New publication: Symbolic Crucifixion and Royal Sainthood: Two Examples from Benedictine Saints’ Lives (c. 985-c. 1120)

 
Today, I was notified of the publication of a collection of article to which I was fortunate enough to contribute with an article of my own. The collection is titled Death, Sanctity, and the Cross - Crucified Saints in Image and Text and it is edited by Barbara Crostini and Anthony John Lappin. The articles explore different ways in which the singular significance of the crucifixion of Christ was negotiated in the cult of saints, where the saints were expected to imitate Christ, but where the boundary between imitation and sacrilegious copying could sometimes be blurry and not a matter of universal consensus. 

The book is published by Viella, and can be purchased from the publisher's website: https://www.viella.it/libro/9791254690024. 


My article, 'Symbolic Crucifixion and Royal Sainthood: Two Examples from Benedictine Saints’ Lives (c. 985-c. 1120)', is an examination of texts from the cults of two saints, Edmund Martyr (d.869) and Knud Rex of Denmark (d.1086). Through a close-reading of the material, I explore how crucifixion imagery was used to amplify the holiness of these two royal saints. I argue that this imagery was employed within a Benedictine context where the holiness of kings was something that could be met with scepticism, due to the many different aspects of the king's office that made holiness very difficult to attain.  









 

A brief appreciation for the pathetic in literature

Today I finished reading a work I had been looking forward to for a few years already, namely the novel El anacronópete (1887) by Enrique Gaspar. Unfortunately, as I was unable to obtain a physical copy in the original language, and since I do not like to read on a screen and therefore preferred to use the file on Project Gutenberg mainly as a control text against the English, I had to rely on the excellent translation The Time Ship by Yolanda Molina-Gavilán and Andrea Bell from 2012. I first learned of this book thanks to the third season of one of my favourite TV series, El Ministerio del Tiempo (The Ministry of Time), which is an excellent way to become introduced to both major and minor aspects of Spain’s rich, layered, complicated and varied cultural history.       

There are many interesting things to say about the novel, more things than I as a neophyte in science fiction literature can embark on and still do them justice, at least within the confines of a blogpost. But one thing of which the novel did remind me was an aspect of the speculative literature of the nineteenth century that I greatly appreciate, namely the pathetic protagonist. And in this blogpost, I wish to provide a brief explanation of what I mean by this description, and why I appreciate it so much. 

As far as the novel goes, Gaspar does not hold back in his construction of pathetic figures when fashioning the two main male protagonists of the tale. Chief of these two is the scientist Don Sindulfo García, maker of the time ship or the anacronópete, who is a man in his forties. The second is Benjamín, a man in his thirties, a humanist polymath who has studied a vast array of languages, and who serves as Don Sindulfo’s assistant. Together with the two female protagonists – Clara, the fifteen-year-old ward and niece of Don Sindulfo and Juana her nineteen-year-old maid – they travel back in time. The two male protagonists, however, have very different key motives for doing so, and both these motives are in their way pathetic because they are founded on pettiness and selfishness. Benjamín is mainly concerned with obtaining the recipe for immortality rumoured to be found in Han China, while Don Sindulfo is in search for a less liberal age in which it will be legal for him to marry his own niece. The selfishness of these two individuals plays out in different ways that endanger both themselves and other characters, but to go into any detail on this here would spoil too much. The point is that in their efforts to indulge in this selfishness, the two scientists are displayed as the all-too-human, all-too-foibled individuals that they are.     

I appreciate such protagonists greatly, because they are the opposite of hero-worship, and their fallible nature gives a sheen of realism even to the wildest and most absurd stories (two categories to which El anacronópete definitely belongs). It is that kind of human realism that makes it much easier to suspend any disbelief concerning other aspects of the story, and that allows me to heartily enjoy all kinds of unrealistic coincidences or even the use of deus ex machina. As I generally abhor any kind of hero-worship and as I prefer to emphasise the human aspect of even those individuals whom I consider the greatest and the best among us, I like seeing the pathetic aspect of humanity written large on literary protagonists.            

It is this kind of pathetic humanity that has made me enjoy certain speculative novels – novels that explore ideas and that are not confined to neither fantasy nor science fiction but can easily be classified as both – from the nineteenth century. A few memorable cases can be listed here. In George Sand’s Laura, a Journey into the crystal (Laura, Voyage dans le cristal) from 1864, a poor geology student is dragged along on an unlikely expedition by his megalomaniac and demonic uncle. In Jules Verne’s masterpiece Journey to the centre of the earth (Voyage au centre de la Terre) from 1864/67 a similar uncle-nephew dynamic is notable, one which might be explained by Verne’s apparent inspiration drawn from George Sand’s novel, as noted by William Butcher in his 2008 translation. In Verne’s story, however, the uncle is not as theatrically demonic, but his obsession and stubbornness come very close and do give the scientist in question a very pathetic touch to his otherwise evident resilience. The nephew, who is also the novel’s first-person narrator, is more traditionally pathetic in that he is doubtful, scared, yet too much in his uncle’s thrall to rebel, and this is why is all-the-more relatable and, indeed, likable. (Note that I do not use pathetic as a pejorative but as a neutral, if not downright objective, description.) Two final examples here will be Henry Rider Haggard’s protagonist Allan Quatermain, of whom I have read in King Solomon’s Mines (1885) and Allan Quatermain (1887), and Horace Holly from She (1887). Both these men are pathetic in different ways, but in each case they are pathetic by not conforming to the ideals of their society, one by being frail and emotional, one by being ugly and eremitic.          

Due to the pathetic nature of the protagonists of these novels, the reader, at least in my case, is drawn all the more vividly into the story-world because there is something very human and therefore relatable about them. In some cases this humanity makes them also likable, although that is not always a given. (I will state that I detest Horace Holly with a vengeance because of his misogyny.) The pathetic element of these figures gives both the characters and the novels they inhabit greater depth, and it is that kind of depth that in my mind is one of the many possible hallmarks of great literature.  

Or, perhaps I appreciate these pathetic literary figures because they remind me of myself, and we all, I suspect, appreciate seeing ourselves reflected and represented in the works of culture that we imbibe. 

Outdated materiality in the library

libros cuyas páginas, finalmente, aprendí a cortar, para no comprobar, meses después, que estaban intactos   

books whose pages I at last learned to cut [in advance] so as not to find them still intact months later

- Jorge Luis Borges, El Aleph (my translation)



Even though I am not a book historian per se, I am frequently reminded of various ways in which the book as an object has been designed and made, ways that are no longer in use but which remain within our field of vision because we still make use of books belonging to a bygone era of book-craft. Today was such a day, as I was looking up a few sources in a 1938 volume of Diplomatarium Danicum, a series of edited letters and documents that pertain to medieval Denmark. One of the pages that I needed had evidently not been needed by anyone else at the University of Oslo, because the quire – the sheet folded into pages during the binding of the book – had not yet been cut. As can be seen in the photographs below, this book was a relatively cheap paper-bound volume where the quires were left for the buyer or the reader to cut themselves. It reminded me of the quoted passage in Jorge Luis Borges’ story ‘El Alepth’, in which the narrator recounts the painfulness of seeing the books gifted to the woman he loves lying uncut and therefore unreadable in her house. 

Today was not the first time I encountered such uncut quires, but I decided that the wisest thing to do would be to ask a librarian for help rather than taking the matter into my own hands. (First of all, I do not have a knife of any kind in my office, which I probably should rectify.) The librarian I encountered, a helpful man who has been very good at solving problems for me before, remarked that he was glad that I had not done the cutting myself, which in turn prompted me to suspect that there are those who do things their own way. He first produced a paper knife, but upon closer inspection, seeing that there were several quires that were uncut, he took the book with him to another part of the library to trim the edges of the book and open the quires by simply cutting away the outermost part of the edges where the folds were.

 

When the librarian returned, he expressed delight in the sensation of rubbing one’s finger along a freshly cut edge, so I decided to test it myself right away. And he was right: the smoothness of the trimmed paper – paper that is thicker than what we often encounter in books produced nowadays – was pleasant, both because of the feeling itself but also because this was an unexpected opportunity to come closer to a material aspect of the book that I had not reflected on. I felt that I had been exposed to a part of the practice of book-handling that has been lost to us, but which once was part and parcel of buying and reading books. The whole matter became like a micro-adventure, an object lesson in a historical reading practice. That brief moment of running the flat of my fingertip against the smooth edge of the book gave me a deeper understanding of the materiality of the book in this particular period, the period when books were still cut.           

The librarian made a joke about how this was a case of going into unknown territory, since those particular pages definitely had not been read by anyone at this university. This joke made me realise that on a very small level I did feel a kind of ownership to this book since it was on my prompting that these quires were now opened. The feeling is not serious, of course, but nonetheless a nice reminder that when we handle books the way we do in academia – daily and in many different formats and conditions – we come to appreciate them as more than mere tools of communication and conveying knowledge, but as historical relics in their own right. And if I leave no other mark on the University of Oslo, having made a few more pages of an old collection of edited sources is not a bad legacy. 

Learning to see a question in context

 
This autumn is my first full term of teaching at the University of Oslo since my employment there a year ago. During that past year, I have been involved in supervision of BA students and one seminar, but to oversee and participate in planning a course through an entire term is new to me, at least at this university. However, notwithstanding my previous experiences at other universities in other countries, each new start brings with it new experiences, and every time I settle in at a new institution it does feel a lot like learning how to teach from scratch. Partly this has to do with the different ways that higher education is conducted in different countries. Even at different universities within the same country there are practices and solutions that are particular to one specific institution. And moreover, returning to Norway after eight years abroad also means that several aspects in university education have changed since I myself was a part of that system.        

One of the fascinating and enjoyable things about teaching at a university is that you get constant reminders of how utterly complex and varied we are as individuals, and people come with such different frames of references and experiences that what we, the lecturers, communicate or what they encounter during a course can be received so very differently from person to person. While this variety is well known to anyone who has been at university, and while it is by no means unique to the university, I do forget from time to time just how tricky it can be to convey a message in such a precise way as to give no room for misunderstanding. Teaching is a constant reminder that the audience of your communications can read the key words of a message in very different ways, and so you must do your best to avoid any kind of misunderstanding. And even then there are glitches and cracks.   

These glitches and cracks, however, are part of the educational process, both for myself and for my students, as they provide ample opportunity for teachable moments. Recently, I was reminded of this when I came to realise that the historian’s dictum of learning to ask the right questions also has a counterpoint: learning to see the question in context. This realisation came about when I was organising the obligatory oral assignment for one of my courses, a half-term course that was to be concluded with that assignment. The course consisted of two groups of students, and for each group there were between twenty and twenty-six registered participants. In order to make each student participate in the seminar I formulated individual questions that the students were given one week to prepare for, and then they would answer that question in class. The questions were relatively simple in the sense that they did not demand long answers, but they did require that the students had paid attention during the seminars and read the syllabus. Those who could not attend the final seminar were allowed to submit their answers in writing. All in all, most of the students did a very fine job of it and showed great potential in their further studies. Indeed, some who had been quiet and withdrawn during the entire course were among the ones who showed most understanding of the topic. While it is neither surprising nor uncommon, it is always a bittersweet sensation when students show their competence at the end of a course, demonstrating that they could have contributed so well and so productively in the seminar discussions.            

The questions all pertained to the course and its syllabus, and I had thought it obvious that when answering these questions the students should consider this framework. It turned out that yet again I had failed to learn the age-old lesson that nothing should be considered obvious when communicating with students, especially when they are first-year-students. One question that reminded me of this lesson ran as follows: “What does the term ‘universal history’ mean?”

The half-term course is on the cult of saints and identity-construction in twelfth-century Norway. Within the context of the course, universal history is the history of the known world beginning with Creation, ending with Judgement Day, and maintained, guided and planned by the omnipotent God. This is the Christian sense of universal history that underpinned the history-writing that began in twelfth-century Norway, and in this course we had read several primary sources that served to exemplify this approach to universal history. I had repeated time and again that the identity-construction of twelfth-century Norway was bound up with the concern of showing Norway’s place within this universal history. The question was, in other words easy – or so I thought.  

It turned out that the two students who got this question struggled to understand it on the terms that I had expected, and I realised that I should have added a few more details to anchor the question more firmly in the course itself. But when I gave feedback to one of those students, who submitted their answer in writing, I also came to realise that it was not solely a matter of how firmly it was anchored in the course, it also had to do with how these students had not learned to see a question in its context. When I gave my feedback, I remarked to the student that while the answer was in and of itself not wrong, the answer had also nothing to do with the course. I accepted the answer as a pass and not a fail – it was, after all, a very low-key assignment – and explained to them that in the future they needed to read the question in light of the context in which it was asked. The topic of the course should have given clear indications, and so should the syllabus and the many references to the key term of the question in the seminars. The student responded by thanking me for the feedback, and said outright that they had not thought about this issue because to them, a question was just a question.                    

The student’s response was intriguing to me, because it was the perfect diagnose for one of the main problems with communication in general, namely that to see a question in its proper context needs to be learned. In answering the question in a way that was unconnected to the course, the student was not stupid. They had just not been taught that very simple aspect of the nature of questions, namely that questions all depend on context. For a historian – as well as any other participant in society – learning to see a context in question is crucial, because the quality of our answers depend on it, and because our follow-up questions can only be relevant when understanding the context of the original question.

There really needs to be a course in its own right where we dig into the basics of abstract reading that is part and parcel of human daily life. Because learning such basic elements as seeing a question in context is important, but also too easy to not learn.