Saint Edmund the protector - an example from medieval Norway

 

Today, November 20, is the feast of Saint Edmund Martyr, who was killed by Danish raiders in 869/70. His cult became one of the largest cults of a native saint in medieval England, and in the eleventh and twelfth century it was also notable in the Nordic sphere. Since I wrote about the cult of Edmund for my PhD, and how the formulation of his characteristics changed over time, I take the opportunity of today’s feast to connect one of the main iconographic features of Saint Edmund with a reference found in a Norwegian twelfth-century source. If my interpretation of the evidence holds, it suggests that the image of Saint Edmund as it was reformulated at Bury St Edmunds in the late eleventh century was also sufficiently well known in twelfth-century Norway to be a point of reference. 

Towards Hovedøya

The iconographic feature in question is Edmund’s efficiency as a protector and guardian of his territory, who could resort to violent means to carry out his protective role. While the clearest formulation of Edmund the protector first came about in the late eleventh century, the first vita of Edmund, Passio Sancti Eadmundi written by Abbo of Fleury around 985, includes a miracle story that might provide the basis for the later reformulation. This miracle story tells of how a group of thieves broke into Edmund’s resting place at Bury in order to steal the valuables housed there. As the thieves went to their business, they eventually discovered that they were unable to move, and so were discovered the next day by the clergy who served at the shrine. The thieves were subsequently executed by hanging on the orders of the bishop. Abbo remarks that the death of the thieves was an unnecessary tragedy, and the violent aspect of Edmund had apparently not become part of his image at that point. What is important, however, is that it was through Edmund’s merits that God prevented the thieves from moving, and Edmund was then able to protect his property.  

In the late eleventh century, during the abbacy of Baldwin (r.1065-97), Herman the Archdeacon compiled a collection of miracles which also served as a history of the abbey, and especially the period preceding the reform of the church into a monastic house in 1020. Herman recorded a story of how King Svein Forkbeard, the leader of Danish raiders who demanded heavy tribute from the church at Bury, was killed in his bed by Saint Edmund. The killing of the Danish king convinced the raiders to relinquish their demands. With this story, recorded close to sixty years after it supposedly happened, the image of Edmund as a protector had taken a new form. Or, perhaps more accurately, this aspect of Edmund had now been committed to writing and could therefore have a much more tangible impact on the later cult. This impact is notable, both for its early implementation and its longevity. For example, when an office for the vigil of Saint Edmund was added to the already-existing office for the feast-day itself, the story recounted in the four lessons for Matins was that of Edmund’s killing of Svein. The materials for the office were taken from Herman’s account, and although the earliest source of this office dates from the 1120s, it is likely that the office was composed already in the eleventh century. The longevity of Edmund’s reputation as a protector is evident from the wide range of church art that depicts his killing of Svein, but this development is another story, one that is addressed in the two best studies of the cult of Edmund to date, namely Rebecca Pinner’s The Cult of St. Edmund in medieval East Anglia (2015) and Francis Young’s Edmund – in search of England’s lost king (2018).

Towards the abbey church at Hovedøya

In twelfth-century Norway, the cult of Edmund was known, although to what extent is still an unanswered question. The knowledge of Edmund’s cult was due to the close contacts between the Norwegian church and the English church, a contact that had played a signification role in the conversion period of the early eleventh century, and which continued to have an impact on the cult of saints in Norway throughout the twelfth century. One example of this impact is the Cistercian abbey of Hovedøya – Head Island – outside Oslo, which was dedicated to SS Mary and Edmund. The abbey was established in 1147, and became a significant landowner in the Oslo region. It is in relation to this abbey we find our source to the knowledge of Edmund’s role as protector in medieval Norway.         

The source in question is the Registry of Akershus from 1622, an inventory of the records and charters kept at Akershus fortress (see Regesta Norvegica vol. 1, no. 157). One of the records is a letter of donation to the abbey at Hovedøya from the period 1170-78, signed by King Magnus Erlingsson, Archbishop Eystein Erlendsson, Bishop Helge I of Oslo, Earl Erling (the king’s father) and Orm Ivarsson, all of whom were powerful men of the Norwegian kingdom. The letter states that the manor of Frogn, situated north of Oslo, had been given to the abbey of Hovedøya. Moreover, the letter includes the warning that whomever would infringe on the rights and the ownership of the abbey should beware the anger of God and Saint Edmund.

What makes this letter notable is the warning, and the reference to the anger of the saint. To this date, I have not come across a similar formulation in the Norwegian medieval material, and although this does not preclude that it is a common detail of such letters of donations, it is remarkable for how it fits with the image of Saint Edmund that was well established and common by the end of the twelfth century. Granted, that saints could punish those who offended them or who sought to encroach on their territory or their domain is a feature of the cult of saints that was established very early in its history. Punitive miracles are attested early in the literature pertaining to saints. Moreover their role as protectors is often formulated as battle-helpers who provide victory against the enemies of the saint’s clients, and this variant goes back to at least the early fifth century. In Norway, the protective saint was also known in the figure of Saint Olaf, whose role as battle-helper was recorded in the 1150s, and whose punitive miracles were recorded in the 1180s at the latest. There is, therefore, no guarantee that the threat of a saint’s anger in the donation letter should be linked to the image of Edmund the protector as formulated at Bury St Edmunds in the late eleventh century.

The interior of the Church of SS Mary and Edmund, Hovedøya

However, the anger mentioned in the letter is precisely the anger of Saint Edmund. Considering that the Cistercians at Hovedøya were familiar with the legend of their patron saint, and considering that Archbishop Eystein also is likely to have known about it, it would make sense to see this threat as an expression of the knowledge of Edmund’s violent guardianship whenever his territory was threatened or challenged. We do not know of any manuscripts containing the legend of Saint Edmund from twelfth-century Norway, but that absence of evidence is almost to be expected considering that the vast majority of Latin texts produced and/or kept in medieval Norway have been lost. There is, however, one important survival that suggests that Edmund’s role as guardian was known to the Norwegian clergy, at least at the diocesan churches. The survival in question is a fragment from an antiphoner written in Bergen in the first quarter of the thirteenth century. This antiphoner, whose fragments have been digitally collected by scholars at the University of Bergen led by Åslaug Ommundsen, contains an excerpt from the office of Saint Edmund, an excerpt that earned this antiphoner its current name, namely “the Saint Edmund antiphoner”. Pleasingly, at least from the perspective of my argument here, the fragment (NRA Lat. fragm. 1018) contains one of the antiphons for Lauds which recounts the episode of the thieves who broke into Edmund’s shrine. While this miracle antedates the violent version of Edmund’s protective qualities, it is nonetheless a concrete piece of evidence that points to the knowledge of Edmund and his characteristics in medieval Norway. The threat of Edmund’s anger in the donation letter should, therefore, be seen as a manifestation of the idea of Edmund as a violent protector, and that this idea was sufficiently familiar in late twelfth-century Norway to be used in such an official document as a letter of donation.    

Saint Edmund's sketchy wolf - a doodle in a twelfth-century English manuscript

Today is the feast of Saint Edmund Martyr (d.869/70), one of the saints about whom I have done the most research as a professional academic, and about whom I have written several blogposts already. (See for instance here, here, here, here, and here.) In this blogpost, I wish to present to you an encounter I had while researching the cult of Edmund for my PhD, namely a little doodle of an animal head in the margin of a twelfth-century manuscript.

Edmund's wolf?

Pierpont Morgan MS 736, f.187

The manuscript in question is the sumptuous Pierpont Morgan MS 736, currently held in New York but originally produced at the abbey of Bury St Edmunds in the period 1125-30. Among other things, the manuscript contains materials for the liturgical celebration for Edmund's feast, and for my thesis I was researching how this liturgical material presented the martyred king. Since the liturgical office of the manuscript is not edited I was dependent on the manuscript itself, and fortunately I was sent a file of a black and white scan of the relevant section of the manuscript from the librarians at Pierpont Morgan, a kindness that spared me much time and money. (You can get a high-quality scan of a manuscript page for 100 dollars.) This is also why the above picture is the way it is, it's a photograph of a scan.

In the summer of 2015, I taught myself how to transcribe twelfth-century script by using the scans of this manuscript, an exhilarating two-week endeavour that I have written about here. It was a very exciting exercise, especially because the script is relatively easy to read and the manuscript is clearly a product intended to be of the highest quality, something to which the spectacular illuminations readily attest. But precisely because of this high-class nature of the manuscript, it was all the more surprising and delightful to encounter this doodle of an animal head in the margin.

To this day, I am still not certain how to understand this doodle, and to my knowledge there have been offered no suggestions from the Pierpont Morgan library as to what it may mean. It is not included in their selection of publicly available images from the manuscript, and I have not seen it mentioned anywhere in the academic literature. I will therefore attempt an interpretation here.

The wolf guarding Edmund's head

Pierpont Morgan MS 736, f.16r

The wolf itself is an element from the legend as it was written down by Abbo of Fleury in Passio Sancti Eadmundi in the late 980s. When Edmund has been killed by decapitation, the Danes take the head with them into the woods and discard it there in order to prevent the locals from venerating the dead king. One local, however, observes what goes on, so when the Danes have left the area the locals all go into the woods in search of  Edmund's head. They find it when the head itself start calling out "her, her, her", i.e. "here, here, here", and when the locals approach the head they find that it is guarded by a wolf. Abbo of Fleury compares this wolf to the lions who did not touch Daniel in the den. The wolf then follows the people back to Beodricsworth, the later Bury St Edmunds, and when he sees that the head is cared for properly he disappears. This wolf has become one of the main signifiers of the legend of Edmund in later medieval art.

The animal head doodled in the margin of Pierpont Morgan MS 736 is placed right next to the opening of the eighth lesson of the liturgical office. This lesson is itself opened by a beautiful and rich illuminated initial, an S that contains a griffin and a lion. The lesson begins with the details of Edmund's death on twelfth kalends of December, i.e. November 20, and continues on the next folio with a description of how the text is brought into the woods. The wolf itself does not appear until lesson 9, four folios later, an appearance that itself is heralded by an initial that depicts the wolf guarding the severed head.

But I consider it nonetheless to be possible that the animal head on folio 187 might be intended to signify the wolf of the legend. Granted, it appears a bit early in the story, and, granted, it is not of a clearly lupine shape. Yet it invokes the image of a monk at Bury, at any point between around 1130 and the abbey's dissolution, who perhaps excitedly, perhaps in boredom, remembers the wolf as his reading eyes arrive at the lesson beginning with the aftermath of Edmund's decapitation. He knows the story from before, he has heard it read aloud on previous feast days, he has himself most likely sung this story by way of the liturgical chants also included in the manuscript, chants like the responsory immediately preceding the lesson in question. And this rememberance seems to have spurred him on to make this doodle. 

We will never know who the monk was who made this doodle. We will never be able to say with certainty whether it is indeed a representation of the wolf, or whether it is an image more or less divorced from the story unfolding on the vellum. But it does remind us that this manuscript, sumptuous though it be, was a manuscript in use. It was read, and readers engaged with it in different ways, one of which being this little drawing that remains a delightful and perpetual mystery.

The vigil of Saint Edmund Martyr

Preuenientes festum ueneremur eadmundum et in eo adoremus regem regum

The feast of Edmund is arriving, let us venerate and in him we adore the king of kings
- Invitatory antiphon from the office of the vigil of Edmund Martyr (my translation)



Today is the vigil of the feast of Edmund Martyr, one of the most popular native saints of medieval England, and one of the saints about whom I wrote my PhD thesis. Due to my abiding interest in Edmund and his cult, I have written about him several times on this blog, and accordingly I will not go into great detail about his story, at least not the entire story. (For older blogposts about Edmund, see here, here, here, and here.) But since I have not yet written in detail about his vigil, I will say a little bit about it here. 

The vigilant Edmund Martyr

Pierpont Morgan MS 736, f.5r

The vigil of a feast is the day before the feast itself, and serves as a precursor or a preparation for the main celebration of the saint. As Edmund's feast falls on November 20, the vigil is celebrated the day before. However, it is important to keep in mind that due to the daily cycle of liturgical services, it is easy to get confused about when a celebration actually begins. Any feast in the liturgical calendar begins with the hour of Vesper, which corresponds roughly with our six in the afternoon, though seasonal differences apply. This is the first of three big services in which the saint of the day is commemorated through chants and readings. In the case of Edmund, the most important celebration of his feast was held at his shrine at Bury St Edmunds, and the chants and readings were performed by the monks of the abbey.

As stated, there are three big services in the course of the daily liturgical round: Vesper (ca 18.00), Matins (ca 03.00) and Lauds (ca 06.00). The most important of these is Matins, during which the main part of the liturgical office is performed, and when most of the texts are read. However, since the feast begins with Vesper and Vesper is in the afternoon, this means that the office for the main feast of Edmund begins around six in the afternoon on November 19. This means, in turn, that the office for the vigil of Edmund begins around six in the afternoon on November 18, and the apex of the vigil is at around three in the morning of November 19.

The vigil is, as mentioned, a precursor to the main feast. This means that only the most important feast days were celebrated with their own office for the vigil, as well as for the main feast. For minor feast days, a brief acknowledgement of the vigil was sufficient. But Edmund's feast day was widely celebrated throughout England, and at Bury St Edmunds this was one of the most important liturgical days of the year, outranked only by the feasts commemorating the main events of the life of Christ, such as Resurrection Sunday. Consequently, we do possess a manuscript evidence to the office of the vigil as it was celebrated by the monks at Bury, and it contains the chants and the readings that were performed at Vesper, Matins and Lauds of the vigil. This is a significant testament to the importance of Edmund.

Edmund crowned as martyr in Heaven

Pierpont Morgan MS 736, f.22v

The office for the vigil of Saint Edmund is transmitted in a lavish manuscript from Bury that was produced in the period 1125-30. The manuscript, Pierpont Morgan MS 736, contains not only the office for the vigil and for the main feast, but also Passio Sancti Eadmundi by Abbo of Fleury (the first vita of the martyr) and a collection of miracle stories associated with Edmund.

A liturgical office for a major feast day at a monastic community is an expansive affair. The service of Matins, for instance, consists of the performance of twelve psalms, each with their own antiphon recounting something from the saint's story, the reading of twelve lessons taken from the saint's life, each lesson being followed by its own chant recounting key elements of the lesson, and several other shorter liturgical pieces.

The liturgical office for the vigil of Saint Edmund, however, is not as grand. For the service of Vesper (which, as stated, begins at around six on November 18), only one chant was performed instead of the six of the main feast. For the service of Matins, the monks at Bury would sing one antiphon at the beginning (the one quoted above), then three more antiphons, and four lessons with one responsory each. Lauds consisted of four antiphons instead of the five of the main feast.

The office for the vigil that we find in Pierpont Morgan MS 736 serves, as stated, as a preparation for the main feast. Consequently, the chants and readings of this office do not recount episodes of Edmund's vita, i.e. how we was martyred. This is a story for the main feast. Instead, the monks would gather in the abbey church and listen to the readings, and themselves perform the chants, in which were told some of the miracles that God had performed in order to prove the holiness of Saint Edmund. These stories were taken from the collection of miracles gathered in the 1090s by the monk Hermannus.

For the vigil, two miracle stories were selected. One recounted how the Danish king Svend Forkbeard had oppressed the abbey with taxation and had been punished by death by Edmund himself. The other recounted how the faithful monk Aelwine had freighted Edmund's shrine on a cart to protect it from the ravages of the Danes. One day they came to a river whose bridge looked a bit too narrow for the cart, but Aelwine drove on, trusting in the aid of Saint Edmund, and the cart crossed the river with one wheel driving on the bridge, the other driving on the river itself.

The miraculous crossing of the river

Pierpont Morgan MS 736, f. 20v

These stories were important to the community of monks at Bury St Edmunds. Not only did the stories educate the monks about their patron saint whose body lay in the shrine in that selfsame church. But the stories also educated the monks about their own institution, their own abbey, about its history and about how it was protected from oppressors by the patronage of Saint Edmund and by God. Listening to these stories, and performing these stories through chants, on a set day of the year, in the very abbey featured in the stories, instilled into the monks at Bury a sense of their own institutional identity, and this was passed down from generation to generation. In this way, we see how liturgy served a didactic purpose, and at Bury St Edmunds, this didacticism was centred on the figure of Edmund himself.

As a sort of conclusion to this blogpost, and for the occasion of the vigil, I also present to you the two chants of Lauds in which the story of the river-crossing is narrated. The transcription of the Latin and the translation of the text is my own, and can be found in the appendices of my PhD thesis. 


Antiphon 4:

Dum peruenit sanctus et auriga eius ad aque transitum fit ibi dubium quomodo sancti gleba transierit in hreda [rheda] sed facit uirtus diuina pro sancto laudabilia

While the saint and his charioteer [4 Kings 2:12] arrived at the water-crossing, this [charioteer] became doubtful as to in what way he could cross on that turf in the wagon, but it is done by praiseworthy divine power for the saint.

Antiphon 5:

O sanctissimi meritum eadmundi per quem benedicitur filius dei cuius rote uehiculi dantes certa uestigii super flumen cucurrit dextra eque super pontem sinistra more petri calcantis equor nutu domini benedictus deus per omnia.

O merit of most holy Edmund, by whom the son of God is praised. Whose wheels produced sure tracks, the right moving over the river, just as the left did over the bridge, in the manner of Peter treading the level sea on God’s command. God is praised by all.

The typology of decapitation - the case of Edmund Martyr and John the Baptist

When working on the cult and literature of saints, one of the most noteworthy aspects one comes across is the many ways in which one holy person is typologically connected with other holy men and women of Christian and biblical history. This means a saint is understood as the antitype, i.e. as a kind of later reconfiguration, of an earlier type, hence typology. All saints are expected to be an antitype to Christ, but one saint can be typologically connected to a number of saints, either by shared features, belonging to the same category of saints, by intertextuality, or by other means. Mapping these connections is sometimes the most fun part of working with saints.

These days I am returning to Edmund Martyr, the king of East Anglia who in 869 was killed by Danish Vikings and who was venerated as a saint from at least the late ninth century. The first biography of Saint Edmund was written by Abbo of Fleury c.985, and this was the foundation for the later texts that were produced at Bury St Edmunds, the centre of his cult.

Edmund tortured by Vikings
BL MS Harley 2278, John Lydgate's life of Edmund and Fremund, England, between 1434 and 1439

(Courtesy of British Library)

In Abbo of Fleury's Passio Eadmundi, we are told how Edmund was tied to a tree and pierced by arrows while the Danish chieftain Hingwar (usually identified as Ivar Boneless) tried to make him subdue to Danish overlordship. When Edmund refused, his head was chopped off and thrown into the bushes lest a veneration of the deceased monarch should emerge. The head was later found, guarded by a wolf, and when it had been interred in a simple wooden chapel, the head and body miraculously merged into an intact unit.

 

The finding of Edmund's head
BL MS Harley 2278, John Lydgate's life of Edmund and Fremund, between 1434-39
(Courtesy of British Library) 

 Passio Eadmundi was the fundamental text for the later composition of a liturgical office at Bury St Edmunds. This office is today recorded almost completely in Pierpont Morgan MS 736, which was written and put together c.1130. The office for Edmund's feast day - November 20 - consists of a collection of chants and readings to be performed at the hour of Matins on the night of his dies natalis, his heavenly birthday and his death-day on earth. This office forms the centrepiece of my chapter on Saint Edmund for my doctoral thesis.

One night I was playing with one of my most important research tools, the CANTUS database in which liturgical chants from the Middle Ages are catalogued. While doing so, I serendipitously discovered that one of the chants for Saint Edmund - the seventh antiphon, i.e. a chant sung before the seventh of the psalms during the night office - shared some features with an antiphon for the feast of the beheading of John the Baptist.

Decollation of John the Baptist

Amiens - BM - ms. 0195, f.133v, pontifical of Corbie, thirteenth century, Northern France

(Courtesy of enluminures.culture.fr)

According to Matthew 14, Mark 6, and Luke 9, John the Baptist was beheaded on the orders of King Herod Antipas. The reason for the beheading was that Herod's wife Herodias hated John the Baptist and told her daughter Salome that should Herod ask what she wanted as a gift, Salome would request the head of John the Baptist on a silver platter. Salome then danced for the king, and Herod was overcome with delight and told his step-daughter to ask for anything she wanted as a reward for her dance. Salome then heeded her mother's words, and John the Baptist was duly beheaded.

The death of Saint John the Baptist is marked with its own feast in the Catholic liturgical calendar, and it is celebrated on August 29. Unlike most other saints, however, the death-day of John the Baptist is not his principal feast, which is his nativity on June 24. Nor is the day marking the day of his beheading, but instead it marks the finding of his head. This is why the day is known as the feast of the decollation, rather than the dies natalis.

Even the marginal hybrids turn their face away in sorrow 

Limoges - BM - ms. 0002, f.182v, gradual, Fontevrault, c.1250-c.1260

(Courtesy of enluminures.culture.fr)

Since both John the Baptist and Edmund Martyr were beheaded, it is no wonder that the venerators of Saint Edmund should think that the two saints were typologically connected, especially the hagiographers and liturgists at Bury whose job it was to emphasize such connections through musical borrowings, textual allusions, and iconographic similarities. To illustrate how this was done, I will here present you the antiphon of Edmund and that of the feast of the decollation to illustrate how this typological connection was made through liturgical borrowings.

The antiphon for Saint Edmund:

Misso spiculatore de crevit tyrannus
dei adletam eadmundus dum capite
detruncari sicque ymnum deo personuit
et animam celo gaudens intulit.

(The thrown stabs increased by the tyrant, the athlete of God, Edmund, when his head was cut off, and thus resounded with hymns for God and brought the soul rejoicing to Heaven)

The antiphon for the decollation of John the Baptist:

Misso Herodes spiculatore praecepit
amputare caput Joannis in carcere
quo audito discipuli ejus venerunt et
tulerunt corpus ejus et posuerunt
illud in monumento
(The thrown stabs ordered by Herod amputated the head of John while in prison. When his disciples heard this, they came and interred his body and placed it in a monument.)

Praecepit amputare caput Joannis in carcere

Cambrai - BM - ms. 0189, f.161v, Evangeliar, Use of Cambrai, c.1266, Cambrai

(Courtesy of enluminures.culture.fr)

As can be seen from the words put in bold, it is likely that the antiphon for the feast of the decollation served as the foundation for the antiphon of Edmund Martyr. This relationship is also strengthened by some of the words that are not identical but nonetheless carry the same meaning. While the Edmund antiphon uses "detruncari" and the decollation antiphon uses "amputare", it is nonetheless clear that they signify the same form of execution. Similarly, while the primary antagonist in the antiphon for the decollation is identified as Herod, the antagonist of the Emund antiphon is not named but instead referred to as "tyrannus", a term which in medieval liturgical chants is sometimes used about Herod (such as this hymn verse for the feast of the Holy Innocents).

These two antiphons, therefore, provide a good example of how the typological connection of two saints could be emphasized through liturgy. By borrowing key words and phrases from an antiphon for the decollation, the liturgists pointed to the fact that Edmund and John the Baptist both were beheaded, and that they therefore had a relationship in the collegium of saints. Such connections were important to bring out because that way the typological roster of Saint Edmund - i.e. the list of his features shared with other saints - could be mapped out more completely, and thus Saint Edmund's role in the history of Creation could be understood more clearly. This in turn would mean that he could be addressed more accurately, more flatteringly, which might bring about his help more effectively.

Although such a connection might seem arcane to us who do not perform medieval liturgy, we must remember that the monks at Bury St Edmunds would sing both these antiphons. And even though the antiphons were sung at different times in the year, they would nonetheless be performed by the same monks year after year, and thus be remembered. In this way, the monks who venerated Saint Edmund would be reminded that their patron also shared features with the forerunner of Jesus Christ.

Learning to transcribe - a few personal notes on working with Saint Edmund Martyr

One of the recurring sensations in my time in academia is the feeling that there are things with which you never really finish. Today this feeling was brought on by a revision of a transcription of the office for Saint Edmund which I undertook back in 2015, and which forms one of the main pillars for the research of my doctoral thesis.

The offices for the vigil and feast of Saint Edmund Martyr are contained in a manuscript produced at Bury St Edmunds around 1130, together with the first saint-biography of Edmund, Abbo's Passio Eadmundi, and collections of miracles related to Saint Edmund. This manuscript contains the most complete version of the office for the feast of Saint Edmund that has survived, and also the only version of the office for the vigil. For my chapter on Saint Edmund, I have gone into great detail about the chants and readings for the office for the feast day, but now it was time to turn to the office for the vigil instead and get a better overview of what it contains.

The office for the vigil was performed on the eve before the feast of Edmund (November 20), and contains one nocturn of four lessons with responsories in accordance with the monastic model. The chants and lessons all take their material from the miracle collection written down by Herman the Archdeacon around 1080-90. The selection of miracle stories is not wide, as they all focus on one of the most salient episodes in the history of the cult of Saint Edmund, namely the divine punishment of Svein Estrithsson.

The story which Herman wrote down tells of how the Danish king Svein Estrithsson (d.1074/76) invaded England and demanded tribute from the English. He also demanded tribute from the monks at Bury St Edmunds and sought to despoil the riches that had accumulated at the shrine of Saint Edmund Martyr. The monks turned to Edmund for help, and their heavenly ambassador brought divine wrath down upon the Danish king to such a degree that the king exempted Bury from paying tribute. At the time when Herman composed his collection of miracles this story had not been in circulation for many years, but it tied in with another punitive miracle that had been included in the Passio written by Abbo of Fleury in the 980s and so the punishment of the Danish king became one of the most iconic miracles attributed to the merits of Saint Edmund (but performed by God).

Opening of the office for the vigil of Saint Edmund
MS Pierpont Morgan 736, Bury St. Edmunds, c.1130 (photocopy)

I find the miracle story fascinating, especially in the way it cemented Saint Edmund Martyr's reputation as a guardian of his own shrine and ensured that this reputation would be a recurring feature in later writings at Bury St Edmunds, such as the chronicle of Jocelin of Brakelond from c.1200.

In the coming days I will immerse myself further into the miracles of Saint Edmund, which I left off in 2015 so that I could focus more single-mindedly on the office of the feast itself. To return to this text was a reminder that those things on which you work the most are sometimes the things most likely to stay with you. This feeling of return was perhaps also exacerbated by the fact that back in 2015, the office for the vigil of Saint Edmund was the first text I ever transcribed from a medieval manuscript - or rather, from a printed out photocopied version of the manuscript.

I remember very well the excitement of those summer days in June 2015 where I had a 27-page document to transcribe and make sense of - without any prior experience of transcription. Foolhardy and stupidly optimistic as I sometimes can be, I nonetheless thought that I would be able to do it. And sure enough, I did manage to tackle the text after two intense weeks of work, and I remember feeling overly proud of myself for getting this done.

Today, close to two years later, my experience with transcription is significantly greater, and armed with more experience - and much greater knowledge of the textual corpus in question - I set out to see how much of the transcription work of my 2015 self I had to correct.

It turned out that there was quite a lot to correct, both in terms of things I had misread, things I had failed to understand, things that were close to unintelligible, and also in terms of lack of standardized practices for how to deal with scribal inaccuracies. This was perhaps particularly noticeable in the office for the vigil, since this is the very beginning of the manuscript and the very first text with which I had to try my inexperienced brain.

On the one hand, correcting my mistakes from two years ago gave me a sense of how inexperienced I still am when it comes to manuscript work, even though I have gained a lot more since 2015, and many of the mistakes had the very dirty tinge of the dilettante about them. On the other hand, however, it made me realize just how much I had learned in the two years that had passed, and it also gave me an optimistic sense of all the things I have yet to learn and hopefully will learn as I continue to carve my path through the dense forest that is academia. It is a pleasing thought, and such thoughts are always welcome in the thesis process.

Adversus Obfuscari

Down there you do not follow a single path

When you philosophise; so carried away are you

By showing off and the ideas it gives you.

- Paradiso, Dante Alighieri (translated by Charles Sisson)

In the course of research for my MA thesis I was directed to an article on the hagiography of Edmund of East Anglia (d. 869) which might provide some interesting details for comparative studies. The article in question is found in the anthology Holiness and Masculinity in the Middle Ages, a collection of essays edited by P. H. Cullum and Katherine J. Lewis, compiled for the purpose of shedding new light on old issues by focussing on aspects pertaining to gender studies. The compilation covers a vast timespan and includes a range of topics, some of them very interesting and relevant to my dissertation. Despite my overall good impression - and my firm conviction as to the project's importance - there was nonetheless one article in particular that made me seethe with scholarly rage to such an extent that I completed the opus mainly out of spite. This blogpost is therefore dedicated to a fierce rebuttal of poorly applied gender theory and scholarship that serves only to obstruct the usefulness of a discipline.

I have chosen the title Adversus Obfuscari as a play on Irenaeus' two books against heresies, Adversus Haereses, and I have included a neologism whose correctness I in all honesty can't vouch for. Since the article in question serves to sabotage the seriousness of gender history I find it obfuscating and I consider its author - Edward Christie - to be an obfuscator, a point of view I hope the subsequent rant will serve to assess.

The article in question is titled Self-Mastery and Submission: Holiness and Masculinity in the Lives of Anglo-Saxon Martyr-Kings and Edward Christie's aim is to investigate submission and its implication on masculinity in the passions of Edmund and Oswald and how this aligns with the conflicting ideologies of Pagan and Christian heroism of the Anglo-Saxon world. The focal point of the article is an interesting one and I for my part have for a long time been very fascinated by collisions of cultures and their aftermath. However, Christie's argumentation is so fraught with anachronism, so steeped in the bilgewater of obsolete scholarship that the minor points of interest and real scholarly worth are overshadowed by nonsense.

Very little is known about the historical King Edmund. He was king of the East Angles until his death in 869 at the hands of Danish Vikings and this death is all the two near-contemporary written sources can tell us. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and Asser's Life of King Alfred were both composed in the 890s during the reign of Alfred the Great and as such may be considered fairly trustworthy by virtue of proximity in time, but despite being records dated only some 30 odd years after Edmund's death they fail to provide any great detail. Nonetheless it appears that Edmund's death attracted some attention and a generation after his death there were issued coins venerating him as Sancte Eadmund Rex, but what instigated this is not known to us.

From Richard II's Wilton Diptych (late 14th century)

In the latter quarter of the 10th century Abbo of Fleury wrote the first hagiography, Passio sancti Eadmundi, which portrays Edmund as St. Sebastian: tied to a tree and pierced with arrows. As with Sebastian Edmund's death came not because of arrows, but at the hands of the Viking chieftain Hingwar - probably Ivar the Boneless - who decapitated Edmund when the king refused to tell where his treasure was hidden. This is the main point of interest to Edmund's hagiographers. Through submission to the Viking chieftain Edmund performs his passio Christi, the imitation of Christ necessary to attain sainthood, and through his death Edmund conquers in spirit what he could not achieve in the flesh: victory over the Pagans. This also becomes a focal point for Edward Christie.

St. Sebastian (by Sandro Botticelli), the model for Abbo of Fleury's portrayal of Edmund

The opposing ideals of Pagan and Christian culture and the victory in spirit versus victory in the flesh are both elements that can be found in the Medieval matter and as such provides material for scholarly investigation, so where does it all go wrong for Edward Christie? A clear marker of this can be found on page 147 where he writes "Part of my purpose is nonetheless to explore the psychoanalytic reading of Anglo-Saxon heroism (...)". The problem here is of course the psychoanalysis for how do you apply a questionable approach of the 20th century to a Medieval reality whose writers did not know and consequently paid no heed to this way of thinking? It should be pointed out that some aspects of psychoanalysis - in which respect I'm hardly even a layman and am therefore prone to mistakes - can be used propitiously if applied with extreme care, provided - of course - that we have enough material to allow such investigations. I'm thinking here of the implications of childhood trauma, exploration of which may yield some useful information for explaining adult behaviour, but how do you do this when there is no childhood to explore?

Things get worse when Christie goes on to explore the passion of St. Edmund equipped with modern theories, starting with the society of exploit as put forth by 19th century American economic theorist Thorstein Veblen who divided "barbaric" society into "exploit" and "industry". The chief problem here, of course, is that this is anthropological scholarship from the very infancy of anthropology, a field that has undergone significant developments in the past hundred years. Whether Veblen's theories are still valid I don't know and I find it unfortunate that Christie has not taken pains to ensure the reader that they are. Anthropology can be a good way of exploring historical issues, especially since there are certain anthropological constants that manifest themselves in various ways throughout history, but Christie is far too careless in his treatment here. He cites from the Frankish chronicler Fredegar to prove that this division did exist, but to cite merely one example from the vast range of Early Medieval literature to buttress a claim based on 19th century hindsight is not what I consider persuasive.

Christie moves on with this idea of the society of exploit as exemplified by the Viking raiders, quoting Sigmund Freud on kingship who in turn relies on James George Frazer's anthropological studies. The problems here should be evident. Christie has seemingly cherry-picked material from the dawn of anthropology to find support for his approach, although the theories and interpretations of both Freud and Frazer suffer from the scant methodological and theoretical framework of their own time.

As if founding his ideas on this kind of obsolete scholarship was not enough, Edward Christie then considers the decapitation of Edmund along the same lines as Karma Lochrie did in a 1994 article on Judith's beheading of Holofernes in the Beowulf manuscript. In this article Lochrie relied on the ideas of Luce Irigaray and Toril Moi, arguing that the decapitation of Holofernes was a symbolic castration and Christie urges for the possibility of reading Edmund's death as feminising. First of all Christie and Lochrie have completely ignored any scholarship done on the practice of decapitation in Early Medieval and older societies and its spiritual implications. The head has been a forceful symbol down the ages for quite obvious reasons, such as the fact that the head is the centre of reasoning and thinking. There is to my knowledge no evidence to suggest that Celts and Goths collected heads as a symbolic castration. If the Celts and the Goths wanted to castrate their enemies they castrated their enemies, they did not decapitate them. When, according to the first book of Samuel, King Saul said to David he wanted hundred Philistine foreskins David did not return with hundred noses, because when kings of old said they wanted their enemies castrated they did not consider the head a good substitute.

That Holofernes guy was such a dick. (by Botticelli)

Secondly Christie seems to believe that the ideas concocted by radical gender theorists in the 20h century should somehow be relevant to the writers of Anglo-Saxon hagiography. This is anachronistic in the worst sense possible and it obfuscates the entire discourse. The ideas of Irigaray and Moi, perpetuated by Lochrie and Christie, are themselves spawned by the contemporary issues of those who proposed them and as such must be understood in relation to the modern era, not to mention the personalities of the theorists. When Abbo of Fleury wrote the Passio sancti Eadmundi there is no reason to believe he considered the decapitation as anything but a decapitation, the final resort of a Pagan king whose archers had not managed to make Edmund yield to his demands. What is even more certain is that he did not quote, paraphrase or allude to any theories put forth by Irigaray or Moi, and consequently such theories should only be applied with extreme caution and reserve if they are to be applied at all (which I strongly doubt). Edward Christie shows no reserve but rather seems to immerse himself quite happily in a long series of anachronisms and as a result comes up with an utterly unconvicing and unpersuasive argument which is nothing more than poorly applied gender theory.