Cantigas de Compostela, part 4 - Saint Bartholomew

 

Today is the feast of Saint Bartholomew the Apostle, who - according to Latin medieval tradition - had evangelised in India, where he had been flayed alive as part of his martyrdom. The sensational and macabre manner of his death provided medieval artists of various media with the licence to depict his passion story in varied and inventive ways. To the modern mind, the most famous examples are from Renaissance artists, such as Marco d'Agrate's statue in the Cathedral of Milan, or Michelangelo's Last Judgement scene from the Sistine Chapel, in which Bartholomew - with the face of Pietro Aretino - is holding his empty and dangling skin. These late examples, however, are part of a much longer tradition. One older example can be found from one of the portals of Santiago de Compostela, the Fachada de las Platerías, in which are assembled masonry from various parts of the twelfth-century cathedral. On the side of one of the archways is the haloed and bearded figure, holding his butcher's knife in his right hand and holding his saggy, empty skin in his left, clutching it by the hair. The iconography is immediately recognisable, the masonry is exquisite, and the piece as a whole is a solid reminder of how the iconographical tropes that we often first encounter through canonical Renaissance art have a much older history, and that the Renaissance was a squarely medieval phenomenon. Moreover, it is important to note that there are no straight lines from Compostela to d'Agrate's Milan or Michelangelo's Rome. Rather, these are all dots in an evolving network of ideas and images that connects various places, but where the transfer of influences cannot possibly be mapped or recorded.  

New publications, part 3 - Coinage, the Cult of Saints, and the Legitimization of Elites in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Poland and Norway

 

In the present blogpost, I wish to present the third and final of my three co-authored articles that were published in a recent volume (for the previous two, see here for the first one, and here for the second one). All these articles were written during my previous position, where I was a postdoctoral researacher at a project investigating the legitimisation of elites in medieval Norway and Poland, a collaboration between the University of Oslo and the University of Warsaw. 

This last article is titled "Coinage, the Cult of Saints, and the Legitimization of Elites in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Poland and Norway", co-authored with Mateusz Bogucki and Svein Gullbekk. The article takes as its starting-point the disparity in the use of saints on Norwegian coins compared with Polish coins. From this quandary, we examine how both coinage and the cult of saints could converge in the legitimisation of elites, or - on the contrary - had to be kept separate in order to avoid the legitimisation of the wrong kind of elites.    

Since I am a novice in numismatics, I was greatly aided in this article by my co-authors. The writing process was slow and at times agonising because of the very careful balance needed when trying to say something about general historical tendencies based on little and very uncertain material. But it was also a challenge that greatly expanded my horizon. 

New publications, part 2 - Saints and Legitimization of Bishoprics in Poland and Norway until c. 1200

 

In my previous blogpost, I provided a brief presentation of one of my three co-authored articles published last month. All these articles belong to a volume published as part of a research project hosted by both the University of Warsaw and the University of Oslo, and it was at this project I had my most recent postdoctoral position. 

The second of my contributions is "Saints and Legitimization of Bishoprics in Poland and Norway until c. 1200", co-authored with Grzegorz Pac. This article compares how the cult of saints was used by Polish and Norwegian bishops to solidify their position in society, and how their power and authority were legitimised by the bishop's role as guardian of the cult. The article examines how both bishops and saints' cults related to other social elites throughout the eleventh and twelfth century. One of our main questions - to which I believe we have found a very reasonable answer - is why native cults flourished so strongly at an earlier point in Norway than in Poland. 

The article has been a challenge to write because of the many angles from which we approached our material, but precisely because of the comprehensive examination of Norwegian and Polish medieval society, this article is one of the most rewarding texts I have worked on to this date. 

New publications, part 1 - Sacral Strongholds. Nunneries as Sources of Legitimacy in Twelfth-Century Poland and Norway

Last month saw the publication of one of the collections of articles pertaining to the project where I did my previous post-doc. The publication as a whole is in open access, and it is available here. Since I contributed to three of the articles in this volume, I will briefly present each of these here, with a link to the article in question. 

The first of my contributions is "Sacral Strongholds. Nunneries as Sources of Legitimacy in Twelfth-Century Poland and Norway", co-authored with Anna Agnieszka Dryblak. This article compares how nunneries were founded in order to strengthen the legitimisation of both secular and ecclesiastical elites in the two polities. The article contains four case studies, two concerning secular elites and two concerning ecclesiastical elites. It was a challenge to write this article, as I started out with much less expertise on the subject than my co-author, but it was therefore a great opportunity to delve deeper into this particular aspect of Norwegian history, and to consider these institutions both in terms of social networks and topographies.