Mary the Maiden, Christ the Unicorn

Many a time did the older hands mutter something about virginity, maidenhead; and this, with a melancholy shake of the head conveyed all that was to be conveyed
- Patrick O'Brian, The Hundred Days

As every medievalist knows, back in the Middle Ages unicorns were fierce beasts. They were too swift for hunters and could easily outrun any man. For this reason, there was only one way of catching them: A maiden must go to the unicorn's territory and sit down and wait for it to discover her. When the unicorn sees the maiden, he will immedately come to her, embrace her and place his head in her lap.

This description of its behaviour appears to be universally agreed upon in all medieval bestiaries, and there have survived numerous depictions of this scene. Most of these depictions are like the ones shown towards the end of this blogpost: scenes in which the smiling unicorn in the maiden's lap is given the death-blow by a hunter or a knight. The imagery of these renditions and the very symbolism of the unicorn legend has a distinct erotic quality, although this quality is not acknowledged in medieval expositions of the unicorn - at least not to my knowledge.

Instead, the writer of a bestiary was concerned with another symbolic dimension, and this one was made overtly clear in all cases: The unicorn was a symbol of Jesus Christ. Or, as it is more aptly stated in one bestiary: "Our Lord Jesus Christ is the spiritual unicorn" (quoted from Richard Barber's incomplete translation of MS. Bodley 764). This same bestiary,also connects the unicorn imagery to biblical typology by a refrence to Song of Songs 2:9, where it says, in the Vulgate, "Similis est dilectus meus capreae, hinnuloque cervorum", which in the New International Version of the Bible is translated "My beloved is like a gazelle or a young stag". As you will notice, neither the Vulgate nor the modern rendition mentions unicorns, so the medieval authors looking for a typological connection between Christ and the unicorn, interpreted the gazelle of the Song of Songs as a reference to Christ the spiritual unicorn. The Christic symbolism of the unicorn was well-known in the Middle Ages and various renditions of this symbolism can be found in medieval art.

A few weeks ago, a good friend and I were at the Danish National Museum in Copenhagen, which is a wonderful museum housing a number of interesting collections - we spent about four hours there, but only had time to get through the medieval and the pre-historic sections. One of the first items exhibited in the medieval section was the altar piece seen below, and I was very surprised by its motif, or rather its conflation of two typical and usually distinct medieval motifs.

In this altar front, the Annunciation (Luke 1) where Gabriel announces to Mary that she will bear the world's saviour, is rendered as a typical depiction of a unicorn hunt. The scene itself is ubiquitously identified by the text on the top of frame, where it is written a well-known passage from the passage in Luke: Ave gratia plena Dominus tecum (Hail [Mary] full of gifts, God be with you. (I have here translated "gratia" not as "grace" but as "gifts" since that is closer to the meaning of "gratia".)

The altar front is item number D1257 of the Danish National Museum, and it is assumed to be a Dutch-inspired work from Northern Germany. c.1525. It belonged to Gyrstinge Church in Sjælland, Denmark. The frame is painted to resemble textile.

As an Annunciation scene, this one seemed to me highly unusual since it applies such a traditionally violent motif as an allegorical vehicle. Gabriel is the hunter whose dogs - identified by the curators as Mercy and Peace - chase the unicorn into the lap, or rather in this case into the womb of the maiden. This is a curious reversal of the traditional unicorn legend: Here it is not the maiden who lures the wily unicorn to its lap so that the hunter can kill it. Instead, it is the hunter - horn in hand and dogs in a leash - who drives the unicorn towards the maiden, while God beholds everything from above in his papal tiara. Because of the reversal of the traditional scene, there is no death but rather a conception, there is no violence and no death, and the erotic imagery common to the unicorn motif has disappeared.

Mary receives the unicorn

Gabriel with his dogs

[Edit:] Since first writing this blogpost, I was alerted to the fact that this conflation is "a standard iconography of Gabriel on the mystical hunt", to quote Henrike Lähnemann. She very helpfully directed me to a lectern cloth whose rendition of this scene is very similar to the one depicted above, which comes from Ebstorf Abbey in Northern Germany. The cloth can be seen here.
As a contrast to this highly religious rendition of the motif, here are two scenes from English bestiaries, both from the thirteenth century. As can be seen, there are many similarities between the these illuminations and the altar fronts, but also some differences - which makes sense given the different message of the altar front.

BL MS Harley 3244, f.38, Peraldus, theological miscellany, 2nd or 3rd quarter of 13th century

Courtesy of British Library

BL MS Royal 12 F XIII, f.10v, bestiary, England, 2nd quarter of the 13th century

Courtesy of British Library

Bibliography


Richard Barber (editor and translator), Bestiary, The Folio Society, 1992 (this is an abridgement)

T. H. White (editor and translator), The Book of Beasts, Dover Publications, 1984






For similar blogposts, see:


A poem based on BL MS Royal 12 F XIII

An artist's conflation of Saint George and Saint Ladislas

On the lynx in the medieval imagination

On Saint Edmund as a hedgehog

On the Annunciation and the Passion falling on the same day

Poems on the Annunciation

Detours of academic research - Saint Edmund and his reintegrated body

Academic research does not progress in a straight line. This is knowledge than any academic will accumulate in the course of their career, and it is not necessarily a bad thing. At this point I'm halfway through my PhD, and in those years I have been active as a researcher there have been several detours from my main research trajectory. In some cases, such detours have led me to very fruitful results, as when I tried to map the occurrences of the word "decus" in royal hagiography. Other times, these detours have been a complete waste of time, for instance when I spent an entire workday trying to find the origin of a Latin proverb only marginally relevant to my work, without any success at all. In the following blogpost, I want to share a minor detour which in the end put me on the right track, from my current research.

These past days I've been working extensively on the liturgical material for the feast of Edmund Martyr. His cult and the literature of that cult is one of the three case studies for my PhD thesis, and that means examining and translating a lot of material. At this point, I'm working my way through the chants for Matins in the office for Edmund, as transmitted in MS Pierpont Morgan 736, a manuscript from Bury St Edmunds dated to c.1130. This manuscript has, to my knowledge, not been edited, and I have therefore had to transcribe the entire thing myself, which has been something of a baptism by fire in paleography. The process has been very educational, and it has taken a long time. It has also needed a lot of revising, and sometimes my transcriptions have not been correct in the first place. Trying to find out what the original handwriting actually says, is precisely something that precipitates detours.

Antiphons of the second nocturne of the office for Saint Edmund

Photograph of a photocopy

MS Pierpont Morgan 736, f.94r

Today, my challenge was an antiphon from the second nocturne in the office for Saint Edmund. Antiphons are brief chants performed after each psalm during Matins. Each psalm can have its own individual antiphon. In some cases, the antiphons are taken from a common repository known as the commune sanctorum, the common of saints. In other cases, such as in the office for Edmund, the antiphons are composed specifically for that saint.

Since antiphons are musical pieces and sometimes have notation, as seen above, it is sometimes challenging to decide whether the space between strings of letters indicate a change to a new word, or whether it indicates a liturgical elongation, i.e. a word made longer through song (as when you sing "can't" as "caaaan't" and write it "ca an't"). This problem tricked me many times during my first round of transcribing, because I was not used to this phenomenon.

The antiphon I'm talking of here is the one marked as #57 in the picture above. Its text tells about the translation of the body of Edmund which was incorrupt and entire, despite Edmund being beheaded by the Danes. The text goes like this:

Translato thesauro signum divinum incorrupti et redintegrati corporis enituit vena tantum resplenduit sanguinea quo daret indicium illo sanctum pertulisse martyrium

[In the translation of this treasure, as a divine sign the incorrupt and reintegrated body shone and a bloody vein radiated so much as to give an indication of this holy one who had suffered martyrdom. (My rough translation)]

Translation of Edmund's corpse, guarded by the wolf

MS Harley 2278, John Lydgate's life of Edmund and Fremund, England, between 1434 and 1439

Courtesy of British Library

The problem for me was that I had not been careful enough when transcribing, and I had been fooled by the space which is set between "redinte" and "grati", making one word seem like two. When I was sitting down to translate this I hit one major obstacle, namely the fact that "redinte" is not a word in the Latin lexicon, at least not according the comprehensive but incomplete database of William Whitaker's Words. "Grati" was not a problem as such, since it is a possible form of "gratia", which can be translated as "favour", "goodwill" or "gift", but it did not help at all when "redinte" could not be translated.

After racking my brain a bit and still not realizing that the two words were actually one, I googled the line "redinte grati corpori", hoping that there would be some text or other that contained the same combination of words. The search did not yield any direct hits, but it did send me to a digitized version of Augustine's De genesi ad literam, a commentary on the book of Genesis. This particular version which I was lead to, is the third volume of an edition of Augustine's works, edited in Lyons in 1586. The phrase which led me to this particular book was "redintegratus corporibus", the renewal or revival of the bodies. This made me finally realize what was going on in the liturgical manuscript.

Augustine's use of this phrase has most likely no connection at all to the use of "redintegrati corporis" in the office for Saint Edmund. It is of course possible that the composer or composers of these chants was/were familiar with Augustine's commentary on Genesis, and it is even possible that they had that particular book in mind when putting this antiphon together. But without any more tangible proof of such a connection, I hesitate to make any such conclusions. Instead, the fact that a similar phrase to the one in the antiphon is found in Augustine, is a useful reminder that such detours in research can end in surprising and at the same time helpful results.

Similar blogposts:

Methodology of negatives

Edmund's hedgehog iconography

The finding of Edmund's head in a twelfth-century satirical poem

Time in medieval liturgical thought

 

The woodlouse at the hem of St Francis' habit - a poem by Helen Dunmore

I recently finished reading Helen Dunmore's collection of poetry Bestiary from 1997 (published by Bloodaxe Books). This is the first book by Dunmore I have read, and it appeared in my pigeonhole at work because I had included this title during a inter-library loaning frenzy (in which I frequently indulge). This was a happy accident, because although I found the overall strength of the collection to be less touching than I had hoped, the book does indeed contain some very, very beautiful poems. In this blogpost I wish to present you with one of these, as indicated in the blogpost's title.


The woodlouse at the hem of St Francis' habit

The woodlouse at the hem of St Francis' habit
lay on its back, waiting for the saint to stroke it
and spin a prayer around its name.

Little woodlouse, God's armoured car
true inspiration of the Roman testudo
you and I are brothers, the same.

To the side of the picture St Clare
looked at St Francis with her face ajar
and the light comeing out of it
onto woodlice and spiders.

If a million woodlice honouring Francis
bore him on their backs, a burden
fit for their armour,
then Clare would be carried alongside
by the hundred million feet of centipedes -

she would not want more,
but in the lgiht of being a woman
she would want the same.

The bleeding Francis and Claire with the monstrance

Paris - Bibl. Mazarine - ms.0996, f.145v, unknown date, unknown provenance

Courtesy of enluminures.culture.fr

Scenes from a small Spanish village

This weekend I was in Spain to attend the wedding of two friends. The wedding itself was held in Ciudad Rodrigo, situated between the city of Salamanca and the border to Portugal, and it was a splendid affair to which I hope to return later on this blog. In this blogpost, however, I wish to present a few small glimpses from a small village, which is the native village of the bride and where there was a family barbecue the day after the wedding itself.

The village is called Pastores and belongs to jurisdiction of Ciudad Rodrigo. It is a very small place, and its present population counts to around 60 inhabitants. I am myself from a small place, and so I explored this little village with great fondness, and I was very happy to see the various ways in which the villagers had invested time, effort and pride into the arrangement of the village.

 

Entrance into Pastores along one of its two main streets, with the church in the background

The most prominent building in Pastores is the church, as seen below. Fittingly, the church is presided over by a stork, who in its black and white plumage bears a striking resemblance to a Dominican friar.

The church, with its guardian stork

Like all Spanish villages with self-respect, Pastores has its own main square, the plaza mayor, as seen below.

Hoofprints in the concrete

Perhaps the most charming feature of Pastores is the small, but beautiful botanical garden, which is kept at the very outskirts of the village. It is covered with various plants, but it is not completely without order, as the villagers have made space for some flowerbeds, separating the cultivated from the wild in the manner of a proper botanical garden.

The Vanishing Islands - or, Excerpts from the cultural history of the whale

HAMLET: Or like a whale.
POLONIUS: Very like a whale
- Wiliam Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 2

Yesterday, it was the feast of Saint Brendan the Navigator (c.486-575), abbot of Clonfert. Most of his fame both today and in the medieval period owed much to the account Navigatio Brendani, which was written in the 8th or 9th century. This narrative recounts how Brendan and a group of monks set out in a boat - usually identified as an irish curragh - to find the gates of Paradise. They achieve their goal, but can not enter, and on their way they encounter several wonders of the seas, including an iceberg and a whale mistaken for an island.

Landfall - or rather, whalefall

Besançon - BM - ms. 0551, f.026, Miracles de Notre Dame, Gautier de Coinci, 13th century

Courtesy of enluminures.culture.fr

The episode of Brendan's landfall on a sleeping whale is perhaps the most iconic and well-known episode in the Navigatio. To confuse sea-beasts with islands has become a literary motif, and it might have been so already at the time of the Navigatio's composition. We find some brief excerpts of this motif's cultural history in Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, where the three protagonists of the novel discuss the size of octopuses and provide some examples of such beasts being mistaken for islands.

Today I received a book which is very pertinent to the discussion of this motif, and in this blogpost I therefore wish to quote at length from it. The book in question is a translation of a twelfth-century bestiary by T. H. White (author of The Once and Future King), contained in Cambridge University Library, II.4.26. The MS was edited in 1928 by M. R. James. The quotation below does not come from the chapter on the balene, but the asipdo-delone, which is identified in the bestiary as a cetus, which, like balene, means whale.

Things are heating up

Chalon-sur-Saône - BM - ms. 0014, f.089v, bestiary, c.1280

Courtesy of enluminures.culture.fr

There is an ocean monster which is called an ASPIDO DELONE in Greek. On the other hand, it is called a WHALE (cetus) because of the frightfulness of its body and because it was this animal which swallowed (excepit) Jonah, and its belly was so great that people took it to be Hell. Jona himself remarked: 'He heard me out of the belly of Hell' [Jonah 2:2].

This animal lifts its back out of the open sea above the water waves, and then it anchors itself in the one place; and on its back, what with the shingle of the ocean drawn there by the gales, a level lawn gets made and bushes begin to grow there. Sailing ships that happen to be going that way take it to be an island, and land on it. Then they make themselves a fireplace. But the Whale, feeling the hotness of the fire, suddenly plunges down into the depths of the deep, and pulls down the anchored ship with it into the profound.

Now this is just the way in which unbelievers get paid out, I mean the people who are ignorant of the wiles of the Devil and place their hopes in him and in his works. They anchor themselves to him, and down they go into the fires of Hell.

The nature of this monster is that whenever it feels hungry it opens its mouth and blows out a sort of pleasantly-smelling breath, and, when the smaller fishes notice the odour of this, they crowd together in the mouth. Naturally, when the monster feels his mouth to be full, he shuts it at once. Thus he swallows them down.

That is the way in which human people who are lacking in faith get addicted to pleasures. They pander to their grub as if it we re perfume. Then suddenly the Devil gobbles them up.
- Bestiary, translated by T. H. White as "The Book of Beasts", Dover Publications, 2015: 197-98

Stranded on a whale, with fatal results

Dijon - BM - ms. 0526, literary miscellany, 14th century

Courtesy of enluminures.culture.fr

For similar blogposts:

Oxen under the Sea (Adam of Bremen's treatment of the walrus)

The Chill of the Hunt (on how to hunt an elephant)

The Divided Child (Derek Walcott's poem on a beached whale)

The Legend of Gordianus and Epimachus

Yesterday, May 10, was the feast of Gordianus and Epimachus.  According to tradition, both saints are believed to have suffered at the same period. As for the the time of this period, sources differ. David Farmer sets the time of their martyrdoms at around 250, which corresponds to the persecutions during the reign of Decius. In Legenda Aurea, however, sets the time to c.360, and their deaths are linked to the reign of Julian the Apostate (361-363).

Although they are usually venerated together, at least in the later medieval period, it is clear from legend that they did not suffer together, and the veneration probably comes from the fact that they were both buried in the same church, although Epimachus was buried first. In the Old English Martyrology, however, only Gordianus is mentioned in the entry for May 10:

On the tenth day of the month is the feast of the martyr St Gordianus, whose body rests in Rome, and his commemoration is to be celebrated with masses in all churches.
- The Old English Martyrology, translated by Christine Rauer, D. S. Brewer, 2013: 103

As suggested by the entry from the Martyrology, very little was known about these saints even in the Middle Ages. A more expansive, but also more unreliable, account can be found in Legenda Aurea.

Gordianus and Epimachus

Avignon - BM - ms. 0136, f.239v, Roman Missal, c.1370

Courtesy of enluminures.culture.fr

Gordianus comes from geos, which means dogma or house, and dyan, which maens bright; hence a bright house in which God dwelt. Thus Augustine says in the book The City of God: "A good house is one in which the parts fit well together, and which is spacious and full of light." So Saint Gordianus was well disposed by maintaining harmony, spacious through charity, and filled with the light of truth. Epimachus comes from epi, above, and machin, king, so a high king; or from epi, above, and machos, fight, so a fighter for the things above.

Gordianus was a commissioner of Emperor Julian. Once he was trying to compel a Christian named Januarius to sacrifice to the gods, but listened to his preaching and, with his wife Mariria and fifty-three tohers, was converted to the faith. When Julian learned of this, he sent Januarius into exile and condemned Gordianus to be beheaded if he refused to offer sacrifice. So blessed Gordianus was beheaded and his body thrown to the dogs, but when it lay untouched for a week, his retainers took it away and buried it with the body of Saint Epimachius, whom the aforestaid Julian had had put to death a short time earlier. They were buried about a mile from the city about A. D. 360.
- Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend, translated by William Granger Ryan, Princeton University Press, 2012: 308-09

Gordianus and Epimachus

Limoges - BM - ms. 0002, f. 138, Gradual, Use of Notre-Dame de Fontevrault, c.1250-1260

Courtesy of enluminures.culture.fr

The account by Jacobus de Voragine contains a number of motifs and topoi typical of the early martyr stories. The conversion of an antagonistic pagan and his family, the refusal to offer sacrifice to the pagan gods, the martyrdom of a largely unnamed crowd of Christians, and the saint's body thrown to animals but not devoured, and then buried in secret by other Christians. When these motifs are peeled away, it is evident that little which bears the resemblance of facts remains.

Bibliography

Farmer, David, The Oxford Dictionary of Saints, Oxford University Press, 2004
Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend, translated by William Granger Ryan, Princeton University Press, 2012

Rauer, Christine (ed. and transl.) The Old English Martyrology, D. S. Brewer, 2013

Excavations in Odense - the Middle Ages brought to light

In the city of Odense, Denmark, where I currently live, there is an ongoing excavation in the city-centre, and today there was an open day at the excavation area for the general public to have a look at some of the recent work. Naturally, I decided to go into town and have a look for myself.

Odense is an old settlement, and its name is first recorded in an imperial charter from 988, a time when Svein Tveskæg (Forkbeard) was king of Denmark. In this charter, Emperor Otto III accords privileges to the Danish bishoprics, and is commonly referred to as Odense's birth certificate. The city itself is much older, and recent archaeological excavations have shown that during the reign of Harald Blåtand (Bluetooth) (c.930-c.987) the city was an important royal centre with defensive ramparts. It was during the reign of Harald Blåtand that Denmark adopted Christianity after pressure from the German empire. This led to the establishment of the Danish bishoprics, and a recent excavation in Odense unearthed a bishop's tomb on the spot where the first church was built in the city. This church was made of wood and dedicated to Saint Alban, the English protomartyr. It was in this church that King Knud IV (Canute) was killed in 1086 following an uprising from the nobility and brought on mainly by excessive taxation. Knud was later translated to a new church and canonized in 1102. This church is the city's cathedral and was a Benedictine church in the Middle Ages.

From the 12th century onwards Odense was an important Danish city and this can be seen in some of the results from the ongoing excavations.

Area of the excavations. To the right, the new, Catholic St. Alban's church (1908)

To the left, the washing tent where the soil from the dig is examined

Much of the ongoing excavation is done outside what was once the bishop's palace (not pictured), and where there had been a cemetery in pre-Reformation times. In the washing tent (above) they have found many remnants from the late-medieval market square and from what is possibly the kitchen scraps from the dinners of several bishops. I popped by the tent and had a look, and only today they had discovered several nutshells, old bones and even fish scales. I was allowed to give the washing a try myself and I felt a distinctly boyish excitement as I was washing away the sand and could find several animal bones and fish scale as well.

In the pictures below we see a house which belonged to the guild of Our Lady in the 15th century. The guild itself was established around 1435, while the house is referred to in a textual document from the mid-fifteenth-century, and it is mentioned as belonging to the guild. The dating of the house itself is still not certain, since it is unknown whether the guild had the house built or whether the guildmen moved into a house that was already in place.

Below are some pictures from the excavated cemetery. The skeletons (see further below) are not yet dated, and an archaeologist at the scene told me that they could be from anywhere between 1000 and 1500.

In the pictures below we see the remnants of a wooden structure far deep in the loam. The archaeologists have suggested that it was a bridge that once crossed a moat built to protect the episcopal palace from attacks. This hypothesis is strengthened by the accounts from when the bishop's quarters were assaulted during the Reformation, when a party of attackers came down the river which runs right next to the palace, charged up to the palace itself and set fire to the doors. This was in the course of a brief civil war in Denmark which raged from 1534 to 36.

The supporting beams of the (probable) bishop's bridge

The light-brown, pointed surface is believed to show the remnants of a supporting structure, strengthening the idea of a bridge