New publication: 'Saints and Urban Medievalism: The Case of Saint Knud Rex in Modern-Day Odense'

 

Earlier this week, I was notified about the publication of the collection of articles Doing Memory: Medieval Saints and Heroes and Their Afterlives in the Baltic Sea Region (19th–20th centuries), edited by Cordelia Heß and Gustavs Strenga. The book is open access, and can be read and downloaded here. I was elated by these news, as the collection also features an article written by me, namely 'Saints and Urban Medievalism: The Case of Saint Knud Rex in Modern-Day Odense'. 

Cover of Doing Memory (ed. Heß and Strenga)

Courtesy of De Gruyter 

The article is an examination of how the figure of Saint Knud Rex - who was king of Denmark from 1080 to his murder in 1086 - has been used in the cityscape of Odense, the city where he was killed and later venerated as a saint. The article puts together a range of materials from artworks, signage and place names in Odense, and examines these sources through the concept of urban medievalism, a term I coined for a conference presentation in 2020. 

I am very proud of this article, because it allowed me to explore a new timeframe and types of historical sources with which I am not accustomed to working, such as temporary art works. It also provided a great opportunity to become more familiar with the concept of medievalism - the reception of the medieval past in a post-medieval era - and to think more carefully about how we, as modern humans, make use of the Middle Ages. 

The article was also a joy to write, in part because the writing and subsequent publication mark the culmination of a process that began in the autumn of 2014, and I can see how ideas and observations from back then have flourished into the text that now has been published. It was in 2014 that I moved to Denmark to begin my PhD, and as I was exploring my new home I was frequently bemused by the numerous details of the cityscape that showed some sort of engagement with the Middle Ages, or with ideas, concepts and aesthetics from the medieval period. For instance, that autumn I wrote a blogpost on artworks depicting dragonslayers in Odense. 

In the course of the five years I lived in Denmark, I accumulated a collection of pictures and notes that I intended to put together into some sort of overview. Eventually, that goal did not come to fruition, at least not as I had intended it to do, but the process of collecting and reflecting on these aspects of the cityscape of Odense did provide me with the groundwork for writing this article. I am very happy that the article has given me an opportunity to engage with these materials that I gathered during my Danish sojourn. Moreover, I am quite proud to note how the article provides glimpses of a process in the history of Odense, as many of the pictures and details used in the article were taken and noted down during the now-completed building of the Odense tramway, as well as apartment complexes. The tramway and the apartments have significantly changed the Odense city centre, and the archaeological excavations and subsequent construction work allowed for an engagement with the city's medieval past - both through the items encountered in the excavations and the artworks that served to beautify the temporary walls around the construction site. During my time in Odense, the city was changing, and I was living through a temporary state that was designed to end in the near future. This feeling of living in a moment with a looming endpoint - a transformation nearing completion, as it were - made me all the more alert to the importance of recording some of these changes. The article has allowed me to share some images of a cityscape that is no longer there, because even though the constituent parts of the city are still in place, new buildings have been erected and the vistas are no longer the same. The article, in short, provides some snapshots of a lost past, recorded in the process of losing that past.