A mingled past - or, Adventures in medievalism, part 3

Uses of the Middle Ages in a modern context are a bit like dust bunnies: Once you start looking for them, they are everywhere, sometimes even in rather surprising locations, or in unexpected forms and shapes. One frequently recurring form of medievalism is the use of the Middle Ages as an origin point for modern commercial products, where a modern manufacturer will employ references to the medieval period as a way to sell their merchandise, creating the illusion of a link with ancestral practices. The reference points depend on the culture in which the merchandise is peddled. Knights, monks, saints, Vikings, crusaders, kings, queens, nuns and jesters are some of the typical figure that are employed either separately or together, serving ultimately to persuade the buyer that by choosing this particular product, they will connect to a heritage that extends centuries into the past. Such strategies can yield amusing or funny results, but they can also be quite insidious given the right political context. 

One such example of a product that relies on the buyer's fascination with the Middle Ages is a range of herbal teas that I have encountered both in the fjords back home, as well as in the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo, where the above picture was taken. The herbal teas are named after two of the most important Norwegian saints, SS Sunniva and Olaf. So far I have not been able to find a tea named after the third main Norwegian saint, Hallvard.  

Products that rely so clearly on the medieval past to sell their product often find different ways to do so, but a common strategy is to provide a bit of explanatory text, whereby the link is forged a bit more clearly. In the case of the St. Olav tea, this link is forged by reference to two typical but in a way disparate elements from the Norwegian Middle Ages. The herbs are said to be well-known staples of monastic herb gardens, and the selection includes angelica, which is here claimed to be a Nordic contribution to those herb gardens. This claim is notable since it emphasises Nordic participation in the development of medieval monastic culture, and in a way can be said to present Norway as an active part on the medieval stage. The connection between the tea and medieval monastic practices is also strengthened by the patterns and the logo of the brand, which are taken from the stave church in Lom. Although a stave church was a parish church and not connected to a monastic establishment, the evocation of one religious foundation helps bring the mind towards another type of religious foundation. 

Interestingly, the manufacturer has not only employed the image of the idyllic cloister garden, but also combined this with references to Vikings. In the presentation of the product, the manufacturer states that Vikings used wild-growing herbs, and then going on to provide an estimate of the number of stave churches that were erected after Norway's Christianisation. This joining of two disparate types of imagery - warriors and the institutions they sacked - is at first confusing, but can also be said to make perfect sense from a marketing point of view: All bases are addressed, both those who are drawn to the quiet romanticism of monastic life, and those who aspire to be manly men like the Vikings. The link to the Vikings are also alluded to in the opening text of the content description, where the tea is described as a tea for peaceful times between the battles. Now, the expression "between the battles" is very typical in Norwegian, and simply means between busy periods. In a context that plays on a connection with Vikings, and for a product that is named after a Viking-turned-Christianising-king-turned-saint, the expression does take on a slightly more literal meaning. 

The marketing strategy in this case fascinates me, as it is a typical yet very convoluted and layered employment of Norway's medieval past in order to sell tea, a product that was not known or used in medieval Norway. In this way, there is both an element of achronology - Norway's pre-Christian and Christian past evoked in the same breath - but also of anachronism, since the product that is supposed to embody these links to the past was not used in the past to which it is being connected. I find this interesting because I believe the strategy says a lot about us modern people, not only the manufacturer, but also those who buy the product. And after all, even though I have bought this tea for the sake of a scholarly point, I have spent just as much money on it as someone who buys it in order to be more like a monk, or a Viking, or like Saint Olaf. So it is clear that advertisements work. 

The saint in the pot - Saint Erasmus at Skive

One of my various side-projects these days entails a revisit to the saints of the Church of Our Lady in Skive in Northern Jutland. The church, built around 1200, was decorated with an extensive wall-painting programme of various saints in 1522, and thanks to restoration work in the 1900s, most of these can still be seen today. I have touched upon several of these saints in earlier blogposts (see here, here, here, here, and here). The best treatment of these wall-paintings can be found in a small pamphlet from 1993, Kalkmalerierne i Vor Frue Kirke Skive (The frescoes of the Church of Our Lady, Skive), published by Bodil Glad and Ingvar Glad in 1993. Having read through this excellent resource, I was notified of one particular and in a way delightful detail that I had caught on camera during my visit there in 2019, but which I had subsequently overlooked - no doubt distracted by the host of other details to draw the eye. 

The detail in question concerns the representation of Saint Erasmus, also known as Saint Elmo, whom we find in the second vaulting of the nave next to Saint Denis, or Dionysius if one prefers. Saint Erasmus was, according to legend, the bishop of Formia, who was martyred in a typically gruesome fashion: He had his entrails drawn out with a windlass, and he was himself boiled in a pot. As is typical in medieval Christian art, the martyr Erasmus is depicted holding one of the (often several) instruments of his torture, in this case the windlass. Among the other saints in Skive we see the same pattern, although some have other symbols of their martyrdom than the instruments, such as Erasmus' neighbour Denis, who holds the top of his skull, which his assailants chopped off. 

In the case of Saint Erasmus, however, the artist has decided to present the legend of the saint by more ways than one. Possibly inspired by the vogue of the time which had saints emerge from flower bulbs, the artist has replaced the bulb with the pot from Saint Erasmus' passion, making the saint stand out among his colleagues, as can be seen in the second of the blogpost's two images. The reason for this choice is unknown to us, and can be interpreted in several ways. Was it a humorous choice? Or did it grow - pun intended - out of devotion for the saint, resulting from a wish to make Erasmus more notable, or to have his legend represented in more detail? Did it follow a wider trend of the period, a period in which Erasmus enjoyed widespread popularity as one of the fourteen holy helpers? Ultimately we do not know, but we can still enjoy the result of this decision taken during the work of 1522.

Saint Erasmus in a pot, next to Saint Denis with the top of his skull

Saint Erasmus in immediate context 

(Denis, Erasmus, Peter Martyr, Thomas of Canterbury, Sebastian and Vincent)

Saint Knud Dux, Saint Hulpe, and the limits of saintly fame

Today, January 7, is the feast of Knud Lavard, son of the Danish king Erik Ejegod (r.1095-1103), who was murdered by his cousin Magnus, son of King Niels (r.1104-34). The murder took place at Haraldsted near Ringsted on Sjælland, and Ringsted became the centre of Knud’s cult. While the formal canonisation of Knud only came in 1169, the Benedictines of Ringsted Abbey began preparing the ground for his cult already in the 1130s. Knud is typically known as Knud Dux, in order to distinguish him from his sainted uncle Knud Rex, who was killed in Odense in 1086.   

The cult of Knud Dux was strongly promoted by Knud’s son Valdemar (sole king of Denmark 1157-82), apparently in direct competition with the cult of Knud Rex, whose centre was in Odense. Knud Dux became a patron saint of Valdemar’s new dynasty, but due to tumultuous periods of conflict between various pretenders to the Danish throne throughout the thirteenth and early fourteenth century, the cult of the sainted duke appears to have had limited, albeit notable, impact beyond Sjælland. One example of this limited but notable impact can be found in a book printed in Lübeck in 1492, and this blogpost aims to explain both how the inclusion of Knud Dux in this book shows both the significance as well as the limit of his cult in the later Middle Ages.

The book in question is the collection of saints’ lives Das Leuend der Hÿlghen, or Passionael, printed by Steffen Arndes. The first edition of this book appeared in 1488, and a second expanded edition came in 1492. In the second edition, Arndes included a number of Scandinavian saints, including both Knud Rex and Knud Dux. As both these saints were known in the cultural geography in which both Northern Germany and Denmark participated, the inclusion of these saints are not surprising. Moreover, Arndes had several customers in Denmark and Sweden, so the inclusion of these saints can also be seen as a kind of marketing.    

Passionael contains a number of beautiful woodcuts depicting the saints of the given chapters. In many cases, the woodcut was specifically made for the saint in question, such as the vignette for Knud Rex, which depicts him as a king and shows him holding a sword, which was his main attribute. At the opening of the chapter of Knud Dux (f.181r), the vignette shows a youngish man with hair to his shoulders and with his palms pressed against each other, ostensibly in prayer. His head resting on a cliff or a rock. Around his neck is a collar that possibly is meant to signify ermine, thereby pointing to his noble or royal background. Above him stands an executioner with a curved sword whose edge is planted firmly in the saint’s head.           

The legend of Knud Dux from Das Leuend der Hÿlghen, f.181r
Syddansk Universitetsbibliotek RARA M 15

The vignette does in a way fit with the legend of Knud Dux in that the person in the picture is young and of highborn status. However, the death of Knud was brought about not by an executioner but by a group of his cousin Magnus’ men, not by an executioner who, in saint stories at least, is effectively an official representative of secular power. The legend of Knud Dux as it is narrated in Passionael follows its typical pattern, although its precise source has not yet been established, and therefore there is a distinct dissonance between the legend and the image. The explanation is simply that the image is recycled.            

The image of the young man appears again on f.400r, and although it appears later in the book, this chapter appears to have been part of the first edition from 1488. The chapter beginning on f.400r tells the legend of Saint Hulpe, the son of the king of Sicily at the time of a certain Emperor Anthony. Saint Hulpe is likely apocryphal, and the history of his cult is unknown to me at this stage. What is notable, however, is that Hulpe fits the vignette much better than does Knud Dux, and it seems certain that Arndes recycled the image for the Danish saint because of some overlaps between the two: youngish age, royal background, killed by the sword. 

The legend of Saint Hulpe from Das Leuend der Hÿlghen, f.400r
Syddansk Universitetsbibliotek RARA M 15

Such recycling of images is not uncommon in printing, so it is not surprising to see it done in Passionael. What is interesting about it, at least to me, is what it tells us about the impact of the cult of Knud Dux at the close of the fifteenth century. On the one hand, he was a figure sufficiently well known throughout the Western Baltic that he was included in a collection of saints’ lives produced in Lübeck. On the other hand, he appears to have not been sufficiently important to warrant the production of a specially made woodcuts, even though such woodcuts were made for most, perhaps even all, of the other saints whose chapters were added in the second edition of Passionael. Granted, we need to be careful about using the recycling of woodcuts and images as measures of popularity. There might have been other elements at play than Knud Dux’ fame or relative lack thereof, but the case nonetheless serves as an interesting reminder of the potential limits of a cult’s popularity, despite its relative broad dissemination beyond its cult centre. 

Reading by lists

 
if you want to dream, keep those dreams massively achievable 

- Richard Ayoade, 8 out of 10 cats does countdown S20E03



In my previous blogpost, the last of 2021, I provided an overview of some highlights from my reading that year. These highlights constituted more than the individual books themselves, as part of what made them highlights had to do with aspects related to but extraneous from the act of reading itself. One such aspect is rooted in one of the cornerstones in how my reading through any year is selected and decided, namely the multiple lists that I aim to cross out every year. I briefly alluded to these lists in my previous blogpost, and thanks to a very positive response from friends I have decided that the first blogpost of the new year will be a presentation of these lists and why I employ them as guidelines.               


Why lists?      

Before getting into the lists themselves, however, it is perhaps relevant to note that a fundamental rationale behind my extensive use of lists has to do with my personality and its constellation of virtues and vices. On the plus side – I believe – I am a voracious and very curious reader, who will happily yet not indiscriminately venture into unknown literary fields. On the negative side, however, I am also a very slow reader, and the combination of my personal slowness with the general finiteness of human existence means that I am forced to make choices in my readings. After all, no one goes into a library and work their way through it from A to Z (or A to Å in Norwegian).

In addition to this more existential constraint, there are also two aspects that have an impact in my reading through any given year. On the one hand, there is the issue of my work requiring a lot of reading, which in turn affects how I choose my books. On the other hand, there is a part of me that easily tires of routine and constraint, and which therefore is prone to embark on a book simply because I want to read it. Since I am also driven by professionalism and frivolity – in addition to my concerns regarding finiteness – I am using more than one list simply for the sake of variation. My greatest fear as a reader is to get stuck and to tire of reading altogether.      


The lists         

My first reading list was compiled in the spring of 2008. It was my first year at university, and I was increasingly taking in the vast literary world to which I had access. Trips to the campus bookshop and the library were exhilarating excursions that left a deep imprint on me, but at times also simply overwhelmed me. It was in this period of careful forays into the wider world of literature that I wrote down two lists: One of books I had read, and one of books which I would like to read. The second one consisted of a relatively diverse array of well-known and lesser-known books, mainly fiction, yet this diversity was severely hampered by my general inexperience of the literary world’s infinite possibilities. Even so, the list was a product of my continuing desire to eventually be well-read, interesting and cultured, and I although I have removed some items from the list as they have fallen out of interest, I continue to believe that if I do manage to get through all these books, I will be much better for it. 

As I had compiled the second list, I quickly saw that this was going to be a life-long project, yet despite this revelation – or perhaps perversely because of it – I turned my attention to other titles instead. It was only in the course of 2009, if memory serves, that I started to let this list guide me more systematically. It was also then, I think, that I stopped putting new items on that list, even though the number of books that I wanted to read grew steadily for each new course I took.        

Several years later, as my list of books that I had read grew longer, and my list of books I wanted to read did not diminish as quickly as I had hoped, I was introduced to another system of lists thanks to my youngest sister. This system was comprised of triads: Three books in three or more categories that would guide the reading in the course of a year, and that would open up for some variety. As my desire for titles had gone way beyond the list from 2008 at that point, possibly in 2013, I embraced this system and set down four categories from which to choose my titles. I still use these categories to this very day.         

One category is my reading list from 2008. Even though I have picked up the pace, there are still, at the time of writing, 138 books to be crossed off, some of which are quite lengthy. For this reason, making sure that I at least go through a minimum of three each year will hopefully keep inspiring me to finish before I reach the age of 80.       

A second category consists of Nobel laureates in literature. This category is more of a mixed bag in my eyes. Whereas my list of 2008, at least in its current configuration, solely includes items that I think will either extend my literary horizon or at least fill in various embarrassing gaps, the selection of Nobel laureates is beyond my control and sometimes contrary to what I consider to be necessary reading. For instance, in 2016 I read Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming and disliked every second of it. Granted, there is value in having read it, and there are very few books that I will consider unworthy of reading, or that I will regret reading. But I think it is fair to say that I would not have finished The Homecoming had it not been for Pinter’s status as a Nobel laureate and the canonicity conferred upon him by that status. For this reason, I do not prioritise the Nobel list as highly as I do others.   

A third category is Norwegian books. As I had spent much of my early twenties reading anglophone literature, I came to the realisation that I had neglected the literary heritage of my native country, which is both rich and interesting. In a move to rectify my ignorance and inexperience, I decided to read a minimum of three books that can in some way or another be construed as Norwegian. This means that I do not limit myself to books written by Norwegian authors since the country’s established autonomy in 1814, or its independence in 1905, but in general books that have been produced within, or by people from, the cultural geography known as Norway at any given point in time.         

A fourth category is academic books. This category comes in part from the acknowledgement that my professional life presides over much of my reading in the course of a year, but rarely in the form of entire books. Very often, I will consume academic literature in the form of articles, perhaps chapters, and often in a rather squirrelsome way, meaning that I am looking for specific pieces of information from which I can build my own texts, my own arguments, or my own teaching. This category is a way to ensure that I also read some books in full. 

In addition to these two categories, there are two others that I eventually realised were necessary in order to make even more of my reading. The first of these two categories is books by women. Because I am a medievalist, a lot of my source material and a lot of the older academic texts that I still need to consult are written by men. Moreover, since many of the books I included in my list of 2008 are drawn from the Western cultural canon of before 1900, there is an overweight of male writers. Similarly, the list of Nobel laureates is heavily male-dominated, and continues to be so. I am, however, deeply convinced that a wide reading serves the purpose of gaining a wider understanding of the world and its reality, and for that understanding to be attained it is necessary to read a wide representation of humanity. One way of ensuring a wide representation is to consciously read more women, and that includes, of course, trans women. Additionally, and perhaps especially in relation to the next category, I have found that many female authors have access to or are conscious of social issues and spheres that many male authors have historically either neglected or badly misrepresented. Consequently, I find myself benefitting greatly from reading books by women – beyond the quality of the individual books.
           
The final category came into place in the autumn of 2017, and I have written about it on this blog at various times already. This category is to read one book from each of the world’s 197 countries (and also Western Sahara, which is not yet recognised by the UN). My project of travelling the world by page was inspired by the project A Year of Reading the World by British journalist Ann Morgan, and I picked it up after I had handed in my PhD thesis. So far, I have had a great range of experiences, and learned much more than I had anticipated – naturally – and it continues to be a project that pays enormous dividends. In combination with the previous category, reading women, I often seek out works by women from the new countries, and this, I believe, has provided an even more nuanced view of various countries of their cultures than I would otherwise have had.       

These six categories, then, are what guide my yearly reading. Often, they can be done in combination, fortunately, but in any case, they ensure that I do not tire of reading anytime soon. In addition to these categories, of course, I also pick up books that do not belong in any of them, breaking free of the guidelines and the lists completely. I have so far avoided calling this a seventh “sundries” category, although in effect that is exactly what it is.        


The lists in 2021       

As much as I enjoy talking about books and reading, I have long been very hesitant to enumerate things I have read. Such enumerations – or lists of finished reading, rather – often have or can be seen as having a competitive undertone. Personally, I am very fond of such overviews, because they often provide great recommendations. However, since reading is about quantity rather than quality, and since we all have different frameworks that open up or limit our reading, I will close this blogpost with one book from each of the six categories by which I have organised my reading in the previous year. All in all, 2021 was a very good year for reading, and I hope that 2022 will prove even better.        


Category 1, a book from my old reading list: Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus       


Category 2, a Nobel lauerate: Louise Glück, The Wild Iris 


Category 3, a Norwegian book: Helge Ingstad, Klondyke Bill        


Category 4, an academic book: Henry Bainton, History and the written word      


Category 5, a book by a woman: Elizabeth Lambourn, Abraham’s luggage         


Category 6, a book from a new country: Maïssa Bey, Do you hear in the mountains (Algeria; translated by Erin Lamm)               

Following these categories, I am pleased to say that I did manage to read more than the minimum requirement of eighteen different books, and so the system – in its crooked way – definitely works for me. I hope it will continue to do so in the coming months.