The chalice of John the Evangelist

Today is the feast of John the Evangelist, and for this occasion I decided to dig deep in my archives in search of a memory from when I was an MA student and spent quite a lot of time in York. I was reminded of the many beautiful pieces of surviving medieval stained glass in the city's many churches, and I had some hazy recollections of John the Evangelist featuring in some of them. In particular, I was convinced that the Church of St Denys on Walmgate had at least one memorable depiction of John, and it turned out that I was right, in a fashion. The images I found were not quite what I had envisioned, but what I found was well worth sharing, especially because one of the images teaches a very good lesson about the importance of iconography. But I'm getting ahead of myself. 

John the Evangelist, holding his attribute, the eagle

The above picture was one I had forgotten, but which shows one of the typical representations of John: A young, beardless man holding the eagle, his attribute which points back to the tetramorph of the vision of Ezekiel. In his other hand he holds what looks like the palm leaf, commonly attributed to martyrs, which is puzzling considering that John was not martyred but rather died of old age. It is possible that it is a lily signifying his virginity, but this is uncertain. The glass is fourteenth century. 

Saint Denys

Saint Denys, tower and repaired Norman doorway

The Church of Saint Denys is a treasure trove of medieval vestiges pointing to its long history. The doorway beside the tower, for instance, points to its early twelfth-century origin, as it is a Romanesque Norman arch with mason work typical of the period. Although the stonework and the gateway itself is, to the best of my judgement, original, its placement is a result of the continuous changes of the medieval church space. The main church building with its central nave and two flanking aisles dates from the fourteenth and fifteenth century, the period when the oldest surviving stained glass windows were constructed. The nave was badly damaged during the English Civil War, presumably in particular during the Siege of York in 1644, and therefore significantly shorter and more quadratic than it was originally. Consequently, while the Norman doorway once was the main entrance into the nave, it presently stands in its rebuilt form as a side entrance. 

Saint Denys, interior

Because the church has undergone many accidents and tumultuous changes in the course of its long history, a lot of what survives today is not in its original place - as demonstrated by the case of the Norman doorway. This is particularly evident in much of the stained glass. Some of the figures remain in their original positions, either by being put back in place or simply by serendipitously surviving the many changes in the subsequent centuries. Much of the medieval glass, however, survives only in fragments. These fragments have been put into whichever empty lead frame that fit them, resulting in an incongruous mix of displaced details that together provide an imperfect but powerful glimpse of the once complete programme of stories, episodes and figures that filtered the light for the churchgoers in the late Middle Ages. To the medievalist, these assemblages of fragments provide a veritable treasure hunt by which a picture, a narrative or a figure might be teased out from the chaos. One of these figures is John the Evangelist. 

In the picture above we see some of the many details that once were part of complete stories in glass. We see trumpeters that might hint at a doomsday window since the gonfanon is decorated by horned devils and ominous black birds that could be owls. We see the crowned head of the crucified Christ that might have been a free-standing crucifix or part of a larger crucifixion scene. And we see a chalice with a serpent. This chalice is the chalice of John the Evangelist, and can be found in a story recounted by Jacobus de Voragine in Legenda Aurea. According to this story, John was given a cup of poisoned wine by a pagan priest, but John drank the wine and survived, thus proving the power of God.

What is particular interesting about this disembodied attribute is exactly that it is recognisable even outside its original context. Once this stained glass fragment flanked a figure of John the Evangelist and reminded the onlookers of the story of the poisoned wine, which the priest might have recounted in sermons on precisely this day, December 27. They would have been reminded of this story whenever they went to church, looked up and saw this chalice and the now-lost figure of the evangelist. And even now, centuries later, with the figure of John irretrievably lost to the accidents of history, this single chalice, displaced from its original context, is still identifiable precisely because the stories survive, and precisely because the stained glass is a reminder of that stories, a shorthand for a larger narrative. In this way, fragments of a now-lost vitreous splendour is sufficient for us to, at least mentally, piece together what was once a familiar sight to the parishioners of Saint Denys, Walmgate, York.