full of useless knowledge. While I concede that there is such a thing as useless knowledge, most types of knowledge are far from useless, although the exact use of a particular kind of knowledge might vary significantly. 

 The idea of useless knowledge is often bolstered by the erroneous notion that what people in the humanities study tends to be niche, hugely specialised, obscure, and hermetic. And it is true that to some more competitively-oriented scholars, what exists outside of their particular field - however small and narrow - is not worth knowing anything about. However, by and large most people I have encountered in academia knows that it is necessary to accumulate knowledge about many different topics in order to properly understand one's own. Moreover, most of us also understands that by learning about things outside our respective specialties enable us to more easily broaden our horizons and comprehend our particular topic within a wider spectrum of facts and information. Knowledge is useful because it adds context, and the usefulness of knowledge is contextual. 

I was reminded of the usefulness of so-called useless knowledge when I was talking with a friend of mine at a café earlier today. We are both humanities scholars, and we talked broadly about things that came up. At one point, the conversation steered onto the topic of Latin American literature, and this prompted me to recount some of the main points in the novel Hombres de maíz, Men of Maize, by the Guatemalan novelist Miguel Ángel Asturias, published in 1949. The novel is a kaleidoscope that blends reality and mythology in a way that enables the reader to grasp nuances in the socioeconomic mosaic of twentieth-century Guatemala. One example is that the large-scale planting of maize is a hallmark of the upper social echelons of rural Guatemala, and that this is a practice which breaks with the older rural practice of harvesting wild maize. The large-scale maize cultivation is hard on the soil and takes up space that earlier was used to plant a greater variey of crops - as far as I recall from reading the novel two years ago - and those who have the land and resources to plant maize at this scale represent an extractive upper class that responds to the increasing encroachment of capitalist logic and demands in a part of the world beginning to feel the pressures and influence from the US businesses and governments. 

As noted, my memory of the novel is imperfect, and I have not yet anything more about Guatemalan history in order to further corroborate and contextualise the picture presented by Asturias. Consequently, my knowledge of the socioeconomical nuances of twentieth-century Guatemala is very limited, and it is so far from my own field of expertise that there is nothing I can do about this little piece of knowledge in a professional setting. However, the usefulness of this knowledge is not about the knowledge itself, but the realisation that this kind of knowledge is significant in order to understand the broader picture. Knowing that maize has significance as a marker of class and politics provides a starting point for learning more. In the same way, knowing that various details signify something more than the detail itself is what makes knowledge contextually useful, both in the sense that a piece of knowledge might be useful in a particular context, but also that this piece provides a clue to its own broader context.  

Knowledge for its own sake is insufficient, if not necessarily useless, but knowledge that contributes to an ever-growing, ever-deepening understanding of reality is valuable beyond the price of rubies. Our own historical epoch testifies to the truth of this on a daily basis. 

Saint Julian in a fragment - chance survivals, canonicity, and the cult of saints in medieval Scandinavia

 

Much of my research deals with questions pertaining to the cult of saints in medieval Scandinavia. This is a topic that labours under the double-edged problem of having both very few surviving sources - making it difficult to make strong claims about certain questions - as well as such a wide variety of source types, making it difficult to have the required expertise to use all these sources together. Concerning the cult of saints, we know that there were many more sources used and produced in medieval Scandinavia than those we have access to today. The surviving sources have, therefore, provided a skewed sense of the saints venerated by the medieval Scandinavians, as well as the stories told about those saints. Due to the source situation - combined with the nationalistic tilt embedded into the foundations of medieval studies in each Scandinavian country - we have a tendency to focus on the cult of native saints, especially the royal saints. Aside from the biblical saints and the most famous of the early Christian saints - especially Laurentius, who was patron saint of the Church of Lund, which became a metropolitan see in 1104 - there has been relatively little work done on the veneration of the saints less known in our own time. Judging from surviving materials, we have a pretty good idea of how popular and important these famous saints were. But we cannot really know whether some of the saints that we consider minor today were, in actuality, major saints throughout the Scandinavian Middle Ages, or at least within one time period or within one milieu. 

I was reminded of this issue earlier this spring, when I was at the Danish National Archives in Copenhagen to research some manuscript fragments. In one of the boxes I had ordered was the upper part of a two-columned page from a twelfth- or early-thirteenth-century manuscript, the text of which is the saint-biography of Julian Martyr, also known as Julian of Le Mans. The fragment is well known in medieval studies and I have seen it mentioned and analysed several times. It is most likely produced in Scandinavia, probably in Norway, and it is a important witness to the earliest stages of native Norwegian manuscript production. The content of the fragment, however, has received much less attention than its codicological, palaeographical and iconographical aspects. This text provides a very good starting point for reflecting on the state of our knowledge about the cult of saints in twelfth-century Norway.

Rigsarkivet, Fr. 251

Rigsarkivet, Fr. 251

Saint Julian was a third-century bishop of Le Mans. Since he was martyred during the heroic age of Christianity in what was later to become France, his cult and his figure appear to have been important elements not only of Le Mans' own identity but also the identity of France as a kingdom having received special divine attention. This kingdom-wide identity was also propped up by the cults of Saint Dionysius of Paris, of Saint Remigius and the Holy Ampulla, and eventually also the cult of Saint Louis IX. The early date of Julian's life and martyrdom also meant that he was included in several early martyrologies and calendars, and his cult was disseminated far and wide. 

In Scandinavia, there are few surviving traces of Julian in the sources. For example, the only sources from Sweden, as far as I am aware, are twelve calendars that contain his feast-day, which is celebrated either on January 26 or Janaury 27. Since most calendars used in medieval Sweden have survived only as fragments, however, the actual number of calendars containing his feast-day was significantly higher. In any case, no other sources are known - not sculptures, not altarpieces, not wall-paintings. I know of no sources from medieval Denmark, although I have not yet checked whether his feast is included in the late-medieval printed breviaries. In Breviarium Nidrosiense, the breviary printed in Paris in 1519 and aimed at the entire Norwegian church province, his feast is not included. In other words, Saint Julian of Le Mans appears to have been virtually unimportant in the cult of saints in medieval Scandinavia. 

However, Saint Julian was at least known, if only in the monastic or ecclesiastical community in which the manuscript containing his passion story was used. We do not know what community this was, but it is likely that the manuscript was a collection of saints' lives produced for - and perhaps at - one of the leading religious centres of twelfth- or early-thirteenth-century Norway. My own hunch is that the original manuscript was a typical hagiographical collection that was used during the Matins of the feast-day of the saints included in the collection. Matins was the divine service in the middle of the night, and it was during this service that the saint was venerated with a liturgical office which included both chants and readings from the saint's biography. The original manuscript, therefore, is likely to have contained the legends of several other saints aside from Julian. 

What, then, are we to make of the inclusion of Saint Julian of Le Mans in this hypothetical, now-lost hagiographical collection. Probably not much. Such collections were typically compiled from available materials, and those materials tended to contain those stories and legends that were widely accessible rather than those which were particularly important to a specific diocese or church province. Put differently, the legend of Saint Julian was sufficiently widespread that it was easy to get hold of. Its appearance in Norway reflects Julian's general canonicity as a saint in Latin Christendom by the late twelfth century rather than the importance of his cult among Norwegian Christians. 

On the other hand, the fact that Julian's legend was available in Norway and accessible at one - if not more - major religious centre should be taken seriously. What happens at such an institution when the available hagiographical material is limited? Do those stories that are available become more important than they otherwise would be? Can the cult of Saint Julian have been strengthened at this institution simply because the clerics or monastics who comprised the institution's community were familiar with his legend? Very likely, because cults tended to be shaped by the personal devotion of those who were part of the veneration of saints at religious centres. Surges in a saint's popularity could be shaped by events that were interpreted as intercession from that saint, it could be shaped by dreams of individuals, of the constant, long-term pressure from exposure to the saint's story. We see this happen in the cult of Edward the Confessor, for instance, whose main promoter before the 1160s was the figure of Osbert of Clare who believed himself to have been healed due to the saint-king's intercession. Might not a similar causality - however imagined - also not affect the cult of a well-known but otherwise not particularly important saint-bishop? 

We do not have any evidence to suggest that the knowledge of Julian's legend made an impact on his cult in medieval Norway. And personally, I do not think it did, simply because this possibility hinges on our knowledge of one sole surviving fragment. However, this reflection is not primarily about Julian or his cult, but about how our ideas about canonicity and the cult of sains is shaped by the chance survivals of sources. The fragment containing part of the prologue of Julian's saint-biography proves that he was known somewhere in medieval Norway, and for at least a period, even if that period might only be the generation of clerics or monastics that first made use of this manuscript. 

As scholars we need to be very careful in assuming that the canon of literature that we imagine today based on the survival of sources is necessarily the same as the canon of literature of the Middle Ages. Indeed, we know very well that the so-called bestsellers of medieval Latin Christendom - such as the Imago Mundi of Honorius of Autun, or the Sententiae of Peter the Lombard - receive much less attention from and are much less accessible to modern readers than works such as Beowulf, which only survives in one single manuscript. The modern medieval canon is, in other words, very different from the medieval medieval canon. Similarly, the cult of saints as we understand it today might have been configured somewhat differently in the Middle Ages, with saints now lost to us or ignored by us having much greater prominence than we will ever know. 

Rigsarkivet, Fr. 251

Rigsarkivet, Fr. 251

Timeslips in the fjords

 

A couple of years ago, I read an interview with the British novelist Alan Garner, known for his novels blending reality and folklore. He described how he had been walking in the mountains and suddenly did not recognise his surroundings even though he was in a part of the mountains that he knew well. Some friends of his working on quantum mechanics had attributed this to a timeslip, a sudden travel in time. I remain sceptical of the possibility to traverse the unfolding of time, especially as a historian who will happily concede that history rhymes but that it never repeats and that it is inaccessible save by whatever vestiges survive the vicissitudes of time and chronological progress.  

I was reminded of this interview earlier this year, when I experienced a phenomenon that is in many ways similar to a timeslip, yet which works very differently. This happened late in the evening at the verge of early spring, when there was no snow in the lowlands yet a sere, crisp frost that reminded me that winter had not yet relinquished its claim to the land. I was walking the dog, and we were on our way back from the other side of the innermost bay in the fjord, where there is a shipwright that can be seen in the pictures below as a stretch of light on the right-hand side of the photographs. All of a sudden, I felt that time had blended into itself, and that the world I was walking through contained all times at once as preserved in glass. It was a strange feeling, but a comfortable one, and something I have felt several times before when walking in the fjords.  

This was not a timeslip in the strict sense, and it was more similar to a déjà vu in that I recognised this time as something familiar. However, it was not that I felt that I had experienced this moment before, but more that I experienced times that I knew from stories and photographs, times from before my own entrance on the earthly stage.  

My sensation was, of course, entirely in my head, and the experience itself was very much rooted in a historical moment. I was walking a road that had not been completed until sometime in the 1920s, covered in tarmac that had not been applied until decades later, and the constellation of lights from streetlamps and houses could only stem from the pattern of inhabited and functioning buildings in the year 2026. My timeslip was internal, as it were, and brought on partly by tiredness, but also partly by that strange blend of chronological conglomeration that is typical of the Norwegian fjords. While several buildings are new, and while roadworks, machines and infrastructure point squarely to the 2020s, and even though the centre of my native village is radically altered from its appearance in - say - 1926, there are also numerous reminders of past times: Some errant stones brought by the ice thousands of years ago that have not yet succumbed to the dynamite of construction workers, a few houses that were built in the 1920s, the church from 1875-76, and the mountains that have looked the same in living memory. When I grew up here in the fjords, I noticed this conglomeration in the houses in which I grew up and the houses that I visited. There were keepsakes, furniture, pictures, textiles, and other items that had been passed down through generations, and that bore the stamps of their respective historical periods. 

It is against this conglomeration I see the sensation I felt that cold evening on the verge of spring. Because I have inhabited a world comprised of remnants from earlier times, it is easy to feel as if I know those times. I do not - the smells, the sounds, the tastes of those years have never reached me, however much and however vividly they have been replicated in handed-down clothes, in my grandmother's cooking, or in the dialect of my grandmother's generation that is so distinct from that of my own - like a chronolect lost to the passage of time. I suspect that this feeling of familiarity surged into my head that evening because of the feeling of timelessness that comes with the seasons, the recognition that it is almost spring because it always feels this particular way when it is almost spring. In this way, chronological boundaries slipped away, even though I remained where and when I was. And this, I believe, is the way timeslips work in the fjords. 

A Dublin haul

 

Late April and early May, I was in Dublin for a conference. As always when abroad, I wanted to bring home some books, but this time I had to show more restraint than usual because I was travelling with only a carry-on suitcase which was already quite full. Consequently, I had thought back to my first trip to Dublin, in 2023, when a friend had recommended that I visit Hodges Figgis bookshop. This is a largre and splendid shop, and I remembered a facsimile edition of one of the poetry collections by William Butler Yeats, one of my favourite poets. As I left Norway, this particular volume was the only item I planned on buying. 

When I got to Hodges Figgis, I quickly located the selection of Yeats' works and picked the copy of The Winding Stair and other poems. However, since I still had one hour left before meeting a colleague for lunch, I decided to spend that time browsing the various sections on three of the four floors of the bookshop. From a logistical point of view, this was a mistake since I soon became more lenient in my self-imposed restrictions and eventually abandoned them altogether. After the fourth book, however, I knew that I would probably not resist future temptations as bravely as I had thought, and I hurried downstairs to the till. As the cashier went through the stack of books, she also gave me a loyalty card with slots to be crossed out for each twelfth pound spent at the bookshop. My failed attempt at restraint left only four of the ten slots empty, and I regret nothing.  

The day after the conference, I met up with another colleague, an old gentleman who kindly gifted me a volume of historical articles to which he had contributed. I was utterly delighted at this generous present, especially since my colleague is an expert in the archaeology of medieval Dublin, a topic which I need to learn a lot more about in order to expand the horizon of my own research in the direction of Ireland. 

Four of the books I brought back from Dublin were unplanned. They therefore demonstrate how wise it is to yield to serendipity when it comes your way, especially when dealing with books.