Cantigas de Compostela, part 4 - Saint Bartholomew

 

Today is the feast of Saint Bartholomew the Apostle, who - according to Latin medieval tradition - had evangelised in India, where he had been flayed alive as part of his martyrdom. The sensational and macabre manner of his death provided medieval artists of various media with the licence to depict his passion story in varied and inventive ways. To the modern mind, the most famous examples are from Renaissance artists, such as Marco d'Agrate's statue in the Cathedral of Milan, or Michelangelo's Last Judgement scene from the Sistine Chapel, in which Bartholomew - with the face of Pietro Aretino - is holding his empty and dangling skin. These late examples, however, are part of a much longer tradition. One older example can be found from one of the portals of Santiago de Compostela, the Fachada de las Platerías, in which are assembled masonry from various parts of the twelfth-century cathedral. On the side of one of the archways is the haloed and bearded figure, holding his butcher's knife in his right hand and holding his saggy, empty skin in his left, clutching it by the hair. The iconography is immediately recognisable, the masonry is exquisite, and the piece as a whole is a solid reminder of how the iconographical tropes that we often first encounter through canonical Renaissance art have a much older history, and that the Renaissance was a squarely medieval phenomenon. Moreover, it is important to note that there are no straight lines from Compostela to d'Agrate's Milan or Michelangelo's Rome. Rather, these are all dots in an evolving network of ideas and images that connects various places, but where the transfer of influences cannot possibly be mapped or recorded.  

New publications, part 3 - Coinage, the Cult of Saints, and the Legitimization of Elites in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Poland and Norway

 

In the present blogpost, I wish to present the third and final of my three co-authored articles that were published in a recent volume (for the previous two, see here for the first one, and here for the second one). All these articles were written during my previous position, where I was a postdoctoral researacher at a project investigating the legitimisation of elites in medieval Norway and Poland, a collaboration between the University of Oslo and the University of Warsaw. 

This last article is titled "Coinage, the Cult of Saints, and the Legitimization of Elites in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Poland and Norway", co-authored with Mateusz Bogucki and Svein Gullbekk. The article takes as its starting-point the disparity in the use of saints on Norwegian coins compared with Polish coins. From this quandary, we examine how both coinage and the cult of saints could converge in the legitimisation of elites, or - on the contrary - had to be kept separate in order to avoid the legitimisation of the wrong kind of elites.    

Since I am a novice in numismatics, I was greatly aided in this article by my co-authors. The writing process was slow and at times agonising because of the very careful balance needed when trying to say something about general historical tendencies based on little and very uncertain material. But it was also a challenge that greatly expanded my horizon. 

New publications, part 2 - Saints and Legitimization of Bishoprics in Poland and Norway until c. 1200

 

In my previous blogpost, I provided a brief presentation of one of my three co-authored articles published last month. All these articles belong to a volume published as part of a research project hosted by both the University of Warsaw and the University of Oslo, and it was at this project I had my most recent postdoctoral position. 

The second of my contributions is "Saints and Legitimization of Bishoprics in Poland and Norway until c. 1200", co-authored with Grzegorz Pac. This article compares how the cult of saints was used by Polish and Norwegian bishops to solidify their position in society, and how their power and authority were legitimised by the bishop's role as guardian of the cult. The article examines how both bishops and saints' cults related to other social elites throughout the eleventh and twelfth century. One of our main questions - to which I believe we have found a very reasonable answer - is why native cults flourished so strongly at an earlier point in Norway than in Poland. 

The article has been a challenge to write because of the many angles from which we approached our material, but precisely because of the comprehensive examination of Norwegian and Polish medieval society, this article is one of the most rewarding texts I have worked on to this date. 

New publications, part 1 - Sacral Strongholds. Nunneries as Sources of Legitimacy in Twelfth-Century Poland and Norway

Last month saw the publication of one of the collections of articles pertaining to the project where I did my previous post-doc. The publication as a whole is in open access, and it is available here. Since I contributed to three of the articles in this volume, I will briefly present each of these here, with a link to the article in question. 

The first of my contributions is "Sacral Strongholds. Nunneries as Sources of Legitimacy in Twelfth-Century Poland and Norway", co-authored with Anna Agnieszka Dryblak. This article compares how nunneries were founded in order to strengthen the legitimisation of both secular and ecclesiastical elites in the two polities. The article contains four case studies, two concerning secular elites and two concerning ecclesiastical elites. It was a challenge to write this article, as I started out with much less expertise on the subject than my co-author, but it was therefore a great opportunity to delve deeper into this particular aspect of Norwegian history, and to consider these institutions both in terms of social networks and topographies. 

A saint against lightning - Saint Olaf and the bell at Moster Old Church

 

Today is the feast of Saint Olaf, the patron saint of Norway, who died at the Battle of Stiklestad north of Trondheim in 1030. He was declared holy on August 3 1031 by Bishop Grimkell. The bishop had the king's body translated to the Church of Saint Clement, and at this point in time the authority of a bishop - the only bishop in Norway - was sufficient to proclaim someone's sainthood. The cult of Saint Olaf became a defining feature of medieval Norway, and also spread throughout the North Atlantic and Baltic regions. 

Since the cult of Saint Olaf was in practice ubiquitous in medieval Norway, there are several sources that testify to the veneration of the saint-king - and even more sources that we should presume lost in the passage of time. One of the surviving sources is the oldest of the two bells in Moster Old Church in Southwestern Norway. The church dates to the mid-twelfth century, and is located in the village where twelfth-century tradition claims that Saint Olaf and Bishop Grimkell introduced Christian laws to Norway at the Moster assembly in 1024. The historicity of this tradition is dubious. It is not certain that there was an assembly at Moster in 1024, and it is even more uncertain whether the Christian laws were introduced at such an assembly. When the Norwegian provincial laws were recorded in writing in the second half of the twelfth century, the text of Gulathing law - in whose law province Moster is situated - established this tradition and made it part of the Church's formulation of Norway's history, a formulation in which the course of Norwegian history was guided by divine will and in accordance with a typological pattern found in the Bible. 

Whatever the historicity of the Moster assembly, we do know that Moster was an important village in both the eleventh and the twelfth centuries, as is partly evidenced by the fact that its church was built in stone, a costly and cumbersome material. Sometime in the thirteenth century, a bell was cast for the church, and it is currently located in the church loft. The bell testifies to the veneration of Saint Olaf, as it contains an etching of the saint-king enthroned and holding the axe which had become his main attribute already in the eleventh century. The bell also contains a prayer to the Virgin Mary, perhaps the only saint to gain greater importance in the Norwegian cult of saints than the king. The etching is difficult to see in the pictures below, but it follows an established iconographic pattern and bears resemblance to both wooden sculptures and manuscript illuminations of the period.  

While we cannot say this for certain, it is likely that the figure of the saint and the prayer to the Virgin were both intended - or at least became interpreted over time - as a way to ward off lightning. It is also likely that the figure of the saint-king should be seen as a testament to how the Gulathing tradition - where Moster was the starting-point of the Norwegian Christianisation process - was received in the local community, and we might imagine that the people of Moster in the thirteenth century saw this historical episode as a keystone in their own identity. 

Moster Old Church, April 2024

Covered in a protective net due to restoration works

New publications, part 2 - The Younger Passio Kanuti – a reassessment of its historical context, its author, and its purpose

 

As mentioned in my previous blogpost, I am deligted to announce the publication of a volume containing an edition and translation of an anonymous hagiography about Saint Knud Rex of Denmark (d.1086 in Odense), as well as a handful of academic articles. The volume, published by Museum Odense, is in open access and can be downloaded here. I was fortunate enough to be included among the editors of the book, and I am very happy to have worked on a volume that provides a important contributions to scholarship. 

In the previous blogpost, I wrote as a co-editor. In the present blogpost, however, I write as an author of two of the contributions in the volume, especially the article 'The Younger Passio Kanuti – a reassessment of its historical context, its author, and its purpose'. In this article I examine the anonymous hagiography in order to provide a reasonable assessment of its date and the reason why it was composed. The Younger Passio Kanuti is largely a copy of the earlier Gesta Swenomagni by Aelnoth of Canterbury, composed at Saint Knud's cult centre in Odense in the 1110s. The anonymous text nonethless contains original material and, perhaps just as importantly, rearranges the content of Aelnoth's vita in such a way that we cannot dismiss it as a mere copy. In my article, I therefore examine the internal evidence provided by the text to assess the likely chronological frame of the Younger Passio Kanuti, and also to suggest where it was intended to be used.  

The volume also contains a second contribution of mine, which is a comparative overview of the content of both Aelnoth's Gesta Swenomagni and the Younger Passio Kanuti. While containing some analytical commentary, this article is mainly inteded as an aid to understanding the analysis of the anonymous text and to demonstrate how the anonymous author used and engaged with his primary source. 

Both these contributions were gerat fun to write, because they represent the cumination of several years  of research on the cult of Saint Knud Rex, and they also help to provide a starting-point for future scholarship on both this cult in particular and on the cult of saints in medieval Denmark more generally.    

New publications, part 1 - Royal Blood - The Passion of St Cnut, King and Martyr

 

For the past two years, I have been collaborating with some colleagues in Odense, Denmark, on the publication of a new edition and translation of a medieval Danish hagiography. The text in question is an anonymous vita of Saint Knud Rex of Denmark, who was killed in Odense in 1086 following an insurrection. Knud Rex was one of the most important native saints of medieval Denmark, and his cult resulted in a lot of early texts that have been the subject of much scholarship in our own times. However, the anonymous Passio Sancti Kanuti regis et martiris - a title shared by an earlier and much better known vita - has been largely neglected since it was published in Martin Clarentius Gertz' landmark edition on Danish hagiographical material, Vitae Sanctorum Danorum. 

I was invited along on this project by my Danish colleagues, and the work resulted in a volume that contains both a translation and an edition of the text - both executed by Francis Young - and a selection of articles on both the anonymous vita and topics related to the cult of Saint Knud Rex. The volume is now published in open access, and can be downloaded from the website of Museum Odense. I am very thankful to my colleague that I am credited as co-editor, because I should emphasise that my actual contribution to the volume have not been as significant as the bibliographical information of the volume suggests. 

The publication is a valuable contribution to scholarship, both on the cult of Saint Knud Rex and the history of medieval Denmark more broadly, as it has already allowed us to rethink some of the aspects of the cult's history, and also some aspects of Danish medieval ecclesiastical history.  

As I am very proud to see this volume published, I will wrote more about my own contributions to this book in the next blogpost.