New publication: The functions of religion and science in utopian thinking in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period

Today, I was notified of the publication of an article that is one of the texts that I have had the most fun writing. The article in question is titled 'The functions of religion and science in utopian thinking in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period', and is published in the journal Belgrade Philosophical Annual vol. 37, issue 2. The text can be accessed and downloaded here and here. The article is based on a talk I gave last February, which can be accessed through this blogpost. There are significant differences between the talk and the published article, however, both because of how my thinking has developed, and because of new things I have read since then. 

The article is quite simple, as the title suggests. I explore how texts that can be understood as utopian, broadly speaking, from both the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period utilised religion and science in fashioning the ideal condition. By spanning the medieval-early modern divide, I also seek to reject this divide and point to continuities in the worldviews within which the various utopists formulated their ideal societies. It was great fun to write, because it allowed me an excuse to delve into material that has hitherto been quite peripheral to my research, yet which has held my interest for the better part of a decade. Moreover, the longue durée perspective has made me even more convinced about the need to rethink the artificial divide between medieval and early modern thinking, and also how we understand utopianism.   

Joys of returning - an evening meal in Salamanca

As much as I enjoy seeing new places, there is a particular joy in returning to somewhere familiar. Since I am currently in Salamanca, a city I have loved for ten years, I am particularly reminded of this, and especially when I am navigating the food scene. The first evening, I went out to get a quick bite to eat before bedtime, and I ended up in a bar with an intriguing selection of toasts. Spanish toasts are, luckily, more elaborate than the ones commonly found in the UK, for instance, and these were laden with delicious spreads and condiments. Trying to make decisions, I asked the waitress what the things were, and I could not help notice a bemused look that bordered on delight when she witnessed this very obvious foreigner correctly identifying such local specialties as the morcilla, the blood sausage. It turned out to be spectacular, but the joy of the food itself was nothing compared to that deep feeling of belonging - of having returned to a beloved place and, while clearly not a native, being sufficiently well-versed in the language, the various references, the iconography, to encounter the familiar yet also to expand the horizon in different directions. 

 

Utopia closed - encountering a literary topos in Pontevedra

 

Every once in a while, reality corresponds with fiction, and sometimes in delightful ways. These are the brief moments that remind us that even though literary topoi have often come to be seen as signs of literature being divorced from reality - relying instead on cliches and intertextual games to express things - these topoi do resonate with reality. To paraphrase Siri Hustvedt in The summer without men, something that never happens in modern fiction might still happen in modern life. Conversely, just because something is a literary topos does not mean that it cannot echo the real world in some way or another. I was reminded of this puzzling relationship between truth and fiction during a visit to Pontevedra in Galicia. I took a bus from Santiago de Compostela in the morning, and around midday I found myself walking the quiet streets of a town preparing for the mid-afternoon rest. 

Not far from the bus station, I happened upon a bar with the promising name Utopia. For me, having dedicated much of my research time to utopian literature, this felt like a lovely example of synchronicity, where two elements of your life come into contact by chance rather than design. I would have felt professionally obliged to visit this bar, but unfortunately it was closed. However, although I was disappointed not being able to enter Utopia, there is also a delightful aspect to my misfortune. After all, utopian spaces - broadly understood as locations where life is better than elsewhere - are typically closed off for the majority of people. Only those who are selected or who otherwise fit the criteria for entry are allowed to access Utopia. We find this restriction in classical literature, medieval formulations of ideal spaces, and the more purified literary versions in early modern texts. In other words, this chance encounter at the wrong time of day enabled me to live a literary topos.  

Saint James the Elder in Skive

 

These days, I'm preparing for an upcoming talk at a conference in Spain, where I will once more delve into the history of the cult of Saint James the Elder. The cult of Saint James is one of the most remarkable iconographical metamorphoses, as the apostle became a pilgrim and then became known as such throughout the entire medieval Latin Christendom. The signature hat, staff and scallop shell are all part of a recognisable iconography that continues to resonate to this day, and that can often be found in small places far away from the cult centre in Santiago de Compostela. One such place is Skive in Northern Jutland. 

Saint James the Elder

Skive Church

In my upcoming talk, my focus is on the cult of Saint James - as Santiago, which serves as a useful shorthand for the Compostelan iteration of the saint - and his medieval cult in the Nordic sphere. One of the examples of his cult is a wall-painting in the Church of Our Lady in Skive, which is part of a fresco cycle that was completed in 1522. The cycle consists of several saints, some of whom I have written about in other blogposts. Saint James appears as his pilgrim self on the side of the archway that separates the choir from the nave. This archway and the choir are dedicated to the Trinity and the apostles, except Saint Matthias who for some reason is not included.  

That Saint James the Elder appears as a pilgrim is only to be expected, given that saints were depicted in ways that would make them recognisable. It is, however, a fascinating testament to the flexibility of medieval temporal imagination that a saint is placed in a distinctly biblical context, yet is depicted as what would be a post-biblical figure representing the later development of his cult. There is no contradiction in this, at least from the point of view of medieval venerators, since once a saint entered Heaven they were atemporal and existed in all time periods postdating their deaths. What we see here, therefore, is not so much anachronistic a achronic - an example of how time exists on a different plane than mere history, at least within the perspective of the medieval cult of saints. 

Reading-spots, part 6

 

In December, after the end of my most recent employment, I returned home to my native village of Hyen in the Western Norwegian fjords. Here, I spend as much time as I can tying up various loose ends, applying for jobs, and working on the several commitments I have made to friends and colleagues. Such transitions like this one are always difficult, always emotional, because they are final and irreversible, and they are always tinged with a series of annoying what-ifs. As I'm settling into a new rhythm, I also find myself seeking out some solutions I have tried out before. One of these is to use my late paternal grandfather's room as an office, which was how I organised my work back in 2021. I was then in a similar situation, although I still had some short-term employment, and to sit in this room again with a cup of coffee and a cup of tea makes the transition seem less dramatic - the irreversibility of turning a new page feels less dauting, simply because I have been here before.  

This early in the year, it is still too cold to spend long sessions in this room, but when I do the quietness of the walls and the view of the beloved fjord serve as a great framework for thinking and reading, and especially to try and forget about the world for long enough periods at a time.  

Typographic continuity - an example from the novel Antangil

 

In a recent blogpost, I wrote about some of my early impressions and experiences researching the 1616 utopian novel Histoire du grand et admirable royaume d'Antangil incogneu jusques a present à tous historiens et cosmographes (History of the great and admirable kingdom of Antangil, unknown until the present by all historians and cosmographers). Since then, I have had cause to delve deeper into structure of the book, and the book as an object - mainly in order to compare its thematic division with similar works, and to see how much of the novel was dedicated to military matters. 

One detail that struck me with particular force during this work, was how the typography of the of a book printed in 1616 retained many of the same features of medieval manuscript culture that was carried over into the first printed European books. Granted, I always tend to emphasise continuity and to eschew the common medieval/early modern divide, but I was pleasantly surprised to see how the abbreviations from the Middle Ages were retained. One passage that demonstrated the situation particularly well is the one illustrated below, from a chapter on the exercises of the gendarmerie in times of peace. The passage describes how the soldiers are promised to be liberally bestowed with "[charges] et honneurs, venans à se monstrer de plus en plus braves, genereux et fideles" (responsibilities and honours, coming to show themselves off as more and more brave, generous and faithful). I am amused by this aspect of early seventeenth typography, and especially because this makes it actually easier for me to read the text, unaccustomed as I am to read French and seventeenth-century material. 

I. D. M. G. T., Histoire du grand et admirable royaume d'Antangil incogneu jusques a present à tous historiens et cosmographes, 1616, p. 90.

Eden in the Norwegian fjords

Yesterday, I wrote a blogpost on how medieval Christians in Europe connected themselves to the biblical past through typology. Typological thinking, however, is a phenomenon in many Christian cultures and periods, and today I was reminded of another case of Nordic biblical typology that is far removed from the twelfth-century baptismal font in Fiskbæk Church.  

I come from the small village of Hyen in the Western Norwegian fjords, and at the time of writing I am residing here while applying for jobs. Earlier today, I went for a walk which took me along part of the old main road which was used from time immemorial until the 1930s. In so doing, I passed an old stone which looks somewhat like a bed or a couch, which goes by the name of "Adam og Eva-steinen", the Adam and Eve stone. My paternal grandmother, born in 1912, told me about how she and her generation imagined that this was where Adam and Eve had their bed, and this idea was commonly shared at the time of her childhood. My grandmother also had an idea that I believe to be her own - at least based on how she told me about it when I was little - namely that the orchard of one of the farms in this part of the village was the Garden of Eden.  

My grandmother was born into a world of Lutheran piety, where the biblical frame of reference saturated a lot of popular culture as well as the schools and public gatherings. In this sense, Western Norway of the 1910s was quite similar to the Middle Ages, although the type of Christianity in those two eras were very different from one another. It was only natural that both children and adults would fuse their knowledge of the Bible and their immediate geographical horizon together in the way that led to the naming of the Adam and Eve stone. This case, then, points to how easily typological thinking can be infused into a cultural framework, and how human creativity can run with this kind of thinking and create very lovely and very endearing ideas.