Today is the feast of Saint George, who, according to his legend, was a Roman soldier martyred during the Diocletian persecutions of the early fourth century. The early history of his cult is obscure, and scholars have yet to piece together something close to an overview of the cult's trajectory throughout the medieval period. What we do know, however, is that from the twelfth century onwards, George became increasingly popular in Latin Christendom, and in the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the image of George as a dragonslayer became dominant in his iconography. I have written a short piece on this trajectory here. That George was both a soldier and a dragonslayer made him a very suitable patron for knights and other soldiers, and we often find his image in a military context. One such context I encountered by chance while I was visiting the Wien Museum on Karlsplatz in January, which has a small but very interesting selection of artefacts from Vienna's medieval past. Among these artefacts is a late-fifteenth-century shield featuring Saint George in the act of slaying the dragon, standing atop it and piercing the beast with a spear - a posture inherited from the iconography of Saint Michael the Archangel.
The image of Saint George is quite typical of the period and resembles a number of contemporary depictions in church art, such as a wall-painting from Sanderum Church in Denmark. However, it is the first time I see the dragonslayer on a shield, an object which really highlighted the close ties between the cult of saints and the military life of the Middle Ages. The shield is called Setztartsche, or in English a pavise, and was developed by the Hussites during the Hussite Wars of the early fifteenth century. The shield featuring Saint George, however, was used in Vienna, and was part of the city's own armament efforts of the late 1400s.
The ubiquity of the cult of saints in medieval life is a continuous source of fascination for me, and the many ways in which the saints were present in people's lives - if only as images - is a good reminder that we are still a long way away from understanding the full impact of the the cult of saints in medieval society.
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