Balthasar the wise king in fifteenth-century Norway

 
One of the many phenomenal treasures housed by the Oslo Museum of Cultural history is this section from a fifteenth-century altar. The scene is a fascinating, although not unusual, compression of various elements from the Nativity story, where all the actors are gathered but still on their way to the scene, as it were: Mary and Joseph are travelling to Bethlehem, the shepherds have not yet been accosted by the angels, and the three magi and their retinues have not yet arrived at their destination.

The altar is also interesting, although still not unusual, for its depiction of Balthasar the king, who was a black man according to the medieval tradition. In this way, the altar is a good reminder that people in medieval Norway knew very well that there were people of different skin colours than their own in the world. For anyone familiar with medieval Norwegian history, this comes as no surprise at all, and it is indeed incredibly banal to point it out. However, because we are in a political climate where the Middle Ages are re-imagined by right-wing forces as a place in time where ethnicities did not mix and that Europeans were pure-blooded and white-skinned, even such a banal reminder of reality serves a purpose. (Granted, this anachronistic racist vision of medieval Europe is not new, but it has gained greater political currency in the past few years.) 

Piece of an altar from Borre Church, Vestfold, Norway
Produced in the fifteenth century, probably Northern Germany 
Oslo Museum of Cultural History, C6131

Within scholarly circles, the idea that the Middle Ages - however you want to define that term in space and time - was a multicultural period, i.e., a period in which several cultures met, interacted, inhabited the same areas, and influenced each other. This is not to say that these cultural interactions were necessarily peaceful or marked by mutual respect - very often they were the opposite. But that the world was multicultural was not solely a fact, but also something that was well known even in a geographical periphery as Norway. Granted, in the second half of the fifteenth century, when this altar was made, it is most likely that most Norwegians had never seen a black person. It is even possible, although to a significantly lesser degree, that the woodworkers who carved this altar - probably somewhere in Northern Germany, such as Lübeck - might never have seen a black person in their lives. Even so, knowledge about other cultures circulated as part of the cultural impressions conveyed through art, literature and stories, and informed the worldview of Northern Europeans. This worldview included people very different to themselves. And even though this rendition of Balthasar, once featured in Borre Church in Vestfold, was not produced in Norway, the altar, and the figures in it, conveyed an image of the wider world to the Norwegian congregation. And it is not a hazardous guess to suspect that they had already heard about this black king long before the altar was brought to Norway.

Surrounded by simulacra - my first encounter with Warsaw

This week I spent two days in Warsaw for a work trip. Since we – my colleagues and I – had a short timeframe for discussing professional matters, most of the time I spent in Warsaw was taken up with discussions, later followed by talks and even later by chats. It was invigorating, inspiring and pleasant, as good work trips are in academia, but one consequence of this tight schedule was that my encounter with the city itself was relatively brief. However, thanks to the generosity of some of my Polish colleagues, those of us who had travelled to Warsaw from Norway were given a guided tour from the outskirts of what was once the early modern city to the interior what was once the medieval city. It was a crash course in the city’s history. It was very interesting. It was also profoundly moving.

Warsaw is in many ways a complex city, as it blends elements from late medieval cityscapes, the vulgar Baroque of the eighteenth century, the seemingly French-inspired neoclassicism of the nineteenth century, the vestiges of the Communist past, and the scattered skyscrapers of a modern city. But this complexity is in its way deceptive. Or perhaps I should rather say that this complexity is deepened by the illusory sense of history that envelops the flaneur as they make their way through the broad streets of the early modern city into the squares and alleys of the medieval city. This illusory sense of history is then shattered whenever one remembers that all of this – or at least almost all of it – is simulacra.

The medieval town, Warsaw

The great watershed in Warsaw’s history is the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, a sixty-three-day struggle in which Polish resistant fighters tried to take Warsaw from German control. The uprising failed, and on orders by Hitler almost all of the old town was levelled to the ground. The city was later rebuilt, and from photographs and paintings the individual buildings were replaced with replicas of astounding likeness to their originals. The effort was so successful that when walking through these streets, it would be impossible – at least for the non-expert in, say, architectural history – to see that what surrounds the viewer in as good as every direction is a collection of simulacra. 

It was a very eerie experience walking through these replicated layers of history – layers that were in one sense coeval with one another, but which alluded to different epochs and created an impression of layers that once existed. It was on the one hand marvellous, because the recreation was done so immensely well – I could definitely sense something of the same atmosphere that I have sensed in cities where such layered history is preserved and strongly visible, cities like Rome, York, Salamanca, Split. Yet once I noticed that feeling of giddy joy that overtakes the enthusiast, that feeling was immediately followed by a strong note of sadness. The sadness came from the realisation that this was, despite an incredible effort, not real. There was something not quite genuine, something that was not quite guaranteed about the verisimilitude of this assortment of simulacra: buildings, streets, horizons, nooks and crannies. 

It is not that cities like those mentioned above are not also grappling with some of the same issues. Wherever history is preserved in layers, there is a degree of uncertainty connected to it. There is always some restoration that has gone into the work, there is always a selection and discarding that has been done in order to decide what to preserve and what to give up to the changes that must happen in a cityscape. The preservation efforts are also hostage to the whims of human judgement, and it can be difficult to assess whether a restoration is actually a restoration or a creation: whether the past is presented on its own terms – whatever they might be in any given situation – or whether what we see is in actuality the fantasy image of the past as envisioned by an individual or several. Such uncertainties abound, even in the most historical of cities, however we want to understand that term. But in Warsaw, that uncertainty is different. Because on the one hand, we are certain that this is a reconstruction, and on the other, we cannot be certain about the number of liberties taken, or the number of gaps of knowledge that had to be filled by educated guesswork. This uncertainty is in a different configuration as that of other cities with a long history, and it makes for a very different experience when brought face to face with the city as it stands now.

The royal palace, Warsaw

The Trinity Church, Warsaw

There is no doubt that the reconstruction of Warsaw is impressive and based on materials that can be checked and compared with, and this post is in no way intended to denigrate that effort. Quite the contrary, I wholeheartedly applaud the effort, and it has given visitors to Warsaw an immensely beautiful scene. But it does come with a feeling I have never felt before, because never has the unreality of my surroundings been so clear, so well-known, so overt. These simulacra entice emotions that are similar to when I visit other cities as those mentioned above, but there is that constant and ever-returning knowledge that these emotions are based on replicas. (I studiously avoid the term “fake”, because that is not what these buildings are.) These feelings, brought on as they are by reconstructions, make me wonder what the difference is between the original and the reconstructed in terms providing that kind of emotional connection with a place and its past that people often encounter – willingly or unwillingly – in certain locations. These feelings also remind me that there is a very complex discussion to be had about the reality of the past, and about expectations, and about the value of simulacra in the absence of the original – and whether such differences matter all that much in certain situations.

My encounter with Warsaw often caused me to become stunned at various moments as I reflected on this resuscitated reality and the sadness that lingered in the very fact that what I saw around me on every side was an attempt to preserve what had been irrevocably lost, at least from the material point of view. 

The Church of the Holy Spirit, Warsaw

Link: The King’s Three Images: The representation of St. Edward the Confessor in historiography, hagiography and liturgy

I am writing this just past midnight of October 14, but the post itself pertains to October 13, which is the feast of the translation of the relics of Saint Edward the Confessor. 

Long-time readers of my blog might know that I wrote my MA dissertation on the development of his cult in the period 1066-1400. The dissertation was finished in the autumn of 2012, and the work that went into the dissertation is still to this day shaping a lot of my research.  

Since I was reminded of my dissertation today, I was also reminded that I never provided a clear and easy to find weblink to the document itself. The dissertation, "The King’s Three Images: The representation of St. Edward the Confessor in historiography, hagiography and liturgy", is still available on the Internet, and a Pdf file can be downloaded from my alma mater, the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. The link is here: https://ntnuopen.ntnu.no/ntnu-xmlui/handle/11250/243071. 

New publication: En sjælden Tycho Brahe-udgave

 
In the spring of 2019, as I was finishing up my time in Denmark and preparing for new adventures, I was doing research on medieval manuscript fragments in the special collection of Roskilde Public Library, together with my friend and colleague Jakob Povl Holck. At this time, Jakob and I were co-authoring an article on two fragments from medieval Denmark, and we were asked by one of the librarians at Roskilde if we could contribute a short note on the fragment from Roskilde on which we had conducted some of our research. The fragment can be seen below, and is found on the item Karen Brahes bibliotek J.1. It was used to bind a first edition of the astronomical treatise De Nova Stella by the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe. 

The note was set to be published in the annual journal of the historical association of Roskilde. The journal is titled Historisk Årbog for Roskilde Amt (Historical annals for Roskilde county). Although the text was only about two pages and for the most part a description of the fragment and its carrier, I was very happy to be contributing to this note, since it was a way to repay the library and the historical association of Roskilde for the time and effort that had been offered us in the course of our research.

As I left Denmark and the publication of the journal was delayed, I lost track of the progress. Today, however, I found out, to my immense pleasure, that the note was published, and can be accessed online. The note is in Danish, and can be found here. The issue of the journal can be found in full here (although it should be noted that there is an error on the site containing the overview, as I am listed as sole author, while it was written together with Jakob Povl Holck). 

Despite its brevity, I am immensely proud to have co-written this text, and it feels that this is a contribution that actually goes straight to the community for whom this fragment and this book might have greater meaning than most other scholarly communities.

Karen Brahes bibliotek J.1
(Roskilde Public Library)

Enduring materialities - change and stability in Norwegian rural history

This weekend I visited Oslo Museum of Cultural History for the first time, and I was fortunate enough to be able to visit the medieval exhibition, which is going to be taken down on October 10. This exhibition, which has been in its place since the 1970s, contains an array of various and very different objects from medieval Norway, from a fifth-century runestones to wooden sculptures produced in the 1520s. There are many amazing and breathtaking objects in the collection, and my hope is that I will have the wherewithal to write more about some of them on the blog. For this post, however, I will limit myself to one item that in and of itself is rather simple, but which did absolutely take my breath away as I noticed it. 

The object in question is what we in Norwegian call "tvare" or "tvore" (in my dialect, "tvøre"). Its function was to stir porridge and stews to prevent lumps or thickening, and a friend told me that this kind of object is called a spirtle in Scottish. The "tvore" always ends in a cluster of small spikes, and was a typical implement in historical Norwegian kitchens. 

Pot (no. C9246) from Lom and spirtle (no. C34761/G.26439) from Oslo
The Oslo Museum of Cultural History

The reason why this ordinary household item took my breath away is that I encountered this implement growing up. That is, I have never seen one in use, let alone used one myself, but the generation of my grandparents (born in the 1910s) still used these for cooking, and they have been kept in the house where my grandaunt lived when I was a child.  

What fascinates me about the "tvore" is not so much that it has been in continuous use since the Middle Ages. Several items used in the modern world came into their known shape in the medieval period, even before, but there are two important aspects with these particular cooking implements. First of all, the "tvore" has remained unchanged in form as well as in its material since the Middle Ages, which is something we very rarely observe in household items. When we consider how certain tools and implements have changed over the centuries - such as the saddle, the spade, the hammer, the bucket - such permanence is noteworthy. Secondly, unlike the aforementioned tools, the "tvore" is no longer in use. This means that something in the way we cook our food has changed so drastically as to superannuate the "tvore" as a kitchen item. The discontinuing of the "tvore" should probably be seen as a consequence of electricity and a change in the diet, and in this way, the "tvore" is a testament to the dramatic nature of the changes in everyday life that took place in rural Norway in the early twentieth century. In short, the way we cook and the way we eat changed to such a degree in the early twentieth century that utensils that had been used since the medieval period were no longer needed.

Naturally, it is important to keep in mind that there were other changes in Norwegian rural society that marked a break or a discontinuity with the medieval period long before the twentieth century. Changes in growing techniques, the introduction of the potato in the early eighteenth century, changes in social patterns, the transition to more commercially oriented farming practices in the nineteenth century, all these and other elements of Norwegian history were different from how agriculture and the rural life had unfolded in the medieval period. Yet despite such changes, certain things remained long into the modern world, such as the "tvore". And because the enduring materiality of the "tvore", in form as well as matter, the discontinuation of this item signals a break with the past - it signals that some aspect of society is irrevocably and totally different. And it is this change that the "tvore" represents. 
      

A blogpost about my work in spring 2021, part II

 





One month ago, I posted a link to a blogpost I wrote for Mapping Lived Religion, the project for which I worked as a research assistant in the spring. That blogpost was the first of a two-parter in which I wrote a bit about various challenges that might be encountered when working on fragments of medieval calendars. 

Last week, the last of my two blogposts was published, which can be read here.

In this second blogpost, I explain some of the difficulties with examples from one of the most challenging fragments that the project deals with, as you can see from the image below. It was a lot of fun, but at times also a lot of frustration trying to fill the blanks.

Fr 25608, Sveriges Riksarkiv, MPO

New office, new view, new beginning

 

As I wrote in a short blogpost back in June, this autumn I am beginning a new job as a postdoctoral researcher at the university of Oslo. Since August 15 I have officially been an employee, but it was not until the second week of September I physically moved to my new place of work, and the past two weeks have in large part been spent getting started and have the various practical details sorted. Since a lot of these practical details take time and need to be completed in stages, there is as yet no rhythm to speak of, and there are still many new things to learn, to get used to, and to get around to. But this week I was able to access my new office, and to enjoy the new view that will serve as a backdrop for much of my coming workdays. It is mundane in a way, but to me it is all terribly exciting.