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.