Histories from home, part 6 - a quiet reminder

 

The centre of my native village, Hyen, is a hamlet called Straume. The name comes from “straum”, which is one of several words in Norwegian that mean “river” or “flow of water”, and refers to the short but salmon-rich river which flows past the farmstead which for a long time was the only settlement in the hamlet. The river in question is one of two rivers that separate the mainland from a small island, which is called “Straumsholmen”. “Holme” means small island, so the full name can be translated as “the small island by the river. In our time, this small island hosts the sole remaining shop of the village, the church, the school, the care home, the community hall, the gym, a football pitch, and a number of residential houses, including the one built by my paternal grandparents in the late 1940s.

 

At present, the residents of Straumsholmen are primarily middle class. No one on the island keeps animals any longer, and the old farmstead of Straume remains the sole farm in the area. This state of affairs, however, is a relatively recent shift, and the number of modern residential houses can make it difficult to grasp the slightly older history of this hamlet, a history in which wealth was divided among the farmers of Straume and the shopkeepers on the island. At the turn of the nineteenth century, however, a few smaller farmsteads were leased from the wealthy farm, and eventually, over the next few decades, the hamlet of Straume became the home of several families who came to buy the land on which they lived. These families belonged to a type of rural farmers called “husmenn”, literally “housemen”, whose relationship with the landlord could be similar to that of sharecroppers or crofters in the anglophone world. The term is difficult to translate, however, because the social context of the Western Norwegian fjords is rather different in its hierarchies and practices than rural England or Scotland. Moreover, the housemen of the fjords are often referred to as “bygselhusmenn”, with “bygsel” meaning the act of settling through clearing the ground and erecting buildings. These families had some livestock, a small patch of ground, and supplemented their income through work either for the landlord or in other ways. Fodder for the livestock was often collected by helping out at other farms, or a family could be allowed to harvest from part of someone else’s land. 

 

Although my description of this rural class is rather brief and superfluous, the main point is that these new settlements that emerged both on the island and on the mainland from around 1900 onwards were inhabited by people who were often poor, whose social power was often dependent on local village elites, and who lived a much more precarious life than most because they initially did not own the land on which they lived – in short, their livelihood could be taken from them in a heartbeat. 

Straumsholmen, seen from the bottom end of the fjord

Today, the village centre does not contain many traces of this social stratification and the harsh reality of everyday existence that presided over the housemen. However, during daily dogwalks I have come to realise that there is one part of the area which serves as a quiet yet forceful reminder of this aspect of our village’s past. The part in question is the other river which makes Straumsholmen an island. This is a small river which does not always run, of a type which in Norwegian is called “løk” (not to be confused with the word “lauk” which means “onion”, which is commonly also spelled the same way in modern writing). In our dialect, both the river and the surrounding area is called “Løkjen” in our local dialect, meaning simply “the small, trickling river”. This small river is crossed by two bridges, and at the point of the second crossing the river appears mainly like a heap of boulders left from the Ice Age, lying inconveniently at the junction of fresh water and the fjord. A few buildings are located nearby, such as a well-kept boathouse and the local care home.

 

When you stand on the bridge, however, you will see that there are some stones that have been placed there by human effort, and there is a dent in the shore with logs of sallow-wood placed breadthwise across the bottom. Slightly beyond that dent can be seen the foundations of a torn-down house, foundations made from coarsely cut stones, which have probably been collected after one of the many erratic boulders that once littered the island had been blown up. This little corner contains an important clue about the earlier social stratification of the village, and of the plight of the housemen. 

Løkjen

As can be seen in the pictures, the waterway is not very convenient. The pictures are taken on high tide, and it is possible to navigate a rowboat through some of the rocks and into the fjord. When the sea is ebbing, however, it soon becomes difficult to get through, so all passage has to be planned carefully or one is forced to get ashore elsewhere and wait until the tide returns. In this place, however, four families were given the right to keep their boats, one of which was my paternal grandparents.

 

The white boathouse on the left-hand side of the picture is still in use, and it is well-kept, belonging to a family that bought the property from the housemen who first leased it from the main farm. The foundation of rough stone on the other side of the river belongs to my family, and supported the boathouse which my grandfather used, and which my family dismantled in 2023 because it was on the brink of collapsing. One other family kept its boat on that stretch of land – although I do not know exactly where, as the shoreline was altered when the main road was upgraded some decades ago. Another family has the right to store boats on the other side of the boulders behind my grandparents’ boathouse, but no storage facility currently remains.

 

As might be clear from the photographs, this is not a good location for keeping boats, partly because of the lack of general space, and partly because of the difficult passage. Since the river carries so little water, those who are going on the fjord to fish or collect hay from the farms along the fjord are dependent on the movements of tide and ebb. This area was given to the housemen because the owners of the main farm were not interested in using it themselves, as they had access to the fjord elsewhere. Since housemen could not be choosers, they accepted the locations, and over the decades much effort was put into making it a useful and suitable working space. My grandparents’ boathouse was built in the 1950s, and it was still in use – although badly dilapidated – in the early 1990s. The white boathouse remains in use, but that use remains severely hampered by the erratic boulders left in the small river. 

The socioeconomic context in which these places for boat-keeping were established is now part of the ever-receding past. My family, for instance, has long since moved our boat for the fjord to a different place of anchorage, one independent of the tide, and so have most of the other families who once were housemen in the hamlet. This patch of the small river serves nonetheless to remind us – by its retained inaccessibility – of how social hierarchies were once much more severe, and how social class meant something different in the early twentieth century. This is part of my family’s history, and part of the histories of countless families in the western fjords, and we do well in not forgetting it. 

Synchronicities of reading, part 1 - garum in Lisbon

 

Life is full of synchronicitites, episodes in one's life that bear some kind of resemblance to one another, or that provide a sense of symmetry or of patterns. A reading life is particularly full of them, as the variables at play are much more numerous than in a life where reading plays no part at all, simply because reading allows a person to encounter more topics and travel by page to a wide variety of locations, which provides more elements that can be found to rhyme somehow. I have experienced quite a few of them so far, but I was particularly struck by one such synchronicity this Christmas, one which was centred on Lisbon and which involved garum. 

 

The Norwegian translation of Asterix album no. 41, Asterix in Lusitania

(Text by Fabrice Caro, or Fabcaro, art by Didier Conrad, translation by Svein Erik Søland)

This Christmas, I was reading the latest Asterix album, Asterix in Lusitania, by Fabcaro and Conrad. The biannual publication of the new albums produced after the death of Albert Uderzo in 2009 has become subsumed into the great Norwegian tradition of Christmas comic books, and the album was part of this year's haul. The story revolves around an attempt to prove the innocence of a wrongfully condemned producer of garum, a type of fish sauce, who is accused to trying to poison Julius Caesar. The climax of the scene occurs in Lisbon, and the cover of the album invokes a Lisbon view so characteristic that I was immediately brought back to my trip there last spring. And as I was reading the story, I was again brought back to Lisbon because of the garum. 

Lisbon streetscape near the Castle of São Jorge

View of the Tagus River

Translating the Relics of St. James, edited by Antón M. Pazos (2016)

While I was in Lisbon last year, I was reading up on the medieval cult of Saint James the Elder. I had travelled from Santiago de Compostela where I had spent five days as a kind of research-tourist, and I had brought a collection of articles with me on the journey. The collection included articles on the Compostelan cult, as well as a few texts that sought to elucidate the context of the historical James, the fisherman who became one of the twelve apostles. One of these articles delved into the fishing industry on the Sea of Galilee, part of which included the production of garum. This was not the first time I had heard of this fish sauce, but I had never read about it at lenght, nor had encountered it within the context of the wider Roman world. 

I read this and other of the book's interesting articles at what became my regular café during my brief sojourn in the Portuguese capital, where I drank black tea with lemon and devoured delicious local cookies - and where I was mistaken for the Portuguese politician Rui Tavares. It was therefore a surprising realisation as I was reading the latest Asterix album during the darkness of a Norwegian December that this was the second time in two years that the elements of garum and Lisbon had converged in my life. The great benefit of this particular synchronicity was that I could relive those lovely Lisbon days thanks to the memories spurred on by a key plot device in a comic book. 

Beer and climate history - a brief case study from the Western Norwegian fjords

 

This week, my parents and I have been brewing the traditional Christmas ale. It is one of my favourite parts of the Christmas season, because it is the continuation of old, traditional knowledge passed down and adapted through the generations, and because the end result tastes great. In Norway, brewing ale for Christmas goes back to at least the twelfth century, and might have its origin in pre-Christian practices. The ale that we brew nowadays, however, has little in common with the medieval product, and although the practice itself is old, the methods, the equipment, and the ingredients that we use now are very different from what we should expect to find in medieval ale. In other words, although I appreciate that this annual tradition maintains a link with previous generations, I cherish our ale for what it is now, not as a replica of a medieval product.  

The first glass the day after the bottling

The brewing of beer takes place over several days. This year, we started on a Tuesday when I went gathering juniper twigs higher up in the valley where my ancestral farm is located. The juniper is the main flavouring agent, and this year I was fortunate to find green and fresh twigs with a lot of berries on them. These berries enhance the flavour, and are always sought-after when brewing. That same evening, my father began to boil the fifteen litres of water that we needed for this year's batch. The next day, I went to the farm and helped my parents mix the various ingredients together, making sure to add the yeast at exactly 32 degrees centigrade, and to pour the liquid of boiled juniper twigs through a sufficiently thick cloth that we might filter out the needles and other debris. 

The juniper twigs after the liquid has been poured into the barrel

Each year, we do things slightly differently than the year before - usually not by design, but because there are enough variables that we might change things up without being aware of it. For instance, I do not remember whether we poured the sugar in before the malt extract last year, like we did this year. These differences do not impact the ale in any noticeable manner, so we do not keep too strict a watch over the minor movements of the process. 

However, this year we did one thing differently, and that was my father starting the boiling of the water the day before the mixed the ingredients, so that it would cool down in time. Normally, the water would be boiled earlier the same day. The reason why he did things differently this year, was a stark reminder of how such minor occurrences as brewing a batch of Christmas ale can reflect much larger historical contexts. When I first started learning how to brew ale, we would place the keg of boiled water in a snowdrift outside and wait for the temperatures to get sufficiently low. As my father noted, "now we don't have snow anymore". This was in the sense that we now no longer have reliable, long-term, steady supplies of snow in December, due to the climate change and global warming. Decembers are rainy and wet, with infrequent bouts of snow that is typically washed away by subsequent squalls. The climate affects how we do things, and the traditional practice came to stand in sharp relief with the new realities in which that practice was maintained. We have to adapt and prepare things differently, because the climactic reality in which we live has changed dramatically from what previous generations were used to. In this way, climate history can also be understood through such common, minor things like brewing ale. 

The ale fermenting

Collegium Medievale, vol. 38.1 (2025)

 

Normally, I only advertise my own publications on this blog, but the present post in an exception to the rule, because the publication in question is of particular importance to me personally. 

Earlier this year, I took over as editor-in-chief of the Norwegian journal Collegium Medievale, an interdisciplinary journal that publishes articles related to medieval studies across all available disciplines in both English and Scandinavian languages. The journal is in open access, and serves as an opportunity to bring together scholarship from both well-established scholars and younger talent. Ordinarily, one issue is published each year, although some years there is an additional special issue with its own guest editors. 

Four days ago, on December 12, the ordinary issue was published, namely Collegium Medievale, vol. 38.1. The issue marks the culmination of a year of editorial duties, and it is a labour for which I am indebted to my co-editors who are all seasoned and experienced members of the journal, and without whose effort I would have been unable to see this issue through the publishing process. 

The present issue, therefore, is a testament to the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration, and I am very grateful to be able to present the first issue for which I have been responsible. Even though this is not strictly speaking my publication, I am nonetheless proud of what we editors have managed to put together. 

Histories from home, part 5 - a transitory monument

 

Human history is difficult to preserve in the fjords. Most of the buildings constructed in the past were made of wood, and the stones of the foundations were often repurposed in new buildings once the main structure had fallen into disuse, disrepair, or been lost to fire or other disasters. There are few monuments to be found, and most remnants are scattered and overgrown, while some surviving relics stay put far longer than can be expected. Sometimes, moreover, you find examples of people leaning into the transitory nature of our efforts and make their marks in the landscape in the face of an overwhelming likelihood that what they build will be torn down within the year. This blogpost features one such example, namely a small cairn placed in a rather unlikely place. 

In my native village, Hyen, in the Western Norwegian fjords, we often find cairns in the mountains. These are long-surviving markers to guide shepherds or other travellers, and sometimes they are of more recent make, being erected for mountaineers and serving as a gathering point or a point of orientation. Some cairns, however, are made with a seeming desire to make a mark in the landscape, even in places where the landscape is too mutable to support any such long-term history. 

This summer, I found one such precariously positioned cairn in a scree in a promontory on the western side of the fjord of my village. The promontory is called "Bjønnasvøra" in the local dialect, which translates to "Bear gorge". The name is a testament to the bears that once roamed the mountainsides of the village before they were hunted into local extinciton about a century ago. Bjønnasvøra is one of the most mutable locations in the village, because the gorge that empties onto the promontory usually brings huge avalanches of snow into the landscape below. With the changing of the climate and the less snowy winters, the gorge often brings rockslides rather than avalanches due to flash floods. Every year, the first landing on this promontory is followed by a quick survey to see what has changed since last year. One of the most dramatic changes came in 2024, when rockslides caused the blocking of one of the two riverbeds on the promontory, meaning that the water pouring from the gorge was now redirected to the farther bay only. This situation was, in turn, altered sometime this year, when new rockslides enabled the hither riverbed to flow again.  

View from Bjønnasvøra towards the village centre

Bjønnasvøra, towards the eponymous gorge

It was in the ever-changing scree created by millennia of avalanches and rockslides that I came upon the aforementioned cairn. It was placed on a boulder which in turn was mostly drowned in smaller rocks, and consisted only of four large rocks stacked on top of one another. I do not know who erected it, but if they were locals they would be aware that the monument was bound to fall with the next major rockslide or avalanche. Yet I do understand the impulse of erecting such transitory monuments, and I have done similar things myself from time to time. Because such markers as this are made for one's own pleasure, practically in the face of the forces of change, just out of the curiosity to see whether it can survive, and with the ambition of making a mark on the landscape. This kind of structure, however, is a form of that ambition which has been channelled into a healthy impulse that does not destroy the landscape in the process, and which symbolises the inexorably transitory nature of history and human endeavour in the fjords. 

Secondary medievalism? - the case of Tex, The Demons of the North

 

so now the frickin' Mounties are involved 

- Dr. Bob Kelso, Scrubs S05E23

To study history requires the study of how history is being used in our own time. The basic principles of either the use of history or its reception - two similar yet distinct concepts - are largely the same independent of the period that is being used or received. However, distinct periods - as defined by later generations of scholars - require distinct parameters for researching and understanding how a given period has been represented, misrepresented, used, abused, received, or been conceptualised in later eras. For me, as a medievalist, I am naturally most interested in the reception of the Middle Ages, namely in medievalism. Within medieval studies, medievalism has emerged as a broad and rich subfield, and the last ten years have especially produced a number of important and interesting studies. 

As with all scholarly terms, its definitions are constantly under calibration, and it is necessary that we continue to discuss how to define or delinate the terms we use. The term 'medievalism' itself has been interpreted in different ways, and various sub-subfields have emerged along types of sources, along different postmedieval periods, and different applications. Some particularly valuable resources are the essay collections Medievalisms in a postcolonial world, edited by Kathleen Davis and Nadia Altschul (2010), and  Medievalism: Key Critical terms, edited by Elizabeth Emery and Richard Utz (2014), and the series 'Studies in Medievalism', currently in its 34th issue. 

My first published foray into medievalism was an article on the concept of 'urban medievalism'. Part of my argument is that we can talk about primary and secondary forms of medievalism, and perhaps also tertiary forms and so on. The difference is that primary medievalism is intentional, and those who use the past are aware that they use a medieval past instead of confusing it with, say, the seventeenth century. Secondary medievalism is incidental and unintentional. It is still the medieval past that is being used or received, but those who do so might not be aware of it. In these cases, the link to the medieval past usually comes through the use of the primary medievalism rather than the Middle Ages. Defining the border between primary and secondary medievalism might not always be straightforward, and discussions might have to be done on a case-by-case basis. In the present blogpost, I want to highlight how tricky it can be to spot secondary medievalisms because sometimes there is nothing medieval about it. 

Tex, Demonene fra nord, Norwegian Tex Willer vol. 548 (April 2011)

Text: Mauro Boselli; art: Giovanni Ticci; translation: Tone Dannevig

My case study is the 600th issue of the Italian Western comic Tex, which was published in October 2010. Tex was created by Gianluigi Bonelli and Aurelio Galeppini in 1948, and is currently one of Italy's most popular comics, or 'fumetti', with one monthly issue and various specials and spin-offs. The series features the eponymous Tex Willer, a Texas ranger and a Navaho chieftain, his son Kit, the ranger Kit Carson (inspired by but not identical with the historical figure), and Tiger Jack, a Navaho. Most of the stories run across two issues, and they are written in different genres, ranging from classic Westerns to the odd science fiction story. The comic is also big in Norway, and I have been collecting the monthly issues since 1998. The Norwegian publication schedule is a bit behind the Italian one, meaning that what was meant to be a special story marking the important milestone of 600 issues, was published as issue 548 in my home country. 

From here on, there will be spoilers. 

The story, 'I demoni del Nord', The Demons from the North, is written by Mauro Boselli and veteran artist Giovanni Ticci. The plot concerns a mysterious cannibalistic attack on a fort in the Northwest Territories in Canada, which turns out to be part of a series of raids targeting various First Nation villages. The perpetrators are the so-called demons of the mist, a tribe described as having retained cannibalistic practices from the Siberian tundra, who dwell in mist-covered mountains and have cannibalistic rites in a cave in a dormant volcano. Since it is a single-issue story, the plot is fast-paced and little time is spent on describing the tribe itself, but some attention has been made to mark the distinction between some of the First Nations that appear in the story, especially the Cree and the Dogrib peoples.  

What, then, does this have to do with the Middle Ages and its reception? The story operates outside the medieval timeframe, and arguably outside of the medieval geographical remit. It is an action story featuring rifles, dynamite, Mounties, and Canadian First Nations, and the desperate defence scenes are more reminiscent of Western films such as The Magnificent Seven. There is nothing medieval to be found. 

Except that the story is an adaptation of The Eaters of the Dead, the 1976 novel by Michael Crichton, which was adapted into the film The Thirteenth Warrior in 1999. Crichton's novel draws on both Ibn Fadlan's travelogue from his mission to the Volga Bulgars in 921, and on the poem Beowulf. The plot concerns thirteen warriors who fight to protect a Norwegian village against attackers that turn out to be relics Neanderthals living in caves in the mountains. The novel is a clear-cut case of medievalism, seeing as it uses several elements from the Middle Ages - a tenth-century Arabic travelogue and a poem  in Old English at least two centuries older - but also incorporating distinctly modern elements such as the idea of relict Neanderthals that reveal that this is medievalism and not medieval cultural product.  

I demoni del Nord is an adaptation of Crichton's novel, and although it is evident that the novel is set in a twentieth-century idea of the Middle Ages, the comic book writer, Mauro Boselli, has sought to adapt it to a Western setting in which the basic plot points are embedded within a different narrative universe. Such adaptations are common in both literature and cinema, and they showcase why genres are defined not just by periods or countries but by narratological features. I demoni del Nord is a Western based on a suspense story set in the Middle Ages, but a story that might also be said to contain features from twentieth-century cinema, where the Western has been one of the defining genres. Mauro Boselli's adaptation of the novel makes the comic book story into a case of secondary medievalism because it is incidental. The medieval setting of The Eaters of the Dead is of no consequence for the comic book, because the story could have been adapted in the same way had the novel been set on Mars or sometime in the deep future. And even though the medieval features of the original novel are completely removed, the story itself is recognisable, and it is possible to see that we are dealing with a work of art set in nineteenth-century Canada based on a work of art set in tenth-century Norway. Consequently, in order to use Crichton's novel to understand how the Middle Ages have been used and received in our own times, we also need to follow the trace onwards to both the film adaptation from 1999 and the comic book adaptation from 2010. Researching history means to understand how historical periods have been used and received in later centuries, and to fully understand this use and this reception, we also need to follow whatever echoes and reverberations that the primary medievalism creates further down the line. 

Saint Catherine in Bergen

 

Today is the feast of Saint Catherine of Alexandria, one of the female saints who achieved broad veneration in the Nordic countries at a very early stage in the Christianisation process. In the law of the Gulathing province of Norway - which is roughly coterminal with the south-western seaboard and the western fjords - her feast was included in the list of holidays whose observation was required by law. This law was committed to writing around 1160, but it is likely that the feast of Sainth Catherine arrived much earlier in Norway. The evidence from the Gulathing law is particularly interesting because we have few other sources to the cult of saints in Norway prior to the mid-twelfth century, especially female ones. (One other example is Saint Cecilia, whose name was given to Cecilia Sigurddotter, born c.1155-56, but that is another story.)  

The cult of Saint Catherine gained even more popularity following the dissemination of Legenda Aurea, a collection of saints' legends and texts on liturgical feasts composed by Jacobus de Vorgaine around 1260. The dramatic events of Catherine's life and memorable details - such as her christomimetic debate with fifty philosophers and the torture wheel that miraculously broke into pieces - made her easy to depict in medieval art, and also easy to recognised. One of the surviving depictions of her from medieval Norway is the altarpiece of the Church of Saint Mary in Bergen. The altarpiece was made in Lübeck in the late fifteenth century, and its main saint is the Virgin Mary, but she is flanked by - going anti-clockwise from the top left - Saint Olaf, Saint Anthony of Egypt, Saint Dorothea, and Saint Catherine of Alexandria. She is wearing a crown, as she was believed to be of royal stock, and two of her main attributes - the wheel with which she was not tortured and the sword with which she was killed - make her easy to spot among the saints of the altarpiece.  

The altarpiece was commissioned by the Hanseatic merchants in Bergen, for whom the Church of Saint Mary was the main religious hub. Its selection of saints is neither particularly German nor particularly Norwegian, but rather reflective of saints whose popularity was high throughout the Baltic and North Sea region in the course of the 1400s. Saint Catherine's cult also benefitted from her frequent inclusion in the malleable collective of saints known as the fourteen holy helpers - the configuration of which was changeable according to local tradition - and she was one of the most important universal non-biblical saints of the Nordic Middle Ages.

The restored twin towers of the Church of Saint Mary 

The oldest part of the church date back to the twelfth century

Saint Edmund in the litany - the 1482 Breviarium Othoniense and the cult of Edmund Martyr in medieval Denmark

Today, November 20, is the feast of Edmund Martyr, who was killed by Danish raiders in 869, and whose cult became one of the most important native cults in medieval England. His cult also spread to the Nordic sphere, most likely as a consequence of both deliberate dissemination and frequent contact between the Nordic polities and medieval England. The history of Edmund's cult in the Nordic world is still incompletely mapped and insufficiently understood in its totality, and there are several tantalising clues to suggest that Edmund was perhaps more important than we have hitherto ascertained. 

In October, I was reminded of one such source when I was doing research in the Royal Library in Copenhagen, and I was leafing through the 1482 Odense breviary, or Breviarium Othoniense. This was the first commissioned printed book in the Nordic world, and the second to have been printed - since a pamphlet was finished before the breviary - and it was later superseded by two new editions in 1497 and 1510. The breviary reflected recent changes in the ecclesiastical scene of Odense, as King Christian I had dissolved the Benedictine abbey of Saint Knud, which had served as the cathedral chapter of the Odense bishop. Since the liturgy was no longer performed by monks, it had to be abbreviated to suit the more restrained length of secular offices (nine lessons versus twelve for the most important feasts). As a consequence, the Breviarium Othoniense is a challenging source to the liturgical history of Odense diocese, since it represents a recent rupture in the historical practice. The evidence provided by the liturgical material in the breviary must therefore be weighed carefully before being used to suggest historical trajectories. 

One of the notable aspects in the 1482 breviary is Edmund's placement in the litany, a list of saints placed according to rank within the diocesan church, to be invoked for their intercession. The litany begins on the previous page and opens with prayers to the Virgin Mary, the angels, the apostles, and then the martyrs. The order of the martyrs is an interesting testament to the popularity of the different saints, and one of the big questions concerning this order is whether it reflects an older ranking or more recent changes. It is, for instance, remarkable that Saint Mauritius comes before Saint Olaf, but that is a different blogpost. 

The page shown below, folio 91v, begins with Saint Alban, who was the patron saint of one of the churches in Odense, and whose cult had been brought to the city in the eleventh century - by Saint Knud Rex himself, if we are to believe the hagiographical tradition. His relatively high position among the martyrs is therefore ot surprising. After him comes Saint Olaf of Norway, one of the most important saints in Denmark, but one whose fame appears to have been less intense in the diocese of Odense than in Lund, Roskilde, Ribe, Aarhus, or Børglum. Then comes Thomas, which is Saint Thomas of Canterbury, whose cult in Odense appears to have developed independently of the diocesese of Lund and Roskilde. Then we come to Edmund Martyr. Interestingly, he is before Oswald of Northumbria, whose relics had been brought to Odense alongside those of Saint Alban, according to the hagiographies of Saint Knud Rex.  

The main clue about Edmund's standing in the diocese of Odense is his placement before Oswald. The veneration of Oswald is, as mentioned, well attested in sources from the late eleventh century onwards, but no such evidence can be found for Edmund. In the breviary, his feast is celebrated with six lessons, making it a feast of medium importance, and in the 1497 edition the feast has been largely overshadowed by the feast of Saint Elizabeth (see this blogpost). That Edmund was placed between Thomas of Canterbury - whose cult spread quickly and whose fame rose to phenomenal heights, also in Denmark - and a saint whose relics were an important part of the local religious history of Odense, suggests that there also was a veneration of Edmund going back to the twelfth century, since this is the period in which his cult is most likely to heave undergone a new vogue in Denmark. No churches dedicated to Edmund are known from medieval Denmark, and I do not know of any relics of Edmund in the Odense diocese. The large trove of relics in Sanderum Church, for instance, which is situated close to Odense, does not include such relics (although some of the labels are illegible).  

The evidence of the litany is not extensive and must be treated with caution. The six-lesson office of Saint Edmund points in the same direction, however, namely that before the overhaul of the cathedral liturgy in the 1470s, the veneration of Edmund in Odense was more significant than other available evidence would suggest. It is perhaps time to envision an even greater impact on religious life in Odense from English ecclesiastics. 

Breviarium Othoniense 1482, f.91v

The Danes are coming - or, Adventures in medievalism, part 7

 

Every now and again I find myself baffled at how the past is used as a vessel to promote something in the present. Even though I have been exposed to some very curious and strange applications and abuses of the past, the wide variety in a given period's reception history never ceases to amaze me. My most recent encounter with baffling use of the past occurred in Odense, Denmark, just as I was making my way from the tram to the main building of the campus of the University of Southern Denmark. The incident concerned a sticker promoting some sport team or other - confusingly, this is not specified on the sticker, so it must be aimed at an audience already familiar with the iconography used on the sticker. As seen below, the sticker does speak for itself in a certain way, but also merits some further unpacking. 

The use of viking iconography - however anachronistic - to imbue a sports team with the aura of plunderers and rapists from the increasingly distant past is a familiar phenomenon. The Norwegian football team Viking and the American football team Minnesota Vikings are only some that join this unspecified Danish team in their employment of modern ideas about the Norse raiders. The purpose is usually the same, namely to make the players appear tough and unconquerable, because that is how modern popular culture has taught us to think of the vikings. The combination of stylised longships, the colours of the Danish flag Dannebrog - first used in the early thirteenth century - and the horned helmets of nineteenth-century artistic imagination telescopes history into a unified whole, which suggests the idea that this sports team stands in a direct genealogical relationship to the violent marauders of the past. 

This iconography plays into familiar references, and the use of these symbols and figures might simply be to bolster the self-image and have a bit of fun with well-known tropes. But self-images tend to reveal deeply held convictions - and also delusions - and such self-representations as seen in this stickers therefore should be taken seriously as a good way of measuring how our contemporaries understand - or rather, misunderstands - the past. Only by understanding this misunderstanding can we also map its effect in our own here-and-now. 

Reading-spots, part 9

 

This month, I have been living in Odense for a work-related assignment, which has given me a wonderful opportunity to reconnect with one of my most beloved city, and to revisit places which were immensely important to me in the course of my five very formative years in Denmark. By my own admission, I am a ridiculously nostalgic individual, and I treasure those things that enable me to relive periods of great joy or comfort. When done right, this kind of nostalgia-seeking enterprise is phenomenally rewarding, and can serve as a balm for the soul. 

One goal for my current quest to reconnect with positive aspects of my Danish past was to visit the bakery where I used to buy my daily bread. When I lived here, this bakery - Folkebo's bageri - was only a couple of hundred meters from my doorstep. This time, however, it was slightly more cumbersome as I live close to the train station and my daily commute goes in a parallel direction, making it difficult to combine duty and pleasure as part of one and the same trip. Luckily, one Sunday morning I decided to have a typical Danish breakfast in my old haunt. 

The bakery was largely the same as when I used to live here, except that they had reduced the number of tables in favour of another glass case for baked goods. Luckily, I found a chair and spent an hour enjoying some of the favourite flavours of my Danish past. As I was sitting here, I was brought back to one particular period that has been seared into my memory like few other bakery-related episodes in my life. It was early in 2019, the beginning of what was to be my last term in Denmark. I was in a rather rough shape, being unemployed and having no immediate prospects. For some reason I no longer recall, I began to wake up unreasonably early in the dark of one January week, and I got into the habit of stopping by the bakery for a cup of tea, something to eat, and a bit of time for reading before cycling on to the university campus, where the kindness of my friends and colleagues allowed me to pass my time as part of my old scholarly community. It was a week of glorious mornings, where the wider troubles of this stage in my life were pushed away, and I found a pocket of calm while reading at a table in the bakery's café as the world was becoming lighter outside. Eventually, I began to wake up later in the day again and the routine stopped, but the memory of that week became a treasured gem.  

My current lot is fortunately happier than it was during this particular episode, and my life has accumulated a lot of different experiences since then. I am in many ways a different man than I was then, but this joyous hour on a Sunday morning in October also served as a reminder that I am not that far removed from the person I once was - at least in some respects.

New publication: Sanctus Suithunus

 

As mentioned in my previous blogpost, I am currently working as a co-editor for the online encyclopedia Medieval Nordic Literature in Latin, hosted by the University of Bergen. The encyclopedia was first published in 2012, but there are still several articles missing, and as part of my work I have also worked on some contributions of my own. Today, I have published the second of these contributions, namely an article titled 'Sanctus Suithunus', which contains an overview of two liturgical offices in honour of Saint Swithun of Winchester. 

Swithun became the patron saint of Stavanger diocese in the twelfth century, and his cult was important both in that diocese and in other parts of Norway. Relatively few surviving sources provide insight into the history of the cult, but these two liturgical offices are important and useful starting-points for addressing some of the basic questions concerning the standing of Saint Swithun in medieval Norway. 

New publication: Arnfastus Monachus

For the past six months, I have worked as a co-editor of the online encyclopedia Medieval Nordic Literature in Latin, hosted by the University of Bergen. This is an encyclopedia containing articles about authors writing in Latin and anonymous texts in Latin composed before c.1530. It was founded in 2008 and last updated in 2012, and is currently being updated as part of the project CODICUM, a collaboration between several Nordic universities.  

The updating process does not only consist of editing existing articles, but also writing new ones that have so far been missing. I have been working on one of these missing articles over the past few months, and thanks to some archival research earlier today, I have now been able to complete it and have it published on the website. The article in question is on the monk Arnfast - or Arnfastus Monachus - who is only known as the author of a hagiographical poem on the miracles related to Saint Knud Rex, the patron saint of Odense. The article covers a range of details concerning the poem, providing an overview of what little we know, and a discussion of some of the conclusions we might draw from the work itself.    

Saint Michael in Lübeck

 

Today is the feast of Saint Michael the Archangel, famous in medieval art as a fighter against the Devil and as a weigher of souls. Often, these two roles converge in medieval iconography, such as in the woodcut presented below, where the soul-weighing archangel is lifting his sword to strike at a devil who is climbing into one of the scales. When a person had died, their sins and good deeds were weighed in Saint Michael's scales, and if the good deeds outweighed the sins the person would go to Heaven - if not, they were headed in the opposite direction. In the woodcut below, the good deeds weigh more heavily than the sins, so a devil is climbing into the scale containing the sins of the departed soul in order to weigh it down and ensure that he can take the soul with him to Hell. 

The woodcut is from the first folio of Das Leuent der Heiligen, a collection of saints' legends and other stories pertaining to the Christian year, printed by Lucas Brandis in 1478. Such stories were popular in late-medieval Europe, both owing to the increased literacy rates and because more people could afford books. Brandis' edition appears not to have been a great success as only one edition of the collection is known, and as both the book and the woodcuts were bought by the printer Steffen Arndes who subsequently re-issued the work in 1488 and in several later editions. 

Lucas Brandis, Der Heiligen Leben 

München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek -- 2 Inc.s.a. 780, f.1r

A list of published articles

Recently, the website academia.edu updated its terms and conditions to include a clause that would allow the website to utilise all uploaded files and images - including profile pictures - to train AI generators and generate content. This is a serious escalation from an earlier update, in which the website used uploaded papers to generate podcasts. While the previous update could be blocked, the new and much more comprehensive update would allow predatory companies unrestrained access to material that has been carefully and painstakingly composed in order to contribute to the open scholarly discussion through which society moves towards a better understanding of itself and its past. It is completely unacceptable to me that scholarship - just like art and entertainment - should be utilised to generate texts and images that are simulacra of reality but that do not serve any purpose beyond the enrichment of a technological elite. Consequently, I have deleted my profile at academia.edu. Although the website has since walked back on its grotesque overreach of power, I do not wish to return to a place that was once useful for an emerging scholar, but has now become unreliable and less trustworthy than ever. 

There might be other alternatives, but in today's Internet there is always a chance that other platforms will morph into something equally predatory. Therefore, I have put together this list of articles that I have written over the years, with links to those that are available online and in open access. Should you be interested in any of the articles that are not online, please contact me and I will happily send a pdf of the text in question. These articles were written to be accessible, to be read, to be used, and to be part of a wider exchange. They were not written to assist the degradation of knowledge that is currently unfolding through the AI boom. 

List of articles

“Typologies of the medieval cultural border”, in Revista Roda da Fortuna – Electronic Journal about Antiquity and the Middle Ages, vol. 6, no. 1, 2017: 25-54. ISSN: 2014-7430  

“The North in the Latin History Writing ofTwelfth-Century Norway”, in Dolly Jørgensen and Virginia Langum (eds.), Visions of North in Premodern Europe, CURSOR 31, Turnhout, Brepols, 2018: 101-21      

“Reformulating the sanctity of Olaf Haraldsson – Archbishop Eystein Erlendson and the ecclesiastical image of Saint Olaf”, in Andreas Bihrer and Fiona Fritz (eds.), Heiligkeiten: Konstruktionen, Funktionen Und Transfer Von Heiligkeitskonzepten Im Europaischen Fruh- Und Hochmittelalter, published in the series Beiträge zur Hagiographie, edited by Dieter R. Bauer, Klaus Herbers, Volker Honemann and Hedwig Röckelein, Steiner Verlag, 2019: 45-71

“Strategies for Constructing an Institutional Identity – Three Case Studies from the Liturgical Office of Saint Edmund Martyr”, in Katharine Handel (ed.), Authors, narratives, and Audiences in Medieval Saints’ Lives, Open Library of the Humanities, Cambridge, 2019: 1-31

“The Odense literature and the liturgy of St Cnut Rex”, in Steffen Hope, Mikael Manøe Bjerregaard, Anne Hedeager Krag and Mads Runge (eds.), Life and Cult of Cnut the Holy - The first royal saint of Denmark, Odense Bys Museer, published in the series Kulturhistoriske studier i centralitet, vol. 4, 2019: 100-17         

“Spor etter folkeleg kult – aspekt ved helgendyrkinga av Sankt Knud Rex i dansk mellomalder”, in Magne Njåstad and Randi Bjørshol Wærdahl (eds.), Helgener i nord – nye studier i nordisk helgenkult, Novus Forlag, Oslo, 2020: 61-80         

“Thirteenth-century Ivory Crozier from Greenland from the Perspective of Economic History”, in Sullivan, Alice (ed.), The Encyclopedia of the Global Middle Ages, ARC Humanities Press, 2021

“Byzantine history in the legend of Saint Olaf of Norway”, in Anna Lampadaridi, Vincent Déroche and Christian Høgel (eds.) L’historiecomme elle se présentait dans l’hagiographie, published in the series Studia Byzantina Upsaliensia, Uppsala, Uppsala University Press, 2022: 31-59        

“Symbolic crucifixion and royal sainthood – two examples from Benedictine saint-biography, c.987-c.1120”, in Barbara Crostini and Anthony Lappin (eds.), Crucified Saints from Late Antiquity to the Modern Age, published in the series Sanctorum, Scritture, pratiche, immagini, Viella, 2022: 197-22

“Interaksjon med forteljingar som levd religion? – Ei forsøksstudie med utgangspunkt i randmerknader frå Syddansk Universitetsbibliotek RARA M 15”, in Scandia: Tidskrift för historisk forskning, Vol 88, No. 2 (2022): 241-62                  

“Helgenerne i Skive. Deres udvalg i kontekst”, in Louise Nyholm Kallestrup and Per Seesko-Tønnesen (eds), Dansk senmiddelalder, reformationstid og renæssance. Spiritualitet, materialitet og mennesker. Et festskrift til Lars Bisgaard, Odense, Syddansk Universitetsforlag, 2023: 149-165           

“Urban medievalism in modern-day Odense – thecase of Saint Knud Rex”, in Gustavs Strenga and Cordelia Heß (eds.), Doing memory of medieval saints and heroes in the Baltic Sea Region, De Gruyter, 2024: 113-44            

 

“Saintsand elites on the periphery: an introduction”, co-authored with Grzegorz Pac and Jón Viðar Sigurðsson, in Grzegorz Pac, Steffen Hope and Jón Viðar Sigurðsson (eds.), The Cult of Saints and Legitimization of Elite Power in East Central and Northern Europe until 1300, Turnhout, Brepols, 2024: 4-42          

 

“Non-native Saints: Introduction”, co-authored with Grzegorz Pac and Jón Viðar Sigurðsson, in Grzegorz Pac, Steffen Hope and Jón Viðar Sigurðsson (eds.), The Cult of Saints and Legitimization of Elite Power in East Central and Northern Europe until 1300, Turnhout, Brepols, 2024: 51-55

“Native Saints: Introduction”, co-authored with Grzegorz Pac and Jón Viðar Sigurðsson, in Grzegorz Pac, Steffen Hope and Jón Viðar Sigurðsson (eds.), The Cult of Saints and Legitimization of Elite Power in East Central and Northern Europe until 1300, Turnhout, Brepols, 2024: 211-15          

“The Cult of Saints and the Legitimization of Ecclesiastical and SecularElites on the Periphery: Conclusions”, co-authored with Grzegorz Pac and Jón Viðar Sigurðsson, in Grzegorz Pac, Steffen Hope and Jón Viðar Sigurðsson (eds.), The Cult of Saints and Legitimization of Elite Power in East Central and Northern Europe until 1300, Turnhout, Brepols, 2024: 439-48

“Legitimizing episcopal power in twelfth-century Denmark through the cult of saints”, in Grzegorz Pac, Steffen Hope and Jón Viðar Sigurðsson (eds.), The Cult of Saints and Legitimization of Elite Power in East Central and Northern Europe until 1300, Turnhout, Brepols, 2024: 311-30       

“Holy bishops, papal canonisation and legitimisation of power inthirteenth-century Poland and Norway: the cases of Eystein Erlendsson ofNidaros and Stanislaus of Kraków”, co-authored with Grzegorz Pac, in Acta Poloniae Historica, special issue on ‘Languages of Power and Legitimacy on the Periphery: Poland and Norway, 1000-1300’, edited by Grzegorz Pac, Wojtek Jezierski and Hans Jacob Orning (vol. 129), 2024: 143-84 

“The functions of religion and science in utopian thinking in the MiddleAges and the Early Modern Period”, in Belgrade Philosophical Annual 37.02,2024: 123-38

“Sacral Strongholds in the Twelfth century: Aristocracy, Nunneries, and Parish Churches”, co-authored with Anna Dryblak, in Legitimization of Elites in Poland and Norway in the High Middle Ages: Comparative Studies, ed. by Wojtek Jezierski, Grzegorz Pac and Hans Jacob Orning (Turnhout: Brepols, 2025), pp. 165-204    

“Patron Saints and the Legitimization of Bishoprics until c.1200”, co-authored with Grzegorz Pac, in Legitimization of Elites in Poland and Norway in the High Middle Ages: Comparative Studies, ed. by Wojtek Jezierski, Grzegorz Pac and Hans Jacob Orning (Turnhout: Brepols, 2025), pp. 205-49        

“Coinage, the cult of saints, and the legitimization of elites in eleventh- andtwelfth-century Poland and Norway”, co-authored with Mateusz Bogucki and Svein Harald Gullbekk, in Legitimization of Elites in Poland and Norway in the High Middle Ages: Comparative Studies, ed. by Wojtek Jezierski, Grzegorz Pac and Hans Jacob Orning (Turnhout: Brepols, 2025), pp. 289-319                              

“The Younger Passio Kanuti – a reassessment of its historical context, its author, and its purpose”, in Royal Blood - The Passion of St Cnut, Kingand Martyr, Translation and perspectives, ed. by Mikael Manøe Bjerregaard, Kirstine Haase, and Steffen Hope (Odense: Syddansk Universitetsforlag, 2025), pp. 19-33  

“A comparative overview of Passio II and Gesta Swenomagni” in Royal Blood - The Passion of St Cnut, King and Martyr, Translation and perspectives, ed. by Mikael Manøe Bjerregaard, Kirstine Haase, and Steffen Hope (Odense: Syddansk Universitetsforlag, 2025), pp. 76-94

 

Reading-spots, part 8

 

Earlier this month, I was in Trondheim for a conference and also to perform a kind of personal pilgrimage. I went to university there, and spent seven formative years in the city, and there are numerous places where my own past comes closer and where I notice this release of pain and joy that we call nostalgia, which is memory filtered through our later knowledge of what has been lost and of what might have been.  

Last time I was in Trondheim for several consecutive days was in November 2018, a time in my life when everything seemed uncertain and where I knew I was barrelling towards the end of an era. In some ways, my latest return to Trondheim was marked by several of the same aspects, such as uncertainty, and a sense of loss. But it was also a joyous return, as I met loved ones and walked familiar streets, and as I saw that some of the old places where I left part of my past were still standing. One such place was Baklandet Skydsstation, a cafe housed in the premises of an old house - mainly from the nineteenth century - which has served as a house for manufacture of different kinds throughout its history. It is a quiet and lovely place, with the right kind of old-fashioned atmosphere, namely one that does not feel constructed or contrived.  

In many ways, the quiet, very Norwegian surrounds provided a notable contrast to the book I was then reading, Myriam Moscosa's wonderful novel León de Lidia (Lion of Lydia), which is a reflection on the history of her family and the collective memory of Ladino Jews who migrated from Bulgaria to Mexico in the wake of World War II, a memory that captures a lot of the fissures and faultlines of the twentieth century. Yet as I was there to reconnect with my own past, it also felt like very apposite reading. 

Perhaps a more notable and incontrovertible contrast was provided by the writing which I set out to do after I had finished eating. As I moved to a smaller table in a corner, I sat down to outline a new structure for a co-authored article that deals with the role of violence in medieval and early-modern utopian thinking. The topic is horrifyingly relevant in today's world, but in that particular corner of both the world and of the building in particular, the contrast between subject-matter and place was particularly notable. 

Same woodcuts, different saints – towards a methodology for establishing minor saints

 

One of the several challenges when researching the cult of saints is to assess the relative importance and popularity of any given saint. There are various parameters for assessing whether a saint had a large cult, and in those cases there is often source material that allows us to flesh out some of details concerning the saint’s popularity. For instance, miracle collections teach us where some of the pilgrims came from, which in turn makes it possible to map the extent of the cult, albeit incompletely. Church dedications outside of the cult centre provide similar nodes when tracing the cult, and so do the spread of manuscripts containing legends or liturgy for the saint in question. Calendar entries are likewise important sources, especially when later hands add further information, to the names that indicate which saint is to be celebrated on that particular day.

            In the case of saints that are less well attested in the source material, the questions of importance and popularity become more complicated. Granted, most saints are not universally important. However, some saints might appear more important than they were due to the state of the surviving source material – both for that saint and for other saints venerated in the same church province – and some saints might have been important for certain social echelons rather than for the populace as a whole. Despite these uncertainties, it is relatively easy to ascertain that saints with a widespread cult and a strong cult centre were both important and popular within a particular geographical area or within a particular time frame.      

            The minor saints, however, are even more complicated. These are saints that might be ubiquitous in calendars and might be attested throughout the Middle Ages, but where there was no particular cult centre where their relics were housed and from where their cult was promoted. Or if they did have a such a cult centre, the institution in question did not attempt, or perhaps did not mange, to disseminate their cult abroad. In some cases, these are old saints which are found in later medieval sources because they were introduced into the martyrologies that were copied and expanded from Late Antiquity and into the Carolingian period. In other cases, they are local saints that emerged later and were incorporated into the liturgical year of a diocese or a church province, and were then copied into later calendars or breviaries without much regard for the saint or their legend. Such saints might have been minor, but that does not mean that we can unequivocally say that they were unimportant. Especially local cults with little imprint on the surviving source material might have been far more important to the non-ecclesiastical populace than the patron saint of the diocese – especially of the smaller cult was venerated in smaller villages or parishes outside the episcopal see. Moreover, popularity often comes and goes in waves, there are surges and ebbs, and sometimes there never comes a second surge. Consequently, we need to employ very careful parameters assessing whether a minor saint was, indeed, minor.

 

In the present blogpost, I provide you with one case where the surviving source material allows me to designate three saints’ cults as neither important nor popular, at least not at the time and in the place of the source in question. This source is a vernacular collection of saints’ legends, printed in Lübeck by Lucas Brandis around 1478. Such collections were common in fifteenth-century Germany, and were ultimately modelled on the liturgically organised collection Legenda Aurea by Jacobus Voragine, compiled sometime in the 1260s. Unlike Legenda Aurea, however, which was put together in order to provide preachers with material for their sermons, collections such as Lucas Brandis’ Passionael were printed and sold to merchants and other literate social groups whose livelihood – such as artisans – allowed them to accumulate more money.

Lucas Brandis’ Passionael allowed ordinary citizens to read and listen to the stories of saints, some of whom they knew well while others were no doubt new to them. It is important to note that when Brandis put together his collection, he had to reflect on his audiences and their tastes. In some cases, saints would be included practically out of necessity, since they were expected in such collections – for instance the biblical saints. Moreover, Brandis must have been aware of the cult of saints in Lübeck: which were venerated in the city’s various churches, and which were popular. As for the saints he included in collection, some of them were likely gathered from similar collections elsewhere in Germany, whether in the vernacular or in Latin, which he then had translated into Low German.

The chapters were typically introduced with a woodcut vignette that depicted the saint or saints who were the protagonists of the chapter, or an episode from the legend. In many cases, the woodcuts were made specifically for the saint in question and demonstrate familiarity with their iconography, or reliance on the text which is introduced. In other cases, however, the saint or saints were less well known, and their legend was sufficiently generic to be summarised in the same way as other saints whose legends, or whose basic iconographical features or elements, were similar. For saints like these, woodcuts could often be reused. Such reuse constitutes fairly solid evidence that the saint or saints introduced in this generic way was to all intents and purposes a minor saint.

In Brandis’ Passionael, there are several woodcuts that are used in this way, but for the present blogpost I will focus on three of them, simply because they are placed at the top of consecutive chapters, meaning that the reader leafing through the book will encounter these images uninterrupted by others. We should imagine that Brandis made this decision consciously and was aware of the effect it would have on the reader and on their impression of the saint. That he nonetheless went through with this organisation of the woodcuts suggests that the saints were, indeed, neither popular nor important in Lübeck around 1478. 

Lucas Brandis, Passionael

München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek 2 Inc.s.a. 780, f.324v  

The first example comes from folio 324v, which contains the opening of the chapter on Nazarius and Celsus, two saints allegedly exhumed by Ambrose of Milan and venerated there throughout the Middle Ages. Their legend was included in Legenda Aurea, and can also be found in several calendars used in Scandinavia. I have written about their legend here. The legend tells of a pair of male saints who were martyred together. The woodcut summarises the climax of the martyrdom, with both saints placed in a hilly or craggy landscape, shown mid-execution as the head of the one lies on the ground facing the executioner who is preparing to strike the head of the other. It is a dramatic and graphic scene, and it is one that can summarise the fate of several other male martyr-pairs, of which there are quite many in the Latin medieval cult of saints. 

Lucas Brandis, Passionael

München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek 2 Inc.s.a. 780, f.325v

The second example is found on folio 325v, introducing the chapter on Simplicius and Faustinus, two brothers whose martyrdom is typically dated to the Diocletian persecution. They were beheaded and their bodies thrown into the Tiber. The legend also includes their sister Beatrice, but she was not beheaded, and she is not always named in the calendar entries for their feast-day, July 29. In Scandinavia, and presumably also in Lübeck, their cult would probably have been overshadowed by that of Saint Olaf of Norway whose feast was on the same day.

Lucas Brandis, Passionael

München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek 2 Inc.s.a. 780, f.326r

The third example is found on folio 326r, the page opposite that of the previous vignette, which introduces the chapter on Abdon and Sennen (here written “Sennes”, which is not uncommon). These martyrs were killed during the Decian persecution, and I have written about them here. They were Persians who were brought to Córdoba, from whence they were brought to Rome and killed following the discovery that they were evangelising. Their feast-day was on July 30, and it is likely that they, too, were eclipsed by the feast of Saint Olaf on the preceding day. 

 

The woodcut used for these vignettes are also employed elsewhere in Brandis’ Passionael, but I have not seen them in such an uninterrupted sequence as this one. To use the same woodcut for all of them was a deliberate decision, as there were elements enough in all of these legends to provide something different for the engraver. That no such effort was taken is a fairly good indication that these saints were included because they were expected – as part of the regular liturgical cycle – but that they were also known to be practically unimportant to Brandis’ intended audiences. Consequently, in this one instance we can be fairly certain that these were minor saints, at least for the time and place in question. Often, this is as much certainty as we can hope for when researching the cult of saints.