The price of books in twelfth-century Denmark

 
In a recent blogpost, I wrote about an episode from the Danish town of Ribe which occurred in the twelfth century. The episode is recorded in the Chronicon Ripense, or the Ribe Chronicle, from c.1230. This brief chronicle is a treasure trove of information about medieval Denmark, and although a lot of its details should be accepted only with great caution, it does shed light on several interesting aspects of its time. One such aspect is the value of books. 

Chronicon Ripense is known in modern Danish as "Ribe bispekrønike", i.e., the chronicle of the bishops of Ribe. As is often the case with texts composed in the Middle Ages, we cannot be sure how they were referred to by their authors or by others in their time, and even the Latin title is a modern appellation. The Danish title is perhaps the most accurate, as the book is predominantly concerned with the reigns of the various bishops of Ribe. 

One of these bishops was Homer, who was ordained in 1186. It was customary for newly-appointed bishops to bestow gifts on their new churches, and Bishop Homer turned out to be a lavish gift-giver. The chronicler records a chalice made of gold, a censer or a thurible made of silver, various vessels or bottles made of silver, and a collection of books in six volumes. It is not specified which books these were, but it is likely that they were books of the Bible, as one-volume bibles were rare at this time and the individual biblical books were often bound together according to their connection with one another. It was common, for instance, to group the four Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles. It is possible that this book collection also contained liturgical books, such as breviaries and psalters, but it would be more probable, and more practical, for these books to be bound in single volumes since they were used more frequently during the divine services. 

The chronicler adds that the preparation of this six-volume collection required sixty marks in gold. Thanks to a number of other sums recorded throughout the chronicle, we are able to better understand just how much money this was in medieval Denmark. For instance, it is also recorded that the same Bishop Homer donated one mark in gold for the adornment of the altar of the parish church of Hellevad.

In another section, the chronicler records that after the burning of Itzehoe in Holstein, King Valdemar II (r.1202-41) donated thirty marks - it is not specified whether it was in gold or in silver - to the rebuilding of the Church of Saint Lawrence. In the same period, 700 marks in silver was the ransom demanded for Bishop Tuvo. 

A mark is a notoriously imprecise unit of currency, as it depends on the material and also the measurement, since various cities, city-states or kingdoms could have different definitions of marks. This becomes clear when the chronicler records how King Valdemar II was taken captive together with his son, and ransomed for 60 000 Lübeck marks of silver.  

Together, these instances provide some points of orientation for understanding the price of books in twelfth-century Denmark. Granted, these points are vague and imprecise, but the chronicle does offer an interesting insight into the cost of binding books, and the value of such books as gifts bestowed by a newly-ordained Danish bishop. 

A blogpost about my work in spring 2021

In the period March to the middle of June this year I worked as a research assistant for the project Mapping Lived Religion at Linnaeus University. My work consisted mainly of transcribing calendar fragments and inserting them into the project database, and it provided me with a great opportunity to learn more about Swedish medieval manuscript fragments.  

I have not yet written much about this work, except some general remarks about methodology in this blogpost. Today, however, the first of two blogposts about my work for Mapping Lived Religion was published on the project blog. In this blogpost, I provide an overview of how my work routine has been and what challenging aspects in the sources that have dictated such a routine. For those who are interested, the first blogpost can be found here.

To take the dragon by the nose - the iconography of dragonslaying by Paolo Uccello and Francisco Ibáñez

 
One of the great joys of being a medievalist is to explore how aspects from the Middle Ages - such as ideas, literary topoi or iconography - continues to work in culture long after the end of the medieval period (even by the most liberal estimate). This longevity of cultural aspect is of course unsurprising given the continuity in cultural transmission, or the occasional rediscovery which brings something back to the cultural consciousness after a period of oblivion. Moreover, this continuity is yet another example of how periodisations are fictions of practicality rather than natural entities, and continuity thus reminds us how cautious we should be in dividing time too neatly into compartments. 

Leaving aside the definition of the Middle Ages, and its problems as a scholarly construct, it is very clear that because there exists an idea of the medieval, that idea can be used aesthetically to connect with the period meant to be covered by that term. This connection can be serious or playful, or a mix of both, and it can serve a number of different purposes, all depending on the combination of author/sender/transmitter and audience.  

One medieval iconographical topos that has had a substantial impact on modern popular culture is that of the dragonslayer, which can be found in a range of media, from commercial fantasy to church art. I have touched on the development of this topos in earlier blogposts (here, here, and here), and I recently came across one scene that reminded me again how this ties into the cultural output of the medieval period. What the scene in question reminded me of was the famous depiction of Saint George and the dragon by Paolo Uccello, completed around 1470. In the contemporary imagination, this is perhaps one of the best known and most resonant renditions of the motif, and I was struck by the similarities between this and the scene by which I was reminded of Uccello's painting

Paolo Uccello, Saint George and the dragon (c.1470)
National Gallery, London, NG6294
Courtesy of Wikimedia

The scene in question is part of a dream sequence in the comic book El estropicio meteorológico (The meteorological fracas), which was serially published in 1987. The comic book is an instalment in the classical series Mortadelo y Filemón by Francisco Ibáñez, a series in which several famous works of art and literature have been parodied through the characters of this fictional universe. The similarities between the scene in the dream of Mortadelo and that of Uccello's dragonslaying are notable, especially the lance piercing the dragon's nose. Naturally, I cannot claim that it is Uccello who has provided Ibáñez with the model for the scene in El estropicio meteorológico - the scene might be inspired by any number of Saint George renditions, so we should be cautious in pinpointing influences too exactly. Even if the connection between the painting from c.1470 and the drawing from 1987 might be indirect at best, the scene with Mortadelo as the typical dragonslayer points to the impact of the medieval imagination on the modern, and we are reminded that so much of our modern cultural output is in some way part of a continuity that goes back centuries into the past.   

Francisco Ibáñez, Mortadelo y Filemón no. 17, El estropicio meteorológico (1987)

An interdict from Saint Lawrence's day - ecclesiastical conflict in twelfth-century Ribe

Today, August 10, is the feast of Saint Lawrence, an early Christian saint made famous, in part, through his inclusion in the hagiographic poem Liber Peristephanon, book of the martyrs, by Prudentius. Lawrence, or Laurentius, was one of the major universal saints of Latin Christendom, and his feast was celebrated in all calendars. The present blogpost, however, is not so much about Saint Lawrence, interesting though he is, but rather about an event in which Lawrence's feast-day figures as a temporal marker. The event unfolded in the Danish episcopal see of Ribe, and it is recorded in the anonymous Chronicon Ripense, Chronicle of Ribe, believed to have been written c.1230. The chronicle has been edited by Ellen Jørgensen, and there exists a Danish translation by Helge Søgaard.

Ribe Cathedral 

The anonymous account provides an overview of the episcopacy of Radulph, an Englishman who had been the chancellor of King Valdemar I (r.1157-82) and who became bishop of Ribe around 1160. The chronicle's dating is imprecise, and Helge Søgaard suggests that Radulph began as bishop in 1162, whereas the surviving text of the chronicle has 1152 instead. Radulph was a controversial man, and his inauguration as bishop was delayed four years pending charges of murder and apostasy, but eventually he began his office as bishop of Ribe.  

The episcopacy of Radulph was a dynamic period, perhaps in part due to the ongoing rift between the Danish archbishop, Eskil of Lund, and King Valdemar I. One episode, the one that I will focus on here, provides a view of one of the rifts between the bishop and the clerics at the cathedral. According to Chronicon Ripense, Bishop Radulph sought to appoint his chaplain, a certain Vincent, as a cathedral canon. The other canons were deeply averse to this, and the reason appears to be that a canon should be elected by the other canons, and not appointed by the bishop. The hierarchical structure of the church community was clearly delineated, and the election of its members was one of the prerogatives of the chapter of canons. 

The matter of Vincent's appointment was so contentious that it came to blows, and the anonymous Ribe chronicler describes how the bishop's clothes were torn, and how the head of the cathedral school, a certain Boniface, was beaten up in the chapter house. Judging from the location, this must have been during one of the regular community meetings, that in most, if not all, ecclesiastic and monastic communities took place in chapter. The conflict led to an interdict being placed on Ribe, and this interdict - during which all church services in the diocese were null and void - began on August 10, Saint Lawrence's day, and lasted until Maundy Thursday. The right of the canons to elect their members was then confirmed. 

The story of the tumult in Ribe cathedral might at first seem odd, or perhaps amusing, but most importantly it is a window into the complex world of medieval ecclesiastic and monastic communities. These communities were comprised of people of diverse personalities, and often with diverse aims and opinions about how to achieve those aims. They were communities in which life was balanced by rights and duties, privileges and demands, and where life was guided by custom and institutional identity. For the canons at Ribe, the appointment of someone by the bishop was a breach of that balance by which the community sustained itself. Consequently, that the controversy resulted in a fist fight is not necessarily indicative of the ease with which medieval ecclesiastics resorted to violence - although that was by no means rare - but it should perhaps primarily be seen as an indicator of how serious this matrix of rights and duties were to the canons. We are reminded, in other words, that the medieval world was, as all human worlds are, infinitely complex and often surprising. 

Norup Church

These days I am reading up on Danish church history for a couple of papers that I need to write in the course of the autumn, and this has brought back a lot of pleasant memories from my time in Denmark. To a foreigner such as myself, Denmark at first seemed like a country too small to host much in terms of treasures and wonders - small as a nose was what my grandparents would often say - but staying in Denmark for four years upended that notion. There are still numerous sites that I have yet to visit, and which I will hopefully get around to eventually, but until then I am reliving, from time to time, some of those places I got to visit during my Danish sojourn. One such place was Norup Church on Fyn.

Norup Church is situated a few kilometers to the north of Odense, to whose bishopric Norup belongs. In its current form, the church is a product of late medieval and modern changes to its architecture. One such change is the tower, very typical of Danish parish churches, which was added in the later Middle Ages, but at an uncertain date. The church is not well attested in the medieval source material, and the earliest reference to Norup Church is an indirect reference to the parish, although not the building itself. From later antiquarian sources, the church is called the Church of Our Lady, and this dedication was most likely in place already in the Middle Ages.

Norup Church in predominantly a rather unassuming church, and I came upon it by coincidence as my parents and I were driving in the area. Due to changes in later centuries, much of its medieval history is less eye-catching than in several other Danish parish churches. However, as I learned afterwards, there are several fragments from the Romanesque stone church which is likely to have been erected in the twelfth century, a period which saw the construction of a several parish churches in Odense diocese. Unfortunately, as the visit to Norup was unplanned, my parents and I missed the scattered vestiges of the Romanesque phase of the church which can be found in the walls of the church, but which I have since learned about. In this way, Norup is emblematic for the minor Danish parish churches, because even though the smallest and least known may house very exciting and valuable treasures that shed some light on our understanding of the Danish medieval past.  

Altarpiece from 1598

Source: Danmarks kirker, Norup kirke

On statues, and how not to defend them

 
June last year, I wrote a blogpost in response to the toppling of the statue of Edward Colston in Bristol. Since then, I have followed the ongoing discussion concerning statues and whether they should be kept or removed, and from time to time there are new incidents where protests usher in new removals. Earlier this month, for instance, statues of Queen Victoria and Elizabeth II were brought to the ground in Winnipeg, in response to discoveries of mass graves of indigenous children at the sites of residential schools in Canada. As I’m writing this, reports from protests in Brazil show that in the city of São Paulo, protesters have set fire to a statue of the explorer Borba Gato (1649-1718). No doubt, there will be more statues to add to the roster in the coming weeks.

The debate about the role of statues is, as we see, still ongoing, and will remain ongoing for the foreseeable future. In some cases, the debate is ongoing precisely because the statues have not fallen. One such example can be found in Oxford, where Oriel College decided not to remove the contentious statue of the imperialist Cecil Rhodes.

There are many ways to approach the question about statues and whether or not to keep them standing. I have, I hope, made my own thoughts quite clear in my previous blogpost, and they have not changed since I wrote it. However, I do think that the public discourse benefits from disagreement and differing views, and I am therefore always interested to hear the arguments put forth in favour of keeping the statues in place. Last autumn, I had a seminar with two groups of first-year students on the use of history, and since the seminar was part of a module on early modern history, I decided to focus on the statue debate. My students were asked to find a statue, research any controversies – actual or potential – concerning the person in question, and then we discussed the individual cases. The students responded very well to the assignment and had found a number of interesting examples. Since this course was in Sweden and since I was the only foreigner in the virtual room, it was particularly educational for me, both to see the statues they had chosen to discuss, and also to see how they responded to the global discussion from a Swedish vantage point. To my surprise, and indeed dismay, I noted that most of them accepted some of the most frequently presented arguments in favour of keeping the statues in place. The argument that the people in question were products of their time, and the argument that removing a statue is to remove history were both invoked quite frequently. While I disagree with this, I limited myself to presenting a general rebuttal of the core of each argument, while also explaining why these arguments were not very good. Some of the students did indeed come around to a different point of view towards the end of each seminar, but as I felt that this was a discussion they needed to develop further on their own, I did not insist on the matter. This was one of those cases where I was very glad that the students were not graded according to their efforts, because if so, it would be easy for the students to adopt my view and ostensibly agree with it. Since all that was required was attendance, they were at full liberty to agree and disagree as they saw fit, and I came away from the seminars with a lot of impressions and food for thought about how this discussion is viewed through eyes different from my own.

I have not changed my views about statues, but I am always looking for good counterarguments in the event that I will be discussing this issue with future groups of students. For this reason, I was interested to find a link to an interview with a scholar at Oriel College who was not in favour of removing the statue of Cecil Rhodes, and I was curious about the arguments that would be put forth. Unfortunately, I found that the website that had conducted and published the interview regularly publishes pieces that seem to take a lot of left-wing issues in very bad faith, and I also found that the interview was couched in a similar vein of bad faith, dismissive and misrepresentative language, and I saw that neither the interviewer nor the interviewee had really grasped the core of the debate. For these reasons, I will not link to the interview, nor will I name the site or the scholar. Should you wish to read the interview, I imagine that some efficient googling should produce the required results.

I am not linking to the interview, because this blogpost is not really about the interview itself, but rather about the tendency that I saw represented there. This is a blogpost first and foremost about how not to argue in favour of keeping statues of problematic historical persons.

As I mentioned above, when talking about my experience with Swedish students, the arguments of being of one’s time and removing history are both unacceptable arguments. The first argument is based on the expectations that humans are homogenous in different epochs, and that human nature changes. There have always, in each epoch of recorded history and also before that, been a plurality of opinions about important issues. While many previous historical eras are now known for their violence and instability – often a reputation caused by the interpretation of future generations rather than an accurate representation of the time – we should also keep in mind that ideas that it is wrong to kill people, and that one should not treat others the way one would not wish to be treated, are thousands of years old. We also know that dissent has been one of the key themes of recorded history, and that revolts, revolutions, rebellions and riots have flared up in the face of injustice or abuse of power as long as power has been wielded. We therefore need to abandon the argument of someone being of their time.

Similarly, the idea that removing a statue is to remove history is wrong. History is recorded in many forms, especially in our current times, and while there have been cases where removal of statues had the deliberate purpose of removing people from history through the so-called damnatio memoriae, statues are not vehicles for learning about history. David Olusoga has written very well about this already. Another version of this argument is that the statues are products of a historical period and are therefore imbued with some degree of venerability. This is a better version of the argument, but it is nonetheless deeply problematic. There is a reason why we do not have statues of some historical transgressors, namely because there is a sufficiently wide consensus that the people in question have committed crimes too monstrous to allow for statues. Granted, there are some historical persons whose crimes are still not subject for sufficient consensus as to facilitate the removal of their statues, but this consensus might change, and then there is a very good reason for removing the statues in question. For instance, it was only two days ago, July 23, that a bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest, the first grand wizard of Ku Klux Klan, was removed from the Tennessee capitol building in Nashville. We then see that it might take time before a requisite number of people acknowledge the crimes of historical individuals, but once those crimes are acknowledged we also see why it is unacceptable to keep statues of those people in place.

The main reason why these two aforementioned arguments are insufficient is that statues are by their very nature celebratory. As history progresses, we change whom we choose to celebrate, and it therefore makes little sense to celebrate people who are acknowledged as transgressors. We should of course have a lively discussion about who gets to stay and who has to go, but for any such discussion to be in place it is crucial to be aware of the fact that the primary purpose for a statue is celebration.

Another argument that I have often seen levelled – and which had a central place in the interview I mentioned earlier – is that toppling these statues are acts of hysteria, that they are tantrums and overreactions. This is a disingenuous response, and it is not so much an argument in favour of keeping the statues in place as it is a thinly veiled ad hominem attack. We should of course acknowledge that such protests that have resulted in the felling of statues have a degree of group effect to them, that those who commit these acts are energised by being part of a large group of people. But this in itself is not the same as hysteria. There are often long-running tensions that come to the surface in such moments, and these reactions must be understood against backdrops of social inequality, racism, imperialism and the long-felt effects of past injustices. It is simplistic to dismiss such actions as the toppling of statues as mere tantrums, especially because in those groups that pull down the statues there are numerous people whose combinations of incentivising factors are different from person to person. If we are to treat the matter of statues with nuance, we cannot lazily label large groups of individuals with derogatory terms such as “hysteria” or “tantrum”.

There might be good arguments for keeping statues in place, and this is why we need to have a thorough discussion for each statue. However, I have not yet been convinced by any such arguments that I have encountered, and if we are to move this discussion in a fruitful direction, it is at least important that none of the three responses listed here are brought into play. Once these rhetorical cul-de-sacs are discarded, we might find good arguments in favour of keeping statues in place. I am not holding my breath.         

A note on Utøya, ten years after

Today at noon, my father, who is the verger of our parish church, had the bells ring in commemoration of the victims of the massacre at Utøya, July 22 2011. The bells rang for only five minutes, the stipulated time, and served as a reminder that today was the anniversary of the greatest tragedy of Norwegian history after World War II.           

The anniversary provides an impetus for Norway as a nation to reflect on how we handled the aftermath, what was done well, and what was done immensely poorly. The present post will not be a thorough analysis of the time following the tragedy. There are far better commentators for that than me, and there are far better resources for learning about this watershed in Norwegian history. One of the best resources to be found is the 22. July centre (https://22julisenteret.no/). The purpose of this short blogpost, however, is rather to provide a short overview of some key aspects of what went wrong, and to some extent what was done well, in the wake of the tragedy. It is also necessary to emphasise that the massacre was perpetrated against the youth branch of the Norwegian Labour Party, and that this was above all a political mass-murder. I for my part do not and have never belonged to this party – although I have voted for them in some elections.    

Following the arrest of the terrorist – whose name I refuse to mention here – Norway stood at a juridical crossroads, and I distinctly remember the concern and worry I felt about how the juridical system would react. There were people who were clamouring for the death penalty to be reinstated, a punishment that was last performed in Norway in 1948, and which was abolished in 1979. Fortunately, the standards of our juridical systems were upheld, and the terrorist was given a solicitor as is the right of all criminals in Norway. The following process was not without its flaws, but on the whole, it was a demonstration of how well our juridical system works, and how its principles could be maintained even in the face of an unprecedented crisis. The fact that the solicitor, Geir Lippestad, had previously belonged to the same party as the victims of the massacre, speaks volumes both about Lippestad as a person and about the integrity of the Norwegian laws.            

Following the arrest of the terrorist, Norway also stood at a self-examining crossroad. The acknowledgement that this was a national tragedy, a tragedy that belonged to the entire Norwegian people despite party lines, was necessary to receive from other parties, and that acknowledgement was given, albeit imperfectly, and this gave some degree of unification and national healing.   

Norway also stood at a political crossroads. By 2011, the right wing of the Norwegian political spectre had become more extreme, and pockets of violent racist ideologies were thriving in online forums. There had been racist murders and episodes of racist violence, and for those of use who were willing to acknowledge the fact, it was clear that Norway had a problem with its right-wing part of the population. However, it was commonly held that the average Norwegian was very far removed from the violent extremes to which the terrorist belonged, and by which the terrorist was influenced. In the aftermath of the massacre, several people in online comment sections made their masks slip, however, and expressed sympathies with the cause, if not with the action, that the terrorist had claimed to champion – i.e., the fight against the multiculturalism, one of the strongest assets of modern Norway. It became clear that a lot of Norwegians also belonged to the same ideology as the terrorist, and that the terrorist had made reality of what many Norwegians had fantasised about. Islamophobia, xenophobia, racism, and various other elements belonging to the right-wing end of the political spectrum were flourishing, and now it became clear that they did.

The massacre became a political crossroad for Norway, and an opportunity to acknowledge and make a reckoning of the fact that there are violent currents in our country that need to be fought against. This reckoning never came. Instead, the drive towards national healing meant that many politicians and many news outlets were eager to meet those from the right wing and seek unification. While no doubt well-intended, and while it was done in order to avoid casting everybody on the right in the same light as the terrorist, it also meant that we lost an opportunity to properly identify and roundly condemn the currents that had moved the terrorist along. We could have identified the right-wing talking points, the dog whistles, the rhetorical strategies, the coddling of extremist tendencies that had unified into this heinous crime. We could have set in stone that right-wing parties such as one called the Progress Party – of which the terrorist had been a member before he left it because it was not sufficiently extreme to his tastes – did enable and harbour views that were very closely aligned with the views of the terrorist. In this, the political scene as well as the media failed, and as a consequence we have still not had the reckoning that we need.          

Today, ten years after the massacre, Norway as a nation should look back and realise that we have spilled one of our greatest opportunities to fight against extremism. The insistence on cross-party unification resulted in an unwillingness to acknowledge that the Norwegian right wing still continues the rhetorical game that fuelled the terrorist. For this reason, we as a nation have failed to properly report and digest the fact that in 2019 another Norwegian terrorist attempted an attack on a Norwegian mosque. We have failed to acknowledge the connection between the massacre, the attempted attack, and the unchecked rhetoric of the right. This has also meant that a current of hatred against the Labour Party that was already flowing before 2011 has become even more vitriolic and unhinged, in no small part due to certain public figures who went out of their way to criticise and harass survivors for not doing more for those who lost their lives. The traumatisation of the survivors was strengthened by a massively flawed media approach, in which counter-voices from the right and from alternative milieus were given space that they should not have had.      

The failure to acknowledge the dangerous currents in our society, and the attempt to unify across the political spectrum also led to the Labour Party, who was then in government, to make concessions to the right that curtailed immigration and the right to residence for several families who came from the Middle East, Central Asia and East Africa. These concessions were brutal, and led to a loss of the moral high ground that the Norwegian government had acquired by upholding the standards of our juridical system.           

These elements, our various failures to maintain a moral standard and to identify the evils in our midst, mean that now, ten years later, we still do not have a sufficient understanding of how and who we are as a country and as a nation. In some ways we have done things well, but there are many missed opportunities, and those missed opportunities are necessary to remember as we commemorate the lives of those who died at the hands of a child-murderer in 2011.