Thrice-illumined

 

Western Norway has been a grey castle this June, with mist and grey clouds being constant features throughout almost every day, and also bringing with them torrential showers or milder but more continuous drizzle. As summer arrives, I seek the balcony at the back of my paternal grandparents' house, enjoying its shade until the sun floats into view in the early afternoo, thereby making the place too hot for either work or leisure. This year, however, the rain and cold have induced me to use the porch at the front of the house as a temporary work space. I have done so in previous years, too, but lacking access to the balcony has meant that I have sought porch much more frequently, especially because the dark evenings have provided a good excuse to light the three-pronged candlestick which I keep there. 

Last night, there suddenly broke through a piercing silvery light from the moon as it was climbing the mountain range on the western side of the fjord of my native village, Hyen. This sudden illumination was a drastic change to the heavier light that had preceded it, and it caught my attention immediately. Looking out through the window on the side of the porch, I saw the light of the moon filtered by the clouds, powerful enough to be reflected in the creased surface of the lake behind the house, and I also noted that the window glass in turn reflected the flames of the three candles, as well as the reflection of of one them in the window glass on the front of the porch. It was a lovely moment that made me feel thrice-illumined, and it was a very atmospheric reminder of why I tend to sit in this little nook even when I need to wear a jacket and a blanket - these shifting skies mean that no two evenings are alike in this place. 

A note on reading fragments - or, Why human agency remains important

This week, there has been a lot of publicity around the latest development in the efforts to extract texts from the fire-damaged scrolls from Herculaneum. News outlets tend to focus on the role of AI in the process, not distinguishing between various forms of technology that fall under the broad label of artificial intelligence. As has been pointed out by several commentators on social media, however, the role of artificial intelligence consists of distinguishing ink from papyrus, leaving the actual transcription and identification of the content of the scrolls to human agency. In other words, the main part of the work is done by human researchers with expertise and knowledge. In a post by Dr. Naomi Scott of the University of Bristol, she pointed out that the main work is done by human experts, and posted a quotation from Professor Llewellyn Morgan of the University of Oxford published in a news update from the university in 2025. 

In the quotation from Llewellyn Morgan, there was one particular passage that stood out to me. Morgan likened the pattern recognition by machines to how eighteenth-century copyists who copied what was written on scrolls, but who could not understand the content. This reminded me of an anecdote from my experience with manuscript fragments that really made me understand how experts often need inexpert eyes to help their work progress. 

About nine years ago, I was researching fragments of medieval manuscripts in the special collections at the University Library of Southern Denmark. Most of these fragments were used as bindings, and had been subject to a lot of wear, tear, and years of occasional water damage. Consequently, the texts on these fragments could be very difficult to decipher, as it was often challenging to distinguish a letter from a letter-shaped smudge. In some cases, I also came to realise that my expertise in palaeography and Latin hampered me when the text became too illegible, because I was too focused on the word in its entirety rather than the individual letter, which meant that I often kept searching for one of many possible words that seemed like reasonable option for one specific string of letters. 

In order to better identify the letters, I took close-up photographs of the fragments or parts of the fragments, printed these out, and traced or separated the various letters with a pencil. This method was sometimes successful, but it depended entirely on the state of the fragment, and I was again hampered by the expectations which were leading my gaze. 

I showed some of the pictures to a friend of mine. At that time, he had no experience with medieval manuscripts, palaeography, or Latin. But he is a very good photographer with a keen eye for details, and I thought that he might see things that I did not. This turned out to be the case. As my friend looked at the photographs, he told me very simply what he saw, and I then could focus on that one thing and determine whether this was a letter or simply a letter-shaped smudge. This was a kind of a refocusing, or a recalibration of the gaze, and it was an immense help. In some cases, what my friend saw was irrelevant, but I could only assess this irrelevance after a closer scrutiny, and when transcribing a worn and faded fragment, it is just as important to know which things to ignore. Through his help, I was able to transcribe some lines that had frustrated me for a long time, and I was then able to identify the text itself, which in turn was very important for the general identification of the fragment. 

The exercise was a revelation for me, because it showed very clearly how much help I could get from someone who was not in my academic field or even close to it. In this sense, my friend was doing much of the same job that machines are doing for the Herculaneum scrolls. He was finding patterns, noticing things that I overlooked because I was distracted by the bigger picture. And even though this kind of work would have been done much faster by a machine, the process was also very educational for me and helped me not only to do my work but also to improve my skills as a fragment researcher. As in most things, such research requires a lot of practice, and the kind of slow, incremental progress that my friend and I were doing was what I needed to improve at an early stage in my career as a researcher. 

In many cases, machines are needed to deal with certain aspects of source work, at least for speeding up the process. But sometimes speed is neither of the essence nor very helpful, because it is the slow, trudging pace that helps you improve, making you become an expert through constant practice. In short, human agency is not only still very much needed, it is also to be preferred. 

A woodcut for the Nativity of John the Baptist

I should be in bed, but since it is a summer's night I am staying up longer than is sensible. This night, moreover, is the feast of the Nativity of Saint John, one of few saints in Latin Christianity whose earthly birthday is celebrated, and moreover as his main feast. The eve of Saint John is an important time in European folklore, and there are numerous traditions associated with the night between June 23 and June 24.  

Throughout the Latin Middle Ages, John the Baptist was a famous and popular saint, mainly due to his appearance in the Bible and his important role in the life of Christ. Several churches were dedicated to him, and his iconography made him a recognisable figure in medieval art. He is typically depicted as a wild-haired man dressed in a camel hide, usually holding an image of the Lamb of God, being, as he was, a forerunner for Christ.  

Due to this iconographical tradition, I was rather surprised to come across a rather different representation in March, when I was researching a collection of saints' lives printed in Lübeck in 1492, namely the Passionael by Steffen Arndes. This was the second edition of Passionael, and the printer had commissioned a new set of woodcuts. For the feast of the Nativity of Saint John, the woodcut does not depict the desert hermit typical of medieval iconography. Rather, it highlights the birth of the saint, or rather his childhood. His sainted mother, Elizabeth, is lying in bed while the holy child is bathed by a maid, a situation that neither maid nor child seems very happy about. It is a sweet domestic scene, perhaps reflecting the secular audience of the collection, namely the merchants and artists of Lübeck. 

Steffen Arndes, Passionael (1492)

Syddansk Universitetsbibliotek RARA M 15, f.44v

While I was surprised by this iconography, it was not completely novel the world of late-medieval Latin Christian art. The birth of John the Baptist was recounted in the Bible, and it was part of an expanded narrative commemorated through liturgical celebrations in the Middle Ages. From the late fourteenth century onwards, the Latin Church put greater emphasis on the feast of the Visitation of Mary (July 2), and it was established a compulsory feast at the Council of Basil (1431-49). The Visitation commemorated her visit to John's mother Elizabeth while they both were pregnant. According to tradition, John gave a joyful leap in his mother's stomach when he sensed the approach of the coming Messiah. Consequently, the scene depicted in Passionael fits well within the development of the cults of both Mary and John the Baptist in the later Middle Ages. 

One curious thing about the woodcuts in Passionael, however, is that this particular scene was also used for the chapter on the birth of the Virgin Mary, Nativitas Mariae, on September 8. The viewer is only asked to imagine that the mother who has recently given birth is Anne rather than Elizabeth, and that the baby boy in the bath tub is rather the baby girl who would grow up to become the mother of God. The reuse of this woodcut is perhaps primarily due to practical matters, an opportunity to pay for one less item, or perhaps to save time. But it is also a reminder that the reception of iconographical information is flexible. The readers and viewers of Passionael would eventually encounter both these woodcuts and recognise them as the same - after all, these two feasts are not that far apart in the liturgical calendar - but they would have no problem letting this image represent one occasion on one day and another occasion on a different day. The identity of mother and child changes as the occasion changes, but the scene remains the same because that scene encapsulates what is being celebrated on both occasions, namely the birth of a figure central to the life of Christ. This kind of flexibility requires a kind of pragmatism and iconographical literacy that is often overlooked by modern viewers, inculcated as we are that art needs to be individual and unique. As a consequence, we often underestimate the artistic understanding of the people of the Middle Ages. 

Steffen Arndes, Passionael (1492)

Syddansk Universitetsbibliotek RARA M 15, f.142r

A new publication on local history

 

Two weeks ago, the households of my native village of Hyen received this booklet in their mailboxes. It is a publication that celebrates the 150th anniversary of the local church, which is one of the historical and cultural centrepoints of the village. Aside from its importance as a religious house and a landmark in the fjordscape, it also serves as a reminder of our identity as an oft-forgotten backwater that has to speak loudly for its rights. This new church was built in 1875 and consecrated the year after, which was the culmination of a political process that had gone on for decades. In the nineteenth century, Norwegian governments were very economically minded when it came to the care of rural parish churches. A demand that functioning churches had to accommodate a certain number of people led to the destruction of the vast majority of the country's medeival stave churches, most of which were small and dark. Similarly, a village like Hyen was considered too small to warrant its own church. While there was a church in the Middle Ages, it is likely to have been decommissioned after the Reformation, and in the period c.1600-1876, the villagers had to row to the next fjord in order to attend services. The story of the drawn-out effort to build a church in the village is emblematic of how small rural communities often have to spend much time and money to make themselves heard. 

I was asked to write a contribution to this booklet, and I was very happy to do so. Although the booklet is dedicated to the modern church, its long-gone medieval antecessor is none the less an important part of its story, so I wrote a three-page overview of what we know about the church and the village in the Middle Ages. 

Contributing to a volume like is one of the great joys of being a historian. While this is the kind of publication that yields zero points when it comes to those bibliographies that have to be submitted as part of applications for academic jobs, it is a text that is academically solid and that will be read by a much wider number of people than any of my professional articles. In terms of outreach, this little piece on local history might be something of the most important work I have ever done.