Saint George the kneeling knight - recycling images in the 1492 Lübeck Passionael

 

Today, April 23, is the feast of Saint George. He is a widespread figure in late-medieval iconography, and he is most famous for his battle with the dragon which he subdued and later killed once the city he had saved converted to Christianity. The dragonslaying motif became dominant from the thirteenth century onwards, and - as I have outlined in this blogpost - the most common depiction of Saint George in the twelfth and late eleventh century was of his elaborate passion narrative.  

A few years ago, I was leafing through a collection of texts for the feasts of the liturgical year printed in Lübeck in 1492 by Steffen Arndes. The collection, known as the Lübeck Passionael, was a typical work of its time, as it offered vernacular translations of stories most commonly found in Latin. A response to increased literacy and extra-ecclesiastical religious gatherings - such as the guilds - these books were highly popular. When I made my first forays into this work, I was a bit surprised to see that the woodcut vignette that introduced the chapter on Saint George did not contain the typical dragonslaying motif. However, by that time I had already noticed that other scenes did occur and I did not think much of it. Last year, however, as I had an opportunity to examine the woodcuts more carefully, I noticed that this same image was used for two other saints: Longinus, and Quirinus of Neuss. 

Saint George 

Steffen Arndes, Passionael 

Syddansk Universitetsbibliotek RARA M 15, f.6v

Saint Longinus

Steffen Arndes, Passionael 

Syddansk Universitetsbibliotek RARA M 15, f.379v

Saint Quirinus

Steffen Arndes, Passionael 

Syddansk Universitetsbibliotek RARA M 15, f.383r

The Lübeck Passionael contains several images that are recycled for several legends. This was a common method in the making of such collections. Presumably, the main reason was to save on time, effort and money, especially as a work the length of Passionael could consist of close to three hundred chapters. Moreover, because several minor saints were tortured or killed in the same way, one decapitation or torture scene could accurately reflect the climax of several different stories. What surprised me, however, was the image used for George was shared by two saints who were relatively minor figures in Northern Germany at the end of the fifteenth century. Granted, they were not unknown. Longinus was the soldier who had pierced the side of Christ with his lance and was later healed from an eye condition when Christ's blood came into his eyes. Quirinus was a Roman tribune who appears in the story of Pope Alexander I and Saint Balbina, and whose relics were translated to Neuss in the eleventh century. While he appears to have undergone something of a surge in popularity in Northern Germany and Scandinavia from the fifteenth century onwards, he never attained the status and ubiquity of Saint George. 

That three such different saints - two soldiers and a tribune, each from a different century in the Early Christian past - should be represented by the same image appears strange to modern eyes. After all, why pass up on the opportunity to depict the eye-catching and famous dragonslaying scene? Similar scenes do after all appear in the Lübeck Passionael, such as in the chapter on Saint Martha (f.85r) who is shown defeating the dreadful Tarrascon by pointing her cross towards it. However, the recycling of this image, and the choice of saints who share it, might reveal something about what the artist or the commissioner sought to emphasise by this scene. In all three legends, we see a military figure who chooses to die for the faith. His military affiliation differs - George was known more as a knight than as a soldier on par with Longinus, and as a tribune Quirinus was not in active battle - but he is shown to be martial a man on account of his full-body armour. They represent the literal Christian soldier - not the original, spiritual one formulated in the epistles of Paul - and as such demonstrates a military ideal of the late Middle Ages.  

We are still left with the question why the artist or the commissioner decided not to depict the dragonslaying scene. And we cannot possibly say whether the kind of connecting logic I have outlined here reflects the decision making process that led to this recycling of images. Most likely, the motive cuts no deeper than that the image fits an aspect found in all of the stories and has been recycled for practical reasons. What is interesting, however, is that once we divest ourselves of expectation - or the desire to see a dragon in my case - we are left with the result of that editorial and artistic decision. Once we take this as our starting point, we approach the historical source on its own terms, and from there we might start to ask new questions. For instance, given that this image was shared by these saints, what - if anything - can this tell us about how these saints were understood and viewed in late-fifteenth-century Lübeck? Maybe there were other concerns rather than the slaying of a dragon that drew some of the Lübeckians towards George? Ultimately, we do not know, but reflecting on these questions might make us think more carefully about the late-medieval cult of saints. 

A macabre coincidence - pen trials and the guts of Saint Erasmus

History is full of macabre coincidences, and I encountered one such case over a week ago, as I was doing some research in the special collections at the University of Southern Denmark. I returned to look at a copy of the 1492 edition of the Lübeck Passionael, a collection of texts on the various feasts in the Latin Christian liturgical calendar, which was ultimately modelled on the thirteenth-century Legenda Aurea by Jacobus de Voragine. This book has been a recurring fascination for me ever since I first set eyes on it nine years ago, and this time I had come to take pictures of those woodcut vignettes that I had not yet photographed. Previously, I have focussed on a particular set of saints, while allowing my curiosity to direct me towards other saints that might be relevant for my research, or which might simply catch my eye. The book in question is comprised of 419 leaves, making 838 pages in total, and several of these pages contain one or more woodcuts. No wonder it has taken me years to photograph them all.

Since I was paying more attention to every woodcut missing from my collection, I suddenly noticed a very curious and macabre coincidence on the page containing the woodcut for Saint Erasmus. According to legend, Erasmus was martyred during the Diocletian persecutions in the early fourth century. Because he was killed by having his guts pulled out by a windlass, he is often depicted with the windlass in his hands, and sometimes with the guts rolled around it. The cutter who prepared the vignettes for the Lübeck Passionael made the most of this arresting and recognisable image, and prepared a woodcut for Saint Erasmus which depicted his passion. This choice is particularly notable because not all of the woodcuts in the 1492 edition are made specifically for the saint in question, and several woodcuts are used for several saints. 

Steffen Arndes, Passionael

Syddansk Universitetsbibliotek RARA M 15, f.33r

The copy now held in the special collections of the University of Southern Denmark was once in the possession of the library at Herlufsholm School, a boarding school in Næstved on Sjælland for young boys. The copy contains marginalia from several readers interacting with the book, but most often these seem to be products of boredom rather than engagement with the actual content. On this page - folio 33r - the interaction had been of a more practical kind. A young pupil had decided to test his quill to see if it was sufficiently well sharpened. This is a common type of marginalia in premodern books, and they are known as pen trials, probatio pennae. In this case, these trials consisted of s-like figures, a shape probably chosen because it would easily reveal whether the quill would need adjusment. As a consequence, the shapes of the pen trials are very similar to how the guts of Saint Erasmus often appear in late medieval art. Granted, in the book itself, the gut is pulled out in a straight line, so there is no reason to think that the pupil would be aware of this similarity, or that it is a conscious decision. As a consequence, the macabre connection needs a third factor aside from the image and the pen trials, and that factor are the eyes of a viewer sufficiently familiar with the iconography of Saint Erasmus to see the similarity. And in this case, I happened to be such a viewer. 

An annuncation from 1492

Today, March 25, is the feast of the Annunciation, which commemorates the Archangel Gabriel's announcement to the Virgin Mary that she would be the mother of God. This is one of the most important feasts of the liturgical year in the Latin Church, and medieval calendars typically mark this date in red ink to demonstrate its high liturgical rank. 

Last week, I was looking through the 1492 edition of Passionael, printed by Steffen Arndes in Lübeck, which is a collection of texts on the various feasts of the Catholic liturgical year. The collection is modelled on the Legenda Aurea by Jacobus de Voragine (c.1260), but it is also adapted to the interests of the Lübeck audience. (For instance, a number of Scandinavian saints were added, and these can be read about in this article by Iliana Khandza.) In 1492, Arndes issued an updated second edition of the book - the first edition came in 1488 - which included new chapters and new woodcuts. 

The chapter on the Annuciation runs from folios 384r to 387r and is introduced by a lovely and curious woodcut vignette. The Annunciation is a common theme in medieval art, and in numerous renditions Mary is depicted as reading from a book or performing her devotions. the Archangel Gabriel is usually standing a few feet away, although sometimes touching Mary with its hand. This 1492 rendition, however, is the first instance I have seen of Gabriel touching Mary with a staff, as if to rouse her out of her pious meditations. The woodcut is expertly done and contains a lot of details for such a small space, and it captures Mary's surprise very well.  

I am very fond of these woodcuts, as they represent a form of art that is not often as appreciated as the large wooden panels or frescoes so commonly associated with the fifteenth century, but which captures contemporary iconography in an effective and interesting way. 

Steffen Arndes, Passionael

Syddansk Universitetsbibliotek RARA M 15, f.384r

 

Same woodcuts, different saints – towards a methodology for establishing minor saints

 

One of the several challenges when researching the cult of saints is to assess the relative importance and popularity of any given saint. There are various parameters for assessing whether a saint had a large cult, and in those cases there is often source material that allows us to flesh out some of details concerning the saint’s popularity. For instance, miracle collections teach us where some of the pilgrims came from, which in turn makes it possible to map the extent of the cult, albeit incompletely. Church dedications outside of the cult centre provide similar nodes when tracing the cult, and so do the spread of manuscripts containing legends or liturgy for the saint in question. Calendar entries are likewise important sources, especially when later hands add further information, to the names that indicate which saint is to be celebrated on that particular day.

            In the case of saints that are less well attested in the source material, the questions of importance and popularity become more complicated. Granted, most saints are not universally important. However, some saints might appear more important than they were due to the state of the surviving source material – both for that saint and for other saints venerated in the same church province – and some saints might have been important for certain social echelons rather than for the populace as a whole. Despite these uncertainties, it is relatively easy to ascertain that saints with a widespread cult and a strong cult centre were both important and popular within a particular geographical area or within a particular time frame.      

            The minor saints, however, are even more complicated. These are saints that might be ubiquitous in calendars and might be attested throughout the Middle Ages, but where there was no particular cult centre where their relics were housed and from where their cult was promoted. Or if they did have a such a cult centre, the institution in question did not attempt, or perhaps did not mange, to disseminate their cult abroad. In some cases, these are old saints which are found in later medieval sources because they were introduced into the martyrologies that were copied and expanded from Late Antiquity and into the Carolingian period. In other cases, they are local saints that emerged later and were incorporated into the liturgical year of a diocese or a church province, and were then copied into later calendars or breviaries without much regard for the saint or their legend. Such saints might have been minor, but that does not mean that we can unequivocally say that they were unimportant. Especially local cults with little imprint on the surviving source material might have been far more important to the non-ecclesiastical populace than the patron saint of the diocese – especially of the smaller cult was venerated in smaller villages or parishes outside the episcopal see. Moreover, popularity often comes and goes in waves, there are surges and ebbs, and sometimes there never comes a second surge. Consequently, we need to employ very careful parameters assessing whether a minor saint was, indeed, minor.

 

In the present blogpost, I provide you with one case where the surviving source material allows me to designate three saints’ cults as neither important nor popular, at least not at the time and in the place of the source in question. This source is a vernacular collection of saints’ legends, printed in Lübeck by Lucas Brandis around 1478. Such collections were common in fifteenth-century Germany, and were ultimately modelled on the liturgically organised collection Legenda Aurea by Jacobus Voragine, compiled sometime in the 1260s. Unlike Legenda Aurea, however, which was put together in order to provide preachers with material for their sermons, collections such as Lucas Brandis’ Passionael were printed and sold to merchants and other literate social groups whose livelihood – such as artisans – allowed them to accumulate more money.

Lucas Brandis’ Passionael allowed ordinary citizens to read and listen to the stories of saints, some of whom they knew well while others were no doubt new to them. It is important to note that when Brandis put together his collection, he had to reflect on his audiences and their tastes. In some cases, saints would be included practically out of necessity, since they were expected in such collections – for instance the biblical saints. Moreover, Brandis must have been aware of the cult of saints in Lübeck: which were venerated in the city’s various churches, and which were popular. As for the saints he included in collection, some of them were likely gathered from similar collections elsewhere in Germany, whether in the vernacular or in Latin, which he then had translated into Low German.

The chapters were typically introduced with a woodcut vignette that depicted the saint or saints who were the protagonists of the chapter, or an episode from the legend. In many cases, the woodcuts were made specifically for the saint in question and demonstrate familiarity with their iconography, or reliance on the text which is introduced. In other cases, however, the saint or saints were less well known, and their legend was sufficiently generic to be summarised in the same way as other saints whose legends, or whose basic iconographical features or elements, were similar. For saints like these, woodcuts could often be reused. Such reuse constitutes fairly solid evidence that the saint or saints introduced in this generic way was to all intents and purposes a minor saint.

In Brandis’ Passionael, there are several woodcuts that are used in this way, but for the present blogpost I will focus on three of them, simply because they are placed at the top of consecutive chapters, meaning that the reader leafing through the book will encounter these images uninterrupted by others. We should imagine that Brandis made this decision consciously and was aware of the effect it would have on the reader and on their impression of the saint. That he nonetheless went through with this organisation of the woodcuts suggests that the saints were, indeed, neither popular nor important in Lübeck around 1478. 

Lucas Brandis, Passionael

München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek 2 Inc.s.a. 780, f.324v  

The first example comes from folio 324v, which contains the opening of the chapter on Nazarius and Celsus, two saints allegedly exhumed by Ambrose of Milan and venerated there throughout the Middle Ages. Their legend was included in Legenda Aurea, and can also be found in several calendars used in Scandinavia. I have written about their legend here. The legend tells of a pair of male saints who were martyred together. The woodcut summarises the climax of the martyrdom, with both saints placed in a hilly or craggy landscape, shown mid-execution as the head of the one lies on the ground facing the executioner who is preparing to strike the head of the other. It is a dramatic and graphic scene, and it is one that can summarise the fate of several other male martyr-pairs, of which there are quite many in the Latin medieval cult of saints. 

Lucas Brandis, Passionael

München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek 2 Inc.s.a. 780, f.325v

The second example is found on folio 325v, introducing the chapter on Simplicius and Faustinus, two brothers whose martyrdom is typically dated to the Diocletian persecution. They were beheaded and their bodies thrown into the Tiber. The legend also includes their sister Beatrice, but she was not beheaded, and she is not always named in the calendar entries for their feast-day, July 29. In Scandinavia, and presumably also in Lübeck, their cult would probably have been overshadowed by that of Saint Olaf of Norway whose feast was on the same day.

Lucas Brandis, Passionael

München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek 2 Inc.s.a. 780, f.326r

The third example is found on folio 326r, the page opposite that of the previous vignette, which introduces the chapter on Abdon and Sennen (here written “Sennes”, which is not uncommon). These martyrs were killed during the Decian persecution, and I have written about them here. They were Persians who were brought to Córdoba, from whence they were brought to Rome and killed following the discovery that they were evangelising. Their feast-day was on July 30, and it is likely that they, too, were eclipsed by the feast of Saint Olaf on the preceding day. 

 

The woodcut used for these vignettes are also employed elsewhere in Brandis’ Passionael, but I have not seen them in such an uninterrupted sequence as this one. To use the same woodcut for all of them was a deliberate decision, as there were elements enough in all of these legends to provide something different for the engraver. That no such effort was taken is a fairly good indication that these saints were included because they were expected – as part of the regular liturgical cycle – but that they were also known to be practically unimportant to Brandis’ intended audiences. Consequently, in this one instance we can be fairly certain that these were minor saints, at least for the time and place in question. Often, this is as much certainty as we can hope for when researching the cult of saints. 

Cantigas de Compostela, part 3: Saint Sebastian

 

Around 1450, a chapel was built in the cathedral complex of Santiago de Compostela, dedicated to the Holy Spirit. The chapel contained stone statues of various saints, one of whom was Saint Sebastian. Towards the end of the Middle Ages, Sebastian was one of the most ubiquitous figures of the collegium of holy men and women venerated in Latin Christendom. According to tradition, he was a Christian soldier who was arrested for preaching the Christian faith, tied to a pillar and shot through with arrows. He survived, and was healed back to life by Irene, a fellow Christian. Later, when he had resumed his preaching activities, he was clubbed to death. This was part of the Diocletian Persecutions, c.300-c.303.

The cult of Saint Sebastian appears to have emerged in the late fourth century, but it is uncertain whether he was a historical figure or one that was retroactively imagined or created after Christianity had become legal and had undergone some institutional solidification in places such as Rome and Milan. Sebastian's popularity, however, was not steady until the late thirteenth century, and then surged significantly in the fourteenth century. One of the main factors in this development was the inclusion of his story in Legenda Aurea, a collection of legends by the Dominican friar Jacobus de Voragine, later archbishop of Genoa. The collection was disseminated across Latin Christendom, and appeared in numerous translations and vernacular adaptations and imitations. Another main factor for the surging popularity of Sebastian was that Legenda Aurea identified him as a saint who was particularly effective when praying against plague.  

The statue in Compostela, perforated and blood-soaked, followed a typical contemporary iconography established in Italy, where Sebastian is muscular, beardless, and shot trough with arrows. It is uncertain whether the artist operating in Compostela was familiar with the Italian tradition, or whether the similarity in execution is due to indirect influence mediated through workshops in Catalonia or Burgos, for instance. In any case, for the artisans working on this chapel around 1450, it was a modern, trendy rendition of the saint that was taking shape.  

Cathedral museum, Santiago de Compostela

A lesson from the legend of Saint Christopher

I often think that if we, as a twenty-first-century society, ought to be more familiar with the literature of the past, in order to get a better sense of the psychological breadth that humankind contains. While we now have a much better grasp of some of the nuances of the psychological spectrum, our public discourse is often framed by axioms that are too general to capture the variety of human individuals - even though we are living through an age marked by unparalleled individualism. For instance, the idea often attributed to the stereotypical economist, that a person would not do something that was not in their own best interest, makes it difficult to understand how things have developed the way they have for the past ten years or so. Moreover, the ideals touted by the more optimistic types, such as how people will step up in a time of crisis or other variations on that theme, have been severely challenged by the blatant and overt willingness of so many actors to serve those who happen to be in power. In the case of those who take up the yoke offered by authoritarian powers, this is often explained as being driven by economic gain. After all, it is more financially profitable to serve the powerful, however morally ruinous it is.  

However, I find myself unconvinced that economic profit is always the best explanation for why people flock to the powerful. It might be true of the broad majority of such people, but I also believe that a significant number of those who become willing servants of authoritarian powers do so for other motives than just financial gain. This is where medieval literature comes in handy. In particular, I think the legend of Saint Christopher is particularly useful. 

In the Latin Middle Ages, Saint Christopher gained prominence in the thirteenth century, especially following the compilation of the Legenda Aurea by Jacobus de Voragine, which became widely disseminated - including in vernacular translations - from the last quarter of the century onwards. According to this version of the legend, Saint Christopher - originally named Reprobus before his conversion to Christianity - set out to serve the most powerful king. This ambition brings him into the service of a Canaanite king, but at court Christopher learns about the Devil. When witnessing how the mere mention of the Devil makes the king cross himself, Christopher sets out to serve the Devil instead, since he is so much more powerful. After entering into the service of the Devil, however, Cristopher learns that the Devil is afraid of Christ, and so he sets off on a new quest. Instructed by a hermit, Christopher settled by a river to carry travellers across, since such a task would fit the commands of Christ. One day, he carried Christ in the shape of a child across the river, and by this act - which became a popular motif in Latin medieval art - Christopher gained his new name (since Christoforos means Christ-bearer in Greek). 

While I am convinced that Saint Christopher never existed, historical existence is never a requirement for providing valuable lessons. The most important detail in this legend is that Christopher set out to serve, but to serve the most powerful. The reason for this desire is not expressed in the version found in Legenda Aurea, but the desire itself is identified clearly and matter-of-factly. And this is the lesson that I wish we would remember better in our own time, namely that some people are very eager to serve. In some cases, this eagerness is directed towards positive means of service, such as caring for those who need it, or engaging with your local community. But the desire to serve can also be perverted and have power as its lodestone, and there are indeed those who choose their masters simply because they admire and venerate power, no matter the configuration and consequences of that power. Saint Christopher - while he was still Reprobus - provides a clear example of this kind of service, and while we are allowed to doubt the reality of Christopher's story, its relevance for our own time, and its psychological depth, should be clearly acknowledged. 

Saint Christopher carrying the Christ-child (fifteenth century)

Sanderum Church, Denmark

Cantigas de Compostela, part 1: Saint Stephen or Saint Lucy?

In May, I spent a few days in Santiago de Compostela, a city rich in history and a place important to my own academic interests. In future blogposts, I hope to share several details from the Compostela's multilayered past, and I am collecting these posts under the header 'Cantigas de Compostela', an admittedly clumsy alliterative pun on the famous thirteenth-century collections of songs known as the Cantigas de Santa Maria.  

The first instalment in this new series is a reflection on a type of mystery specific to the scholarship on the cult of saints. As I was exploring the impressive museum of the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, I noticed a headless statue carrying two items in a bowl. According to the sign in the museum, the statue is one among several that once decorated one of the cathedral's chapels, and it was made in the middle of the sixteenth century, possibly in a Flemish workshop, or by Flemish masons working in Spain. 

The statue has been identified as Saint Lucy, a virgin martyr from Sicily who was believed to have been killed during the Diocletian persecutions of the early fourth century. Her cult was revivified following the publication of Legenda Aurea written by Jacobus de Voragine in the 1260s, and she features in many works of late-medieval art. At the time of writing, I do not know whether the identification of this statue rests on any information outside what the statue itself provides. For instance, whether there are archival material referencing these statues, earlier descriptions of the chapel from when the head was still attached, surviving fragments, or any other indicators that point in this specific directions. If we consider the statue itself, however, things are less clear.  

The best argument for Lucy as the saint in question is the the bowl containing two items. According to legend, Lucy was blinded, and her eyes became her defining attribute in art, often shown as presented on a plate or a bowl, as in the case of this statue. However, there is also another candidate, namely Saint Stephen, who was stoned to death according to the account given in Acts, and his main attribute in late-medieval art is a selection of stones. The display of these stones can differ according to the medium or the choice of the artists. In statues, the stones are typically held, whereas in paintings or frescoes the stones can be placed elsewhere, as in the case of Carlo Crivelli's rendition, where the stones are balanced on the saint's head and shoulders. In short, we have two saints who are known by their presentation of round or roundish items, and this is all we have to go on in the case of the statue in the cathedral museum. (The clothes do not yield any clues, as without the original paint, which might have included patterns that could have pointed to a specific gender or social position, they are too generic to allow for any conclusions.) 

What about the items themselves? This is, perhaps, the only clue to which we can reasonably cling. Although we should be mindful of the choices of individual artists, or at least different traditions of individual workshops, the number of items is significant. Naturally, Lucy is typically depicted with both her eyes on a plate - even though she is also typically depicted with her eyes in their original place at the same time, because she is a saint and therefore posthumously healed. The stones of Saint Stephen, on the other hand, ordinarily come in slightly higher numbers, either as a pile whose total number is only hinted at by the stones on the top and at the front of the pile, or as three or four held in the saint's hands. While it is possible that an artist or a workshop would depict only two of Saint Stephen's stones, the number does suggest that Lucy might be the correct identification. 

Ultimately, however, we do not know, but the case does serve as a good reminder of how crucial iconography is to the navigation of medieval art, and how sometimes the attribute of a saint might be the only thing that allows us to pinpoint the saint's identity.    

Saint Edmund in late-medieval Denmark - a hint from the Odense Breviary

 

Today, November 20, is the feast of Saint Edmund Martyr, a ninth-century king of East Anglia who, according to legend, was killed by invading Danes. His death is commonly dated to 869/70, following the so-called Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The cult of Saint Edmund – on which I have written several times before – grew significantly in the eleventh century, in large part due to royal protection and munificence, and also due to the abbacy of Baldwin (r. 1065-97). Most likely, it was also during the eleventh century that the cult was actively exported abroad. Herman the Archdeacon’s collection of miracles pertaining to Edmund, written in the 1090s, records how relics were brought to Lucca by Baldwin himself. It is also possible that the veneration of Edmund at the Abbey of Saint-Denis outside Paris was initiated by Baldwin, although the earliest surviving traces of the cult there seems to be from the twelfth century.       

Edmund was also brought to Scandinavia. As of yet, we do not know when the cult arrived there, and where it arrived first. Perhaps the most likely candidate would be Denmark, seeing that Bury St Edmunds was reformed into a monastic house during the reign of Knud II of Denmark, Norway and England. Such a thought is tantalizing, and Knud’s attention to the cult of Edmund appears to be unquestionable, even if we apply the necessary filter of scepticism when reading Herman the Archdeacon’s account of this relationship between king and abbey. However, while Knud’s respect for English saints is demonstrable, this respect and attention, perhaps even veneration, occurs in the context of a foreign king seeking legitimacy in a new kingdom. Consequently, there is little reason to think that Knud II brought Edmund to Denmark, although we should not omit the possibility that someone – perhaps a cleric at Bury – sought to disseminate the cult overseas as well. The main counterargument to a dissemination that early is that there was little cult material with which to spread the knowledge of Edmund. Knud II’s English reign (1014-35) was the abbey’s infancy, and despite the king’s patronage we do not know of any large-scale text production taking place at Bury, or any other kind of production pertaining to the material dimension of a saint’s cult, until Baldwin’s abbacy.           
 
What we do know, however, is that in the course of the twelfth century, we find several references to the cult of Saint Edmund in Scandinavia. He appears in several calendars, there are two Norwegian churches dedicated to him, and liturgical fragments show that his feast was being celebrated, although it was not universally important in either of the three Scandinavian church provinces. In Denmark the death of Edmund is a historical reference point in the Chronicon Roschildense from c.1138, and in Iceland – to step outside of the strictly Scandinavian remit – the same is the case for Ari Frodi’s Íslendingabók from c.1130. Due to the general loss of sources – both textual and pictorial – from twelfth-century Scandinavia, we will never have a complete picture of the extent of Edmund’s cult there, but the sources that do remain suggest a wide dissemination which entered into Scandinavia at different times and by different routes.

One question, however, is how the cult of Edmund fared after the twelfth century. From 1200 onwards, we have more surviving source material – although only a small percentage of what was produced – but we have few clues as to the development or spread of the cult of Edmund. Yet there is one late clue – from 1497 – which might shed some light on the late medieval fate of Edmund’s cult in Scandinavia.

The clue in question is a rubric on folio 435r from the 1497 edition of the Breviarium Othoniense. This was the second edition of the printed breviary, the first being in 1482 and which I have not yet checked for the issue at hand. The rubric opens the office for the feast of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary (d.1231, can. 1235), which is on November 19. In this rubric, it is stated that the Second Vesper of Elizabeth’s feast is not to be celebrated, as this is the feast of Saint Edmund. Instead, psalms are to be sung in Edmund’s honour, although it is worth mentioning that the breviary does not contain any texts for Edmund’s feast. What follows the office for Saint Elizabeth is the feast of the dedication of a church.    

Breviarium Othoniense, 1497, f.435r

The note in the rubric, and the absence of any further indications about Edmund’s feast, suggest that Edmund’s importance in the diocese of Odense had dwindled significantly by the later medieval period, and these two elements also suggest how it happened. Elizabeth of Hungary was one of the most universally famous new saints in from the thirteenth century onwards – universally within Latin Christendom that is. Her widespread popularity was due to three main factors. First of all, her canonized status in a period when the papal church was actively asserting its power through its claim to monopoly over canonization. Secondly, the Franciscan order’s network and influence. Thirdly, her inclusion in Jacobus de Voragine’s collection of saints’ legends, Legenda Aurea. Which factor had the greatest impact in Denmark is difficult to assess, although my preliminary guess would be the Franciscan influence.

Due to Elizabeth’s importance, she appears to have eclipsed that of Edmund. Granted, that the rubric does acknowledge Edmund’s feast suggests that he was not entirely superseded, but that the celebration of his feast is marked as being ferial psalms – i.e., an everyday office rather than an office of a Sunday – points to Edmund being kept more for tradition than devotion.     

We – or at least I – do not know when Saint Elizabeth came to replace Saint Edmund. The difficulty of using the Odense breviary is that the monastic community that comprised the cathedral chapter in Odense from c.1100 onwards was reformed into a secular house in the mid-fifteenth century. Indeed, it was most likely this reform which prompted the printing of the Odense breviary in 1482, since the liturgy needed to be adapted to the secular use. Consequently, we cannot know whether rubrics such as this one was copied from an older, monastic breviary, or whether Saint Elizabeth’s replacement of Edmund was part of the reform. The question is complicated by the Franciscans’ strong position in Odense, which has made it entirely plausible that the feast of Saint Elizabeth might have been introduced as early as the thirteenth century.

Ultimately, we cannot say for certain when this replacement took place, but we do see that it took place, and through the replacement we can see how a Danish bishopric responded to changes in ongoing trends within the cult of saints. From this little rubric, we might, therefore, get a better sense of what happened to Edmund’s cult in Denmark.

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. 

Saint George in Skive

 
Today, April 23, is the feast of Saint George, a saint with whom I am particularly fascinated, and about whom I have already written several blogposts (see below). Due to the widespread popularity of Saint George in the later Middle Ages, there are several depictions and narrations of his legend - in text and image - which survive from Latin Christendom. In this cultural geography, Latin Christendom, the figure of Saint George became increasingly well known in the course of the twelfth century, possibly because his legend made it possible for him to be reactualised and reimagined as a chivalric figure. This hypothesis is supported by the shift from illuminations focusing on his elaborate and gruesome passion narrative to his victory over the dragon. From the fourteenth century onwards, however, the popularity of Saint George skyrocketed thanks to two converging and related factors: The popularity and accessibility of Legenda Aurea, through which the legend was disseminated more broadly and to new audiences, and Saint George's inclusion among the fourteen holy helpers, a group of saints with changeable configuration which emerged in Germany. 

For this year's feast of Saint George, I present you with one depiction which, as I argue in a forthcoming article, is a consequence of impulses from both Legenda Aurea and German religious trends. The depiction in question comes from the Church of Our Lady in Skive, a church from c.1200 and decorated with an extensive programme of wall-paintings in 1522.

The image in question is found in a section of one of the vaults in the nave of the church. In these vaults, saints are predominantly depicted in pairs, and Saint George is shown together with Saint Knud Dux (also known as Saint Knud Lavard). The depiction of Saint George is both typical and untypical at the same time. Since the saint is shown as emerging from a flower - as are almost all the other saints, with the curious exception of Erasmus - the choreography of the scene is different, as there is no horse, and George wields a sword rather than a lance. The position of the saint above the dragon, however, and the saint wearing contemporary armour, are both common features. Interestingly, since Saint George emerges from a flower, the artist has taken the opportunity to increase the drama of their encounter by making the dragon tangle his tail around the stem of the flower, thereby seeking to topple his antagonist. 

The wall-paintings at Skive are intriguing, both for their variety, their typicality, and their untypicality. There are still several questions that remain to be answered, and even more questions that will never be answered in a fully satisfactory way. For instance, we do not know why Saint George is paired with Saint Knud Dux. The number of such details and the various possible interpretations mean that we scholars will continue to grind our brains against the wall-paintings in Skive for generations to come, and that's part of the fun of it. 

Similar blogposts concerning Saint George 

Saint George and Saint Edward the Confessor in comparison 

Saint George in Odense 

Saint George in the Old English Martyrology 

Saint Alexandria, the martyr-queen 

Saint George in Ribe  

The changing iconography of Saint George 

Saint George at Sanderum  


Similar blogposts concerning Skive Church 

Saint Martin in Skive 

Saint Olaf in late-medieval Denmark 

Saint Thomas of Canterbury in Skive 

Saint Servatius in Skive 

Saint Margaret's in winter

Last Sunday, two friends and I took a trip to a lake called Maridalsvann north of Oslo to visit the ruins of the Church of Saint Margaret. This is a thirteenth-century church located close to the lake shore in the northwestern quadrant, and must once have been the religious centre of a wide remit of farms in the hinterland of Oslo. The church has a small but relatively spacious nave and a small square-walled choir.

To my knowledge, no surviving medieval sources provide any detailed knowledge of the history of the church, and the traditional dating to c.1250 appears to be largely on architectural grounds. Its dedication to Saint Margaret of Antioch is attested in later sources, but it is unclear whether this was the original dedication. If the church was dedicated to Saint Margaret already around 1250, this would be a remarkably early attestation of her cult in medieval Norway. While Saint Margaret was probably known by name in Norway since the official conversion of the country to Christianity in the eleventh century, she was not widely famous until the fourteenth century, when the joint impulses of Legenda Aurea and the cult of the fourteen holy helpers improved her standing. In comparison, the altar of Saint Margaret in Oslo cathedral is first attested in 1329 in a letter of property exchange (although the altar was probably established earlier than that).  

Sufficiently much of the outline of the church remains today that it is possible to get a good impression of its place in the landscape, and of its original splendour. Small though it is, it would probably have been a magnificent building in its prime, visible to travellers between Oslo and the hamlets further north. The ubiquitous snow made for a particularly atmospheric view. 

A model that provides a good estimate of how the church once looked

Somewhere beyond the mist and the lake lies Saint Margaret's Church

Saint George at Sanderum

 

Today is the feast of Saint George, the martyr most famous for his slaying of a dragon, and who might be one of the most famous saints in the modern cultural landscape. As I have explored in a previous blogpost, the motif of the dragonslayer - which has had an immense impact on post-medieval iconography - appears to have become the dominant rendition of Saint George sometime towards the end of the thirteenth century. Exactly what prompted this shift from focussing on his elaborate martyrdom to highlighting his victory over the dragon remains unclear. There are several explanations that might have contributed to this development, such as the impact of the crusader movement, or the establishment of chivalric orders. One factor that is likely to have contributed significantly towards this change in emphasis might be the legacy of Jacobus de Vorgaine's Legenda Aurea, a collection of saints' legends that was translated into several vernaculars from the fourteenth century onwards, and which brought the cult of Saint George more strongly into a non-ecclesiastical sphere. It is likely - although not conclusively established - that with segments of lay society having a greater impact on the cult of Saint George, the motif of the dragonslayer might have become more appealing than the image of George tortured on a wheel, his bones broken in the manner of an executed criminal. 

Whatever the reason for the shift towards Saint George as the dragonslayer, by the end of the Middle Ages this image was widely distributed and rendered by artists throughout Latin Christendom. For this year's feast of Saint George, I give you one late-medieval example from the church of Sanderum in Denmark, where a heavily-restored Saint George can be seen piercing his lance into the dragon in the arch dividing the choir from the nave. The image is most likely from the fifteenth-century, and the saint is shown in contemporary chivalric gear - albeit an idealised rendition. Saint George's cult in Denmark is most likely a consequence of impulses from Germany, where George was one of the most common members of the collegium of the fourteen holy helpers, although the constellation of this collegium was subject to local variations.         

Achronology and the lives of saints - the case of Saint Servatius at Skive Church, Denmark

 
In a previous blogpost, I wrote about how medieval art sometimes condenses elements of a saint’s life into an achronological summary, where several key points from different parts of a saint’s life are brought into the same frozen here-and-now. This kind of amalgamation is part of what Cynthia Hahn has called “pictorial hagiography”, a term that reminds us that medieval art had a narrative function, and that a single image could convey an entire story. This kind of narrative snapshot, however, is not uniquely medieval, and it is not something we have lost in our own time, but we often tend to forget that this kind of sophisticated thinking where chronological borders melt into one another was also present in the Middle Ages.            

When last I wrote about this issue on the blog, I used an example from the Church of Our Lady at Skive, a town in Northern Jutland. The church, built around 1200, contains an impressive programme of frescoes depicting saints, a programme that was painted in 1522, a date which has been incorporated into several of the frescoes. My example then was Saint Martin, shown in bishop’s attire while cutting his cloak in half, a deed he committed when he was still a soldier. The other day, however, I came across yet another example from the same wall-painting programme, and as this example works slightly differently from the case of Saint Martin, I decided to dedicate this blogpost especially to analysing it. 

Eminen and his son Servatius, the future bishop

The saint in question is Saint Servatius of Maastricht, shown in one of the vaults of the church nave, who was venerated as a relative of Christ through his great-grandmother, Hismeria, was the sister of Anna, the grandmother of Christ. In this way, Saint Servatius was part of the extended holy family, whose members had been recorded in apocryphal literature. When Jacobus de Voragine composed his Legenda Aurea in the 1260s, he provided an overview of this extended family in his chapter on the Nativity of the Virgin Mary (September 8). While Legenda Aurea was a repository of already well-established knowledge, and therefore did not contain much in terms of new information, the popularity of the book ensured that a lot of details concerning the saints became more widely and commonly known as Legenda Aurea and its translations spread across Latin Christendom in the Later Middle Ages. These details also reached Denmark.        

The case of Saint Servatius is a particularly interesting example of how Legenda Aurea functioned as a vehicle of canonicity. By this I mean that information that had not been widely known, or perhaps not widely accepted, was transformed into established canon through the sheer popularity and reach of Jacobus’ book. Before the 1260s, the cult of Saint Servatius was predominantly, perhaps exclusively, located in Maastricht, where his relics were kept. I do not yet know the history of the legend of Servatius and his kinship with Christ, and I do not yet know how it emerged at Maastricht, but by the mid-thirteenth century, the claim that Servatius was of the Holy Family had reached Genoa and was incorporated into Legenda Aurea and established as a canonical fact. It should also be noted that this kind of historical refashioning or reimagining of the history of a patron saint was not uncommon in the Middle Ages, although not every such refashioning had the impact of Saint Servatius.

We do not know how the knowledge of the kinship between Christ and Saint Servatius reached Northern Jutland, but there were many possible routes by which that information could have travelled, be it directly from Legenda Aurea, from a German translation, through sermons, through merchants, and so on. Saint Servatius’ presence in Skive is, therefore, no surprise. What is particularly interesting is, as stated earlier, the way that the fresco in Skive combines crucial elements of his life. As can be seen in the picture above, Servatius is shown as a child wearing a bishop’s mitre. That he is intended to be understood as a child is clear when we compare his size with that of his father Eminen, standing next to him. Does this mean that Servatius was understood as a child-bishop? Probably not. Most likely, what we see here is a way of highlighting that he was a member of the holy family, but a young member of a later generation than that of his great-grandmother Hismeria and his great-grandaunt Anna. A similar way of showing the difference between generations can be seen in the depiction of John the Baptist in another section of the vault, where he, too, is depicted as a child. This kind of representation of several generations in one image is typical of the images that modern scholarship call Anna self-third, where we see the three generations of Anna, the Virgin Mary, and the Christchild. This iconography was very popular in the Later Middle Ages.         

The depiction of Servatius as a child, then, shows his kinship with Christ and as a late generation of the holy family. In other words, we see an element of the very beginning of his life, an element that in and of itself was cause for a claim to holiness. The simultaneous depiction of him as a bishop, however, points to a later part of his life – a part that would become his future when he was a child, and that was also a part of the distant past by the time this image was painted in Northern Jutland. Onlookers would, in this way, get a summary of Servatius most salient claims to holiness, his kinship and his office as a bishop, in one and the same glance.

A multiplicity of Maximuses - methodological aspects of saint scholarship

 
Saturday, I collected a package at the local post office which contained a very useful tool for my current research, namely the latest edition of The Book of Saints, an encyclopedia that has grown out of generations of Benedictine scholarship on the cult of saints. Considering that my current job consists in part of entering names of saints from medieval calendars into a database, this book is immensely valuable for determining some of the many cases where a saint's identity is uncertain. And while I had known for quite a while that there are numerous instances where several saints share the same name, I had rarely had to deal with this in my own research. Previously, I have mostly worked on saints whose cults were extensive and whose figures were easily identifiable - if sometimes confused - and there have been very few cases where I have spent a lot of time trying to ascertain the identity of a specific saint. This situation was to change very rapidly as I started in my current job. 

The main part of my current work is centred on fragments of medieval calendars used in Sweden, many of which were either imported from England, or produced by copying an older English calendar, and together these fragments span the period c.1100 to c.1500. For the most part, identifying the saints in these calendars is easy enough to do, as the majority of saints are sufficiently well established in Latin Christendom, and sufficiently well known by scholarship. In some cases, the name is all that is necessary for determining which saint we are dealing with, or the date of the feast. And some saints are so well established that even in the cases where the name is misspelled or the feast is misplaced, it does not require a lot of effort to piece the puzzle together. 

However, in some cases there are saints whose inclusion in the calendar is essentially a vestige of a practice established a long time ago which has essentially fallen into oblivion, maintained only because the name can be found, even though the ministrants might have no clear idea of who this saint is or when and where the saint operated, or perhaps not even what patronage the saint is supposed to have. These are saints so minor in their fame and popularity that not even the shortest chapters of Jacobus de Voragine's Legenda Aurea from c.1260 - which arguably brought a lot of saints out of complete oblivion - have saved them from becoming skeleton cults, names serving as echoes of a lost past. It is when saints attain this level of near-forgottenness that they become problematic for the modern-day scholar. Saints such as these are often perfunctorily recorded in calendars because they are included in the older calendar used as a model - and sometimes they are misspelled, or misplaced, or simply confused with other saints of a similar name. 

In the course of my work on Swedish calendars - about which I will not go into great detail here - I have several times spent more time than I had anticipated, indeed hoped, in trying to establish which Victor, which Eusebius, or which Maximus is actually meant in a badly water-damaged calendar fragment. And in cases such as these, where the name is shared by a great number of individuals - many of which are of such an uncertain historicity that their legends have become confused with one another - it is extremely needful to have several tools such as The Book of Saints. Because even though they might not shed all the required light on the errors of a scribe centuries ago, they might help in the process of narrowing down the possible options. This is especially useful when encountering a Maximus - or a variant of that name - who is merely identified as a martyr, a confessor, and a priest, because there are, as the pages below demonstrate, a long, long list of possible candidates. There is, indeed, a multiplicity of Maximuses - and Eusebiuses, and Victors and others - that need to be carefully sifted through in order to arrive at some sort of conclusion. And even then it is entirely possible that that conclusion is wrong.     

Saint Mauritius in Roskilde

Today, September 22, is the feast of Saint Mauritius of the Theban legion. According to legend, he was the commander of an Egyptian contingent of the Roman army who were stationed in the Alps during the reign of Diocletian (284-306). These soldiers were Christian, and when they refused to recant their faith, they were all martyred. While the exact number of these martyrs differs from version to version, they are usually counted in the thousands, and this has spawned several offshoots of the cult, where individual members of the troop are said to have survived for a bit longer and become martyrs elsewhere. The large majority of these saints are anonymous. 

The cult of the martyrs of the Theban legion is particularly pronounced in the Alps, and cult centres dedicated to them can be found in all the Alpine countries, as seen in the case of St. Moritz in Switzerland.  Beyond the Alpine region, however, I do not know how well-known was the cult prior to the mid-thirteenth century. It is likely, however, that the inclusion of the legend of Mauritius and his companions in Legenda Aurea by Jacobus de Vorgaine made Saint Mauritius into a saint known throughout all of Latin Christendom. 

One of the Scandinavian witnesses to his cult can be found in the cathedral of Roskilde, which was decorated with extensive wall-painting programmes towards the end of the fifteenth century. In the chapel of the three kings, Saint Mauritius can be see on the wall behind one of the statues of the grave of King Frederik II (d.1588) and Queen Sophie of Mecklenburg (d.1631). Already in the thirteenth century, if not earlier, Mauritius was often portrayed as a black man, pointing to him being from Africa, and his iconography is one of our best sources to how Africans were depicted in Latin Christendom.