Today, July 10, is the feast of the martyrdom of Knud Rex. He reigned as king of Denmark from 1080 to 1086, and was murdered in the now-lost Church of Saint Alban in Odense by an angry mob who rebelled in response to high taxation. Knud was proclaimed a saint at an episcopal synod in Odense in 1095, and he became the patron saint of the city. His cult was aided both by royal patronage - his later successors Erik Ejegod (r.1095-1103) and Niels (r.1104-34) were both his brothers - and also the monastic community at Saint Knud's Church, the cathedral church of Odense. This monastic community was established in the reign of Erik, when the community of secular clerics was reformed to a Benedictine abbey. Several of the clerics, and also the monks, were English, and were experienced in the maintenance of the cult of a saint, and produced materials - including saints' lives and a liturgical office - for the veneration of the martyred king. The detail concerning this development are of great interest to me, and several articles concerning Knud, as well as related topics, can be accessed freely in this book.
In the present blogpost, however, I am not focussing on the medieval reception of his cult, but rather an aspect of his modern veneration, namely a pictorial narrative of his murder as it is presented in a series of stained glass windows from the early twentieth century.
Saint Knud Rex in majesty
In the period 1906-08, a new church was built in Odense, the Roman-Catholic church of Saint Alban (Skt. Albani Kirke). The church is built in a distinctly medievalesque style, and the choice of dedicating the church to Saint Alban suggests that those who financed the project sought to establish this building as a modern continuation of the medieval building that had once seen the murder of Odense's patron saint. Moreover, the location of the modern church is roughly - but not exactly - in the area where the eleventh-century wooden structure once stood, which appears to have been rebuilt in stone in the course of the twelfth century.
The modern Church of Saint Alban in Odense contains a number of medievalisms, and together these comprise a very interesting window into the identity-construction of the congregation in the early twentieth century. It should be noted, of course, that in a modern Catholic context, it is sometimes difficult to assess which aspects of the veneration of saints from the Middle Ages can be considered expressions of medievalisms. This difficulty arises from the fact that in a worldview in which the saints are genuine parts of the cosmology, the representation and invocation of that saint is not necessarily a representation and invocation of the medieval aspect of the saint's story, but rather the universal, timeless aspect of the saint.
In the case of the Church of Saint Alban in Odense, however, the architecture and much of the art appears to be deliberately drawing on medieval models. It is very likely that the general aesthetic should be seen in light of the Neo-Romantic appreciation of the Middle Ages that materialised throughout Northern Europe towards the end of the nineteenth century.
Since the Church of Saint Alban is located in Odense, it not only venerates Saint Alban, but also Saint Knud Rex. These two cults have been closely connected in Odense, given that it was Knud who brought relics of Saint Alban to Odense, and it was thanks to these relics that the church could be consecrated to the British protomartyr. That Knud himself died at the altar of that church, whose consecration he had assisted by the gift of relics, strengthened the connection even further. For the commissioners of the modern Church of Saint Alban's to choose Alban's patronage, it would have been implicit that they would also display a strong veneration for the martyred king.
Images and references to Knud can be found throughout the church space. One of the most significant of these cases is the series of three stained glass window in the Saint Knud' chapel, located on the right-hand side before the altar. These windows were made by Georg Schneider of Regensburg. From left to right they depict Knud receiving the final confession from his brother Benedict right before his death, then the martyred king in Heaven, and on the right the moment of his martyrdom. The images are, in other words to be read in the following order: Left, right, middle.
The images are interesting in part because they appear to draw on an iconographic tradition that does not go back to the Middle Ages, but rather to antiquarian and neo-Catholic renditions from the Early Modern Period. The exact links to this early modern pictorial lineage, however, is still not sufficiently mapped, and I will not go into details about it here.
Through the three scenes of the Saint Knud chapel, the story of the martyred king is efficiently narrated in three key points, which are also three of the key points highlighted in the medieval written narratives. This might be deliberate, or it might simply be because when a saint's story needs to be condensed into what Cynthia Hahn calls pictorial hagiography, the scenes chosen for that narrative are selected for practical reasons, namely that those scenes are the most succinct way to present the story.
While the art of the modern Church of Saint Alban is distinctly modern - even, or perhaps particularly, when it draws on earlier iconographic traditions - it is very clear that a lot of the aesthetic seeks to invoke the Middle Ages. For this reason, I brought a group of students to this church when I was teaching a course on the cult of saints, because the church spaces gives a good impression of how a medieval church might have looked. And in this way, the story of Knud Rex as it appears in glass in the chapel of Saint Knud is the latest expression of a narrative and aesthetic tradition that has its roots in the eleventh century.
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